A tipping point for climate change has been reached, UN secretary general António Guterres has warned.
Speaking ahead of the COP30 climate summit, which is due to take place in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém, he said the 1.5C global heating target set in the Paris climate agreement would be overshot with “devastating consequences”.
He told The Guardian that further delays in cutting emissions would mean a greater danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.
Guterres said the priority at COP30 was to shift direction, and added: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”
The past ten years have been the hottest in recorded history, and despite growing scientific alarm at the speed of global temperature increases caused by the burning of fossil fuels – oil, coal and gas – the secretary general said government commitments had come up short.
Fewer than a third of the world’s nations have sent in their climate action plans and the US has abandoned the process. Europe has so far failed to deliver and China, the world’s biggest emitter, has been accused of under-committing.
In England, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has proposed to repeal the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act, stating that replacing it with a new strategy will focus on generating “cheap energy” and is necessary because current net-zero policies are “bankrupting” the economy.
Guterres said it may still be possible to temporarily overshoot and then bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5C by the end of the century, but this would require a change of direction at and beyond COP30.
He called for governments to rebalance representation at COPs so that civil society groups, particularly from Indigenous communities, will have a greater presence and influence than people paid by corporations.
One of Brazil’s initiatives at COP30, which will take place between November 10 and 21, will be the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, which aims to raise $125bn for the protection of standing forests. A fifth of any money disbursed will go directly to Indigenous communities, whose territories contain most of the best-preserved biodiversity and most effective carbon sinks.
“It is fundamental to invest in those who are the best guardians of nature. And the best guardians of nature are precisely the Indigenous communities,” Guterres said.
