The world made a ‘covenant with the future’ – and we broke it

When the world came together in Paris a decade ago and agreed upon a 1.5 degree global warming target, the mood verged on jubilant.

Then United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared the Paris treaty “a covenant with the future,” and said the world was now in a race against time to arrest global warming.

On Wednesday, in a new report by the UN called Limiting Overshoot , it finally conceded that the race to that target had been lost. Due to our collective failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough, the most optimistic scenario would see warming crash through 1.5 degrees by the end of the decade, warm to 1.8 degrees later this century and then – if we are lucky – we may be able to stabilise the climate and force down temperatures over centuries to come.

In the report, this is referred to as “overshoot, peak and decline,” and is a strategy that will require not only the sort of radical cuts in emissions we have so far failed to achieve, but the mass deployment of devices to remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it safely away. These technologies do not yet exist at scale.

And even if this was achieved, the world we are left with will be permanently damaged by our 275-year-long experiment with fossil fuels at immeasurable cost to human life and wellbeing, let alone to the natural world.

“This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway; it is simply the best remaining option,” said the report, in uncharacteristically blunt language for a UN scientific report. “Avoiding every additional fraction of a degree of global warming and reducing the time in overshoot decrease risks and damages and increase the chances of bringing temperatures back down.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen were at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Palau when the report was published, and addressed it at a press conference, but not before the prime minister dealt with other issues.

He discussed the group’s work to address HIV, drug smuggling, new Qantas flights to Palau and Australian support for training police around the region.

When he was finally prompted to address the Overshoot report, Albanese did not shy away.

“We all need to do more,” he began. “Climate change is real, the science is real, the action that is required is real as well.”

Bowen reinforced the UN’s central message too, that rather than the document being an excuse to surrender to warming, the Overshoot report was evidence that the world needed to do more, faster. ”The more we miss it by as a globe, the harder it will be to repair that overshoot, and the greater the implications.”

Then the press conference moved on to other issues, at least until Albanese was asked if Australia had been criticised at the forum for its massive export of planet-warming fossil fuels. He rejected the suggestion outright. “The transition [from fossil fuels] can’t happen overnight,” he explained.