For the first time, UN says breaching 1.5C warming limit is ‘imminent and unavoidable’

A UN climate report released Wednesday finds the globe will unavoidably slip past the Paris Climate Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius warming target in the next few years. The task now, the report states, is to make the period of warming “overshoot” as limited as possible, eventually bringing global average temperatures back down.

The annual UN Emissions Gap report is designed to inform decision makers headed into the next round of global climate talks in Turkey, known as COP31, next month. While past gap reports have expressed skepticism about meeting the 1.5-degree target, this one marks the first time that its authors have pronounced that missing the mark will be “imminent and unavoidable.”

“We are now saying this window has closed, but we can open it again by making the overshoot as brief as possible,” UN Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said on a call with reporters. “This is about how to find a way back as shortly and as quickly as possible with as limited an overshoot as possible.”