World Might Miss Mark for Climate Mitigation: WRI

The world is cruising through Earth’s natural resources and will likely to blow its “best chance” to prevent runaway climate change, the World Resources Institute (WRI) said Tuesday.

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As the global rate of greenhouse gas emissions continues to rise, companies are failing to implement green energy initiatives while the agricultural sector struggles to keep up with carbon-heavy industries, the WRI said.

Using the six goals presented in the 2020 Paris Climate Agreement as an outline, researchers analyzed the efforts made in energy, transport, land use, industry, infrastructure, and finance.

Since 2017, renewable energy has grown to occupy two thirds of the world’s electricity generation. The WFI speculates the cost of electricity from renewable resources will continue to sink, making it more affordable than fossil fuels and powering 30 percent of global electricity by 2030.

However, coal-fired generation has grown in tandem with the appearance of additional coal-fired power plants, despite the explicit warnings outlined in the Paris Agreement.

Another of the Paris goals was to reach 15 percent of electric cars by 2020, but with the 2018 fiscal year showing an overall sale of only 1.4 percent, it’s likely another milestone will be missed.

Michael Bevis, lead author of the study and geodynamics professor at Ohio State University, said, “The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming — it’s too late for there to be no effect.”

However, Director of Mission 2020 and former UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, says there could still be a chance to slow the effects, “The impacts [of climate change] have never been as clear, nor action so urgent, as we are quickly approaching tipping points of no return. It would follow, then, that leaders everywhere should now be discussing this number one concern as their number one priority.

“The decisions we take over the next two to three years are crucial for the unprecedented structural changes we must embark on to safeguard our climate and clean up our air. This is the make it or break it opportunity we have, knowing that the world is expected to invest about $90tn on infrastructure in the period up to 2030, with much of this investment to be programmed in the next few years,” said Figueres.