“At the current emission rate, our remaining carbon dioxide budget for 1.5 degrees will be completely gone within seven years.”

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has blasted world leaders over their inadequacies in addressing the climate crisis.

The 17-year-old said “there are no climate leaders”, even after five years of signing the Paris Agreement, in which leaders had pledged to bring the average global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius.

Target gap is widening by the minute

 In a video posted online, Thunberg said “the gap between what we need to do and what is actually being done is widening by minutes”.

Blasting the global leaders over their “empty promises”, she said that while “commitments are being made, and distant hypothetical targets are being set, yet when it comes to the immediate action we need, we are still in a state of complete denial.”

She added that “the five years following the Paris Agreement have been the five hottest years ever recorded. And during that time the world also emitted more the 200 gigatons of carbon dioxide.”

“At the current emission rate, our remaining carbon dioxide budget for 1.5 degrees will be completely gone within seven years, long before we will have a chance to deliver to our 2030 or 2050 target,” Thunberg warned.

Destroying present and future living conditions

Following the recently held United Nations Climate Action Summit 2020, which resulted in a few new commitments on greenhouse gas emissions, Thunberg accused the leaders of destroying present and future living conditions.

In a post she said: “The UN #ClimateAmbitionSummit leaders celebrate their shameless loopholes, their empty words, their distant insufficient targets and their theft and destruction of present and future living conditions – calling it “ambition”.”

Urging followers to become a part of the #FightFor1Point5 movement- a reference to the Paris accord target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels- she wrote: “There are no climate leaders.

“The only ones who can change this are you and me. All of us, together.”

‘Must step up’

Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam, also branded the summit commitments as insufficient and lacking ambition.

He said: “The Climate Ambition Summit lacked real ambition. World leaders must step up in the next 12 critical months to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophic climate change. Commitments to near-term emissions cuts are still insufficient to limit warming to the 1.5C Paris goal… We must not stumble from Covid-19 disaster into climate calamity.”

‘Glaring disconnect’

Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the California based Breakthrough Institute said cutting emissions to achieve the net zero target by 2050 will not be an easy task for any country.

“We’ve long had this very glaring disconnect between the targets of the Paris Agreement and the commitments that countries have made,” he told The Independent.

“We’re not just talking about building a lot of wind and solar, we are talking about decarbonising every single sector of the economy: agriculture, industry, transport, aviation,” he said.

• Read: UN urges all country leaders to declare ‘state of climate emergency’

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Mohsina Dodhiya

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