Navigating the global warming ‘overshoot’
The world leaders will gather in Antalya, Türkiye, next month (Nov. 9 to 20) for the United Nations climate summit, an annual conference that seeks ways to combat the global climate crisis, including aligning on actions that are binding for all parties.
Turkiye and Australia will share hosting duties for COP31, the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It will bring together climate change negotiators, experts, and world leaders and will be held amid a recent UN Environment Program (Unep) report warning that the Paris Agreement’s 2015 goal of taming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels that worsen climate change is becoming increasingly distant.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius remains a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement, yet under current policies and alternative near-term trajectories, exceedance of 1.5 degrees Celsius is now widely assessed as unavoidable,” said Unep’s Limiting Overshoot Spotlight Report.
The report isn’t all gloom and doom. Beyond exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius overshoot report, it examines peak warming and its attendant risks and impacts on our planet, possible mitigation pathways for subsequent temperature decline, and adaptation and development approaches that could reverse this overshoot. (You can access the report here: https://tinyurl.com/4bsdkhc2)
“Today’s decisions are therefore critical: the lower the peak warming reached, the lower the risks faced by people, societies, economies and ecosystems,” Unep warned.
According to Unep, peak temperature will rise to 1.8 degrees Celsius in the next few years, even under the most optimistic scenario based on current government pledges to cut GHG emissions, thereby overshooting the Paris Agreement’s landmark 1.5 degrees Celsius goal. This bleak scenario results from addiction to coal, oil, and gas for electricity and heat, manufacturing and industrial production, and transportation. Burning fossil fuels drives about a third of global GHG emissions, and carbon dioxide alone—the most prevalent GHG—from fossil fuels and industrial processes accounts for nearly 90 percent of total emissions. GHGs trap the sun’s heat, warming and changing the global climate.
Worsening El Niño’s impacts. In simpler terms, a warmer planet accelerates the global water cycle, leading to extreme weather patterns, such as severe droughts and massive floods, that occur more frequently and with greater intensity.
That’s why we have barely recovered from the back-to-back storms during the southwest monsoon season that caused severe flooding, yet everyone is talking about the extreme heat waves and water shortages that El Niño will bring in the coming months. While El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern in the eastern Pacific Ocean, climate change acts as a force multiplier by intensifying sea-surface temperature extremes. Climate change will increase the frequency and severity of both El Niño and La Niña.
“The central message is clear: mitigation and adaptation must advance together. Overshoot is not an argument for resignation but for urgent action,” Unep said, urging governments and climate negotiators to pursue both legally binding mitigation (carbon cuts to reduce GHG emissions) and adaptation (managing the impacts of climate change) measures.
Because there are no good outcomes above 1.5 degrees Celsius, Unep advocated an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway that calls for immediate climate action—government-mandated drastic and sustained GHG emission cuts and “adaptation actions that reduce vulnerability to the current or expected impacts of climate change.”
Eliminating bottlenecks. In the Philippines, it means a sustained shift toward renewable energy (RE). With President Marcos pledging to put the country on a path to increase the share of renewables in the power generation mix to 35 percent by 2030 (from the current 25 percent) and to 50 percent by 2040, the Department of Energy (DOE) has been given the green light to further expand its green energy auction (GEA).
To hit the 50 percent target by 2040, the DOE needs to hold another round of GEA for about 20 gigawatts of RE capacity (such as the GEA-5 for offshore wind), in addition to the 20 gigawatts already contracted with the private sector.
The biggest game-changer in our country’s green energy transition is the foreign policy reform that now allows 100 percent foreign ownership in most renewables, while red tape in regulatory approvals and transmission grid infrastructure bottlenecks persist.
A yawning gap exists between renewable energy project rollouts and transmission line construction. Until grid integration accelerates, completed RE projects, such as solar and wind farms, will remain stranded, unable to connect to the grid and deliver clean, relatively inexpensive power to our homes, businesses, and industries.
To address this integration problem, the government should fully embrace smart grids, which use artificial intelligence to reduce intermittency, and adopt microgrids, localized grids that maximize RE use in remote, off-grid islands, or in rural solar and wind farms.
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