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Add to Preferred SourcesThe annual United Nations climate change conference has opened with calls for urgent action to prevent runaway climate change and devastating impacts on the planet.
“According to the World Meteorological Organization, the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years. The concentration of carbon dioxide is the highest it has been in 3 million years. Emissions continue to grow. The recent special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that warming could reach 1.5 degrees as soon as 2030, with devastating impacts. The latest UN Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report tells us that the current Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement will lead to global warming of about 3 degrees by the end of the century. Furthermore, the majority of countries most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are behind in their efforts to meet their Paris pledges. So, it is plain we are way off course. We need more action and more ambition,” said the UN Secretary-General,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the high-level segment.
The World Bank Group Chief Executive Officer Kristalina Georgieva announced a major new set of climate targets for 2021-2025, doubling its current 5-year investments to around $200 billion in support for countries to take ambitious climate action. The new plan significantly boosts support for adaptation and resilience, recognizing mounting climate change impacts on lives and livelihoods, especially in the world’s poorest countries.
WMO and the World Bank recently signed a framework agreement to strengthen cooperation and scale up support to the countries’ efforts to generate and use weather, climate and hydrological information for evidence-based action. The agreement will also facilitate easy access to WMO’s expertise by governments implementing projects with World Bank funding.
The Paris Agreement seeks to keep global mean temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also seeks to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.
Ahead of COP24, WMO issued its provisional statement on the state of the climate in 2018, showing that the global average temperature for the first ten months of the year was nearly 1°C above 1850-1900. This is based on five independently maintained global temperature datasets. The report gives details of climate change indicators, including sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification and sea-ice and glacier melt. It also includes details of the impacts of climate change based on contributions from a wide range of United Nations partners.
Levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached another new record high, according to the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The urgency of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires more tools at national and sub-national level to support stakeholders in taking effective and efficient actions.
Recognizing this need, WMO has initiated the development of observational based tools that can guide the emissions reduction actions and confirm their results, for instance in the oil and gas sector.
A new Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System (IG3IS) provides the framework for the development and standardization of the observational-based tools. IG3IS is implemented by countries on a voluntary basis and will feed into the national emission reporting mechanism at COP. WMO will be showcasing IC3IS in Katowice.
Original source: WMO
Published on 3 December 2018