A surge in green funding in the US and EU is aimed at promoting renewable energy sources in the face of 1.8C warming.
Climate policy announcements from the past three months are becoming more ambitious, with many calling for a rise in global temperatures of no more than 1.8C (3.1F), a new analysis has found.
The Inevitable Policy Response (IPR), which describes itself as a climate change prediction partnership, has been following the climate policies of governments and non-governmental organizations since the United Nations climate conference in November 2021 and evaluating the declarations according to their credibility and intentions.
The three-month period from October to January was too ambitious, the group said on Wednesday, after the green money came out of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States and the European Union plans to boost clean energy. sources.
The development has provided a “new climate catalyst”, the IPR said, as other economies compete with China for the lead in clean energy.
‘Race to the top’
However, the IPR tracker shows that most policies are not consistent with limiting global temperature increases to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels. The UN says that violating this standard could lead to more serious climate change problems.
The 2015 Paris Agreement commits countries to limit global warming this century to below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to aim for 1.5C.
The world has already warmed to about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. Each of the past four decades has been warmer than any decade since 1850.
“The race to the top of clean energy launched by the US IRA and followed by the EU Green Industrial Plan together with other positive policy announcements since COP27 shows that the improvement of the use of clean energy compared to the recent expectations,” the director of the IPR Project Mark Mark. Fulton said. COP27 refers to November’s UN climate conference.
Of the 117 international policy announcements tracked in the latest session, 89 had enough credibility to be included in its tracker, the IPR said. Of those, 68 supported or confirmed predictions of a 1.8C temperature rise, 20 indicated an increase in temperature and two indicated a decrease in temperature, the group said.
Since it began tracking policy at the end of 2021, the IPR has analyzed 331 policy announcements of which 162 confirm the IPR’s forecast of a 1.8C rise.
