Climate progress real, long way to go

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

One of the outcomes of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 was a requirement for five-yearly global stocktakes, for countries to assess where they are collectively in making progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement — starting in 2023.

Released ahead of the COP28 meeting in Dubai last month, the first stocktake showed that while the 2015 agreement had helped spur global action on climate change and reduced future warming forecasts, current national commitments fell short by 20 to 24 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030 compared to the levels required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The reality is that global warming will exceed 1.5C, so the focus has to be on the second leg of that 2015 commitment — to hold the average temperature rise to “well below 2C”.

At the time of the Paris COP, the global warming expected by 2100 if policies didn’t change was more than 3C. For policies in place today, central estimates put it around 2.5-2.9C.

In an article ahead of COP28 titled “Some progress, must do better”, the Economist described this as “still so high as to be disastrous for billions. But it is also a marked improvement”.

A lot of this progress has come from cheaper and more widespread renewable energy.

In 2015 the world had 230 gigawatts of installed solar capacity; by the end of 2022 it had 1050 GW, meeting about 5 percent of global electricity demand. Recently the capacity and production growth rate for solar has doubled every three years. The leader in solar energy is China, with about 36 percent of global capacity.

In 2015 the world had 430 GW of wind power; by a year ago it was almost 900 GW, with the largest share in Asia — 366 GW in China, 40 percent of global capacity — followed by Europe and North America.

Better policies have spread also. In 2014, 12 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions came under carbon-pricing schemes and the average price per tonne was US$7; today 23 percent of emissions do, and the price is around US$32. One country had a “net zero” goal in 2015 — 101 do now.

These and other steps forward are why the International Energy Agency has revised down when it sees global CO2 emissions peaking — from the 2040s, to within a few years.

COP28 ended with countries pledging to triple renewable capacity by 2030. The Economist pointed out that it is the private sector that will need to provide the doubling in investment levels seen as required to deliver that; the role of governments in attracting those funds will be to “redesign energy markets, hurry through permits, hugely improve grids and remove policies that still favour fossil fuels”.