In 2016, the United Nations Environment Programme released its first post-Paris Agreement emissions gap report. These reports, which began a few years earlier before such a global agreement even existed, examine the distance between national actions and pledges and the actual emissions reductions required to reach internationally agreed upon goals. How far off are we, collectively, from a world where limiting warming to 2.0 or even 1.5 degrees Celsius is possible? That 2016 version was titled, simply, “The Emissions Gap Report 2016.”
That extremely acceptable naming convention held through 2020, at which point UNEP decided to get a bit more creative. The 2021 version was titled “The Heat Is On: A world of climate promises not yet delivered,” an obvious departure from the norm and an indication that half a decade on from the global agreement to start actually managing the problem there was still quite a lot to be desired.
In 2022, that “not yet delivered” morphed further, and we got “The Closing Window: Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies.” At that point, the introduction of the report warned that the “international community is falling far short of the Paris goals,” and that only a “system-wide” shift would get us close.
2023: An international body’s collective exasperation begins to show. That report, accompanied by an honestly magnificent feat of graphic design, was titled “Broken Record: Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again).” They really put the parenthetical in there, right on the cover! One wonders at the meetings that took place to get there.
Which brings us to Thursday’s release of the 2024 version, which may have well been titled “Give Us a Fucking Break.” Instead, we got “No More Hot Air… Please!” Again, the decisions on punctuation — that ellipsis, that exclamation point — are nearly as fascinating as the report’s findings, which, if we’re being honest, are at this point largely unsurprising.
The short version: The world set a new record for carbon emissions in 2023, at 57 billion tons; if the existing national policies continue, by 2030 that number will be… 57 billion tons. This is a remarkable failure, given that the science tells us and nations have officially agreed that cuts of at least 42 percent are needed by the end of the decade. Under the Paris Agreement, every signatory nation is required to file a new Nationally Determined Contribution, their pledges of emissions cuts, by February 2025; we would need to see a truly shocking about-face in terms of ambition, accompanied by an equally shocking amount of follow-through on those pledges, to be even in the ballpark by 2030.
“Today’s Emissions Gap report is clear: we’re playing with fire; but there can be no more playing for time,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to a press release. “We’re out of time.”
The Emissions Gap reports’ incrementally amplifying rhetoric matches that from Guterres himself, who in speeches over the past few years has similarly ramped up to include increasingly dire flourishes. “Humanity has opened the gates of hell,” he said a year ago. One wonders both what he will say after another year of dithering, and what titles these reports will feature next.
The wording reflect the crazy-making experience of observing warming’s sharp rise, understanding the assignment — this much of a cut by this point, and so on — and then watching the world just kinda not do that. What else can one do, really, but say the same thing louder, more urgently, with more exclamation points than before? They will release another report in a year, and even with some updated ambition at that point, they will search for the words to make this all seem as dire as it is. (Again.)