Context
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in its report Limiting Overshoot, has warned that temporarily crossing the 1.5°C global-warming threshold is becoming unavoidable. It proposes an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway to minimise the duration and magnitude of the breach and bring temperatures back below the threshold by 2100.
Explanation
- The Paris Agreement, 2015, seeks to hold warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
- Overshoot occurs when global temperature temporarily exceeds a specified warming threshold, such as 1.5°C, before declining again.
- UNEP projects that warming could cross 1.5°C within the next few years, creating risks of irreversible ecological losses even if temperatures later decline.
- Under “overshoot, peak and decline,” warming first exceeds 1.5°C, reaches the lowest possible peak, and is subsequently reduced below the threshold.
- Even if countries fully implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and net-zero targets, peak warming could reach around 1.8°C.
- Existing policies, however, indicate approximately 2.6°C warming by 2100.
- Limiting overshoot requires rapid greenhouse-gas emission reductions, stronger NDCs, net-zero transitions, protection of carbon sinks, and eventually carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
- A smaller and shorter overshoot reduces risks of ecosystem collapse, extreme heat, wildfires, floods and irreversible climate tipping points.
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Climate Overshoot: UNEP’s Path to Limit Global Warming