Landmark Paris Agreement set a path to slow warming. The world hasn’t stayed on it

The world has changed dramatically in the decade since leaders celebrated a historic climate deal in Paris a decade ago, but not quite in the way they hoped or desired.

Earth’s warming climate has become more harmful faster than society has been able to wean itself from burning coal, oil and natural gas that emit carbon pollution that triggers global warming, several scientists and officials said.

Progress has been made — more than 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) has been reduced from projections of future warming since 2015 — but the lack of that progress will be a major concern over the next two weeks as diplomats gather in Belém, Brazil, for the annual United Nations climate negotiations.

“I think it is important that we are honest with the world and declare our failure,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Climate Research Institute in Germany. He said the damage caused by warming was occurring faster and more severely than scientists expected.

But the diplomats are not giving up.

“We are actually moving in the direction we set out in Paris at a speed that none of us could have predicted,” said former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped craft the agreement, which requires countries to develop plans to combat global warming.

But the speed of humanity’s climate-fighting efforts is slower than the acceleration of climate damage, she said, adding that this means “the gap between the progress we’re seeing on the ground and where we should be, that gap is still there and growing.”

The Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program, Inger Andersen, said the world was “clearly lagging behind”.

“We’re kind of sawing off the branch that we’re sitting on,” she explained.

The planet’s annual temperature has jumped about 0.46 degrees Celsius (0.83 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2015, one of the largest 10-year temperature rises on record, according to data from the European climate service Copernicus. This year will be the second or third hottest on record, Copernicus calculated. Since 2015, every year has been warmer than the year of the Paris climate agreement.

Deadly heatwaves have hit not only traditional hot spots like India and the Middle East, but also more temperate places like North America’s Pacific Northwest and Russian Siberia.

Earth has been repeatedly hit by costlier, more dangerous, and more extreme weather. The decade since 2015 has seen the most Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic and the most multibillion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, according to records maintained by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. America has been hit by 193 disasters that cost at least $1 billion over the past 10 years, for a total bill of $1.5 trillion.

Wildfires have ravaged parts of Hawaii, California, Europe and Australia. Floods have devastated parts of Pakistan, China and the southern United States. And many, but not all, of them bear traces of human-caused climate change, scientists have calculated.

Since 2015, more than 7 trillion tons of ice in the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have disappeared, according to calculations by ice scientists. That’s the equivalent of more than 19 million Empire State Buildings.

Sea level rise is accelerating. Over the past decade, the world’s seas have risen by 40 millimeters (1.6 inches). That may not sound like much, but it’s enough water to fill 30 lakes the size of Lake Erie, according to Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado professor who studies sea level rise.

Even the Amazon, where climate negotiations will take place, has gone from a planet-saving region that sucks heat-trapping gases from the air to one that, because of deforestation, sometimes releases them.

But there are also many things that officials are celebrating over the past 10 years.

Renewable energy is now cheaper in most places than polluting coal, oil and natural gas. Last year, 74% of the growth in electricity generated worldwide came from wind, solar and other green choices, according to two July UN reports. In 2015, half a million electric vehicles were sold worldwide, up from 17 million last year, according to the report.

“Nothing can stop it,” said former U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. “You can’t hold back the tides.”

In 2015, U.N. projections predicted that Earth was on track to warm by nearly 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1800s. Today, the world is on track to warm by 2.8 degrees (5 degrees Fahrenheit), perhaps a little less if countries keep their promises.

But that falls far short of the goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), a level that scientific reports say is more or less the danger line and has become the overarching goal of the Paris Agreement.

“Ten years ago, we had a more orderly path to staying completely away from 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Rockstrom said. “Now here we are ten years later. We have failed.”

A report examining dozens of indicators of progress – such as solar and wind installations – in the transition from a fossil fuel economy found that none were able to keep warming at or below the 1.5 degree target.

The report from the Bezos Earth Fund, Climate Analytics, Climate High-Level Champions, ClimateWorks Foundation and the World Resources Institute finds that 35 of them are at least moving in the right direction, although far too slowly.

“Technologies that were once hypothetical are now becoming a reality. And the good news is that reality has surpassed many of the projections from a decade ago,” said report author Kelly Levin, chief science and data officer at the Bezos Earth Fund. “But it’s not fast enough for what’s needed.”

Atmospheric methane levels increased 5.2% between 2015 and 2024, while carbon dioxide levels jumped 5.8% in the same time, according to NOAA data.

Several developing countries, including the United States and the rest of the developed world, have reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by about 7% since 2015, but other countries have seen their emissions skyrocket, with China increasing by 15.5% and India by 26.7%, according to data from the Global Carbon Project.

Oxfam International looked at global emissions by income level and found that the richest 0.1% of people have increased their carbon emissions by 3% since 2015. Meanwhile, the poorest 10% of people have reduced their emissions by 30%.

“The Paris Agreement itself has underperformed,” said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge, of the University of Cambridge in England. “Unfortunately, this is one of those glass-half-empty situations, where you can’t say it’s a failure. But you can’t say it’s a spectacular success either.”

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropic organizations, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.