New Report Finds Efforts to Slow Climate Change Are Working—Just Not Fast Enough

In 10 years years since signature The Paris AgreementAt the backbone of international climate action, humanity has made impressive progress. Renewable energy Increasingly cheap and reliable, while Electric vehicles Getting better every year.

By virtually every key metric for measuring progress, however, we are still far behind where we need to be to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The report published on Wednesday by a coalition of climate groups – and we’re running out of time to right the ship.

“All systems are flashing red,” Clea Schumer, a researcher at the World Resources Institute, one of the organizations involved in the report, said in a call with reporters last week. “There’s no doubt that we’re basically doing the right things — we’re just not moving fast enough.”

The Paris Agreement aims to keep the world from warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. To measure progress toward this goal, the report looks at emissions from 45 different sectors of the global economy and environment, measuring everything from building electrification to coal use in the power sector to global meat consumption.

Critically, the report measures no indicators of keeping the world on track to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Six of the 45 indicators are “off track”—progress is being made, but not fast enough—while about 30 are “off track,” meaning progress is too slow. Five, meanwhile, are heading “in the wrong direction,” meaning the situation is getting worse, not better, and requires an urgent U-turn. (There is not enough data, the report says, to measure the remaining five indicators, which include peatland degradation and restoration, food waste and the share of zero-carbon new buildings.)

One of the most consistently off-track markers, experts said, was the global effort to phase out coal, one of which The biggest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. While coal’s share of global electricity generation will decline slightly in 2024, total coal use will actually take a hit. record high Thanks to growing electricity demand last year, especially from China and India. A dirty power grid, Schumer said, has “huge knock-on effects” for other progress indicators, such as decarbonizing buildings and transportation.

To get on track, the world needs to speed up its coal phaseout tenfold, Schumer said. It would shut down more than 360 medium-sized coal plants per year, he continued, and cancel every coal-fired power plant currently in the global development pipeline.

“If coal use continues to break records, we will not limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” Schumer said.’