UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has urged every country to set out a clear plan for ending its reliance on fossil fuels, warning that current climate pledges would still push global temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Addressing a high-level climate meeting in New York, Mr Guterres said governments must move faster to expand renewable energy as the world approaches an overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit.
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He warned that an emerging super El Niño was adding to climate pressures even as global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise instead of falling sharply.
“The world is crying out for climate justice – in mitigation, in adaptation, in finance,” he told political leaders attending the meeting.
Mr Guterres said scientific evidence now pointed to the world exceeding the 1.5C threshold.
The immediate goal, he said, must be to ensure that any overshoot is “as small and as short as possible”.
He condemned the continued expansion of fossil fuel production, arguing that dependence on oil and gas was increasing costs and placing additional strain on government budgets.
That dependence was also leaving countries exposed to geopolitical conflicts and decisions taken outside their control, he said.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke to delegates at the General Assembly
“Doubling down on oil and gas will only lock in vulnerability for decades,” he said.
Renewable energy, by contrast, has become the cheapest, fastest and most secure option for new electricity generation in almost every region of the world.
“Clean energy has gone from alternative to unstoppable,” he said.
But Mr Guterres cautioned that even full implementation of existing national climate plans would leave the world on course for warming of more than 2C.
He said governments had to close that gap during the current decade.
Doing so would require renewable energy capacity to triple and improvements in energy efficiency to double.
Countries must also electrify their economies, reduce methane emissions, stop deforestation and accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.
While every nation needed to raise its ambitions, he said the G20 group of major economies had a special responsibility to act because it produces around 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
He stressed, however, that the transition must be fair.
Workers and communities affected by the shift should have a direct role in shaping it, while developing countries must be able to share in the economic gains, he said.
Mr Guterres warned that without a major increase in investment in climate adaptation, droughts would turn into food crises, storms into debt crises and heatwaves into increasingly deadly events.
He called for adaptation funding to be tripled and urged governments to build climate resilience into public policies, budgets and infrastructure planning.
Mr Guterres said the pace of government action now had to match the rapidly intensifying climate emergency.
“We are the first generation with the tools to end the fossil fuel age – and the last who can avert climate catastrophe,” he said.
