Could the planet finally be on track to limiting climate change? After US President Joe Biden ramped up ambitions with a climate summit, experts are cautiously saying yes — although a difficult path lies ahead.
At a 40-leader summit he convened just months into his presidency, Biden doubled US targets to slash greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change by 2030, with Japan and Canada also raising commitments and the European Union and Britain locking in forceful targets earlier in the week.
“Together we’ve made great progress,” Biden told the closing day of the summit, which he called the “start of a road” to a rigorous new climate accord at a UN conference in Glasgow in November.
John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said that more than half the world’s economy has now pledged action that would check warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — the aspiration set by the 2015 Paris Agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change such as droughts, submersion of low-lying islands and worsening storms, hunger and migration.
World leaders appear on a video screen during a virtual Climate Summit with world leaders in the East Room at the White House in Washington.
But that still leaves half the world — and the effects of climate change are already being felt, with the planet clocking year after year of record heat and extreme weather on the rise.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told the summit that climate-warming emissions are on track for the second-largest increase in history in 2021 amid the recovery from the Covid pandemic.
And more than half of the reductions needed to achieve goals of carbon neutrality mid-century will depend on technological innovations that do not yet exist, he said.
