The UN calls for closing the emissions gap by 18% in four years to not exceed 1.5°C

UNEP warns that the window to stay at 1.5°C has now closed and that the goal is now to limit overshoot with a smaller and shorter peak. The Antalya summit will be the first global review of these figures.

UNEP puts the emissions gap at an 18% cut in four years and almost half in a decade to limit the 1.5°C exceedances, a few weeks before COP31 in Antalya. The data does not come from an activist organisation or a think tank: it is signed by the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN’s environmental agency, in its annual report on the emissions gap. Its diagnosis is uncomfortable because it does not speak of intentions, but of carbon arithmetic: the world needs to cut about a fifth of its emissions in the next four years and almost half within a decade if it is not to exceed climate targets by a catastrophic margin. The emissions gap is literally the distance between what would be cut by the sum of the commitments that countries have put on the table and what science requires in order not to cross dangerous thresholds. It is not an opinion on energy policy. It is a subtraction.

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