A year of pushing for 1·5°C
Authors: Mat Hope
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2019)

To many, it seemed unlikely to have an impact. In Paris, in 2015, tens of thousands of delegates representing hundreds of countries were trying to agree a new global treaty for climate action. The talks were complex and tense, and ultimately successful. But while the limelight was on the big-picture politics of negotiating a deal that was acceptable to both the US and China, in which billions of dollars of financing for climate programmes could be unlocked, a group of small island states were pushing to modify the deal by literally half a degree. For decades, politicians had operated on the basis that limiting global warming to 2°C would be sufficient. But for those facing up to the harshest and most imminent impacts of climate change, this was not good enough. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) demanded more. The long-standing 2°C goal was too risky, they argued. The Paris Agreement needed to commit to limiting warming to just 1·5°C above pre-industrial levels. After hundreds of small countries brought their collective will to bear on the negotiations, the Paris Agreement duly included the 1·5°C goal as an “ambition”. Before fully committing, however, the UN “invited” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—its independent scientific advisory body—to produce a report outlining the implications of limiting warming to this new, more ambitious, level. One year on from its publication, the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1·5°C has “become a cornerstone of the way we now communicate about climate change”, Dharini Parthasarathy, a senior communications officer for campaign coordinators Climate Action Network, says. “We had some concerns about how the report would turn out and whether it would be too conservative, and whether people would reject the science, and all the usual controversies around IPCC reports”, she explains. “But I think in an unexpected way it changed the conversation around climate change and was instantly picked up at a very conversational level among just ordinary people.” Alex Randall, an analyst with Climate Outreach, a charity that works with researchers to communicate climate science, agrees that it made a splash in a way research rarely does. “The reaction to the report was fundamentally different to the way the public and the media had reacted to previous IPCC reports. It felt like this was a point where a new section of the public really grasped the urgency of the situation”, he says. “What the 1·5°C report did was make that urgency clear in a very stark way that perhaps previous IPCC reports hadn't, because this was the first time that a report had been framed in terms of presenting us with a boundary—this idea of the 1·5°C line beyond which we should not cross.” The report's findings were certainly newsworthy. “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe”, read one now famous headline. The report was a “final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’”, read another. In summary, the report says: “that if we are not doing anything, then we will very quickly reach 1·5°C of warming and catalyse impacts that put certain ecosystems in a permanent state of decline; valuable reefs or the Arctic or mountain systems and so on”, explains Dr Joeri Rogelj, a lecturer at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, University of London. He argues that this sense of urgency was the report's key contribution: “It's not 12 years before crunch time. It is actually this year, and it's next year, and it's every year that emissions and ambition need to be increased if we really want to keep warming to 1·5°C.” Unlike previous reports, that limit came with a clear policy prescription attached, argues Professor Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of the New Climate Institute NGO. “The report very clearly stated that global CO2 emissions need to be net zero by 2050 if we want to keep 1·5°C within reach. And that is a very simple goal”, he says. “The 1·5°C target is opaque—we don't really know what that means. But if we say we need to get rid of coal, oil, and gas or fossil fuels globally by 2050, that's something very tangible.” Understanding what the 1·5°C limit means in policy terms is vital to achieving the action scientists say is needed, Höhne says. “I think that a lot of countries had not understood at the time of the Paris Agreement what they were signing up to. In 2015, many policymakers had not understood that keeping warming to 1·5°C means zero emissions by 2050. That is super ambitious, and now more and more people are understanding that this what they've signed up to.” That shift from halving emissions in 2050 to having net-zero emissions by the same point was a massive change for politicians to accept, he observes: “It's a completely different situation. You need a complete different set of policies and a completely different mindset to cope with that change.” Nonetheless, “now, only one year after the report, more people are realising something significant needs to happen.” And things are changing. The UK government was the first major economy to formally agree a target to reduce emissions to net-zero by 2050. Norway has gone further, setting the same target by 2030. California has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2045, with Tokyo and many other cities pledging the same by 2050. Countries including Austria, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu have all set goals to reach 100% zero-carbon or renewable electricity by between 2020 and 2040. The significance of those actions is not lost on the nations that first called for serious consideration of a 1·5°C limit. And the AOSIS countries are no longer alone in pushing for more ambitious action, Höhne says. “It was the most vulnerable countries that really pushed for 1·5°C rather than the 2°C goal. And they did it because they are really affected by even 1·5°C of warming. And now that it's in the Paris Agreement, and now we have this 1·5°C report, there is much broader support.” Randall agrees that there is a geographic discrepancy in who the 1·5°C report immediately benefits. But that is no bad thing, he explains: “The 1·5°C report matters significantly more to some places and to some people than it does to others because you can see locations like the Pacific islands, the Horn of Africa, and the delta region of Bangladesh where crossing that 1·5°C line has much starker consequences for the people who live there than it does for other people who live elsewhere on the planet.” “Some of that has to do with geography and the disasters that they will face and the environment that will change around them, and a lot of it has to do with infrastructure, poverty, and inequality. And I think the 1·5°C report reinforced that message. It made it even more clear that there are certain places and certain groups of people to whom 1·5°C of warming really matters.” That message has resonated with young people, who seem particularly sensitive to current global injustices and are afraid for their future, Randall says. “The report seemed to unleash a wave of public anger or disillusionment about climate change. My sense is that anger had been growing over a number of years, but the 1·5°C report really galvanised public opinion around it. And I think that even though those movements have been growing and there had been gradually increasing levels of concern, that kind of raw anger we saw in the school strikes wouldn't have quite been there without the 1·5°C report to back it up.” Höhne agrees that the report seemed to strike a chord with the younger generation more than others. “They are very intelligent and they read their stuff. And if you read it with no background in the area, it's frightening”, he argues. “It's really saying we are running towards the cliff edge, and we are accelerating instead of putting the brakes on.” Ultimately, the urgency of public calls for action bodes well for the future of the international negotiations, Parthasarathy argues: “Now ordinary people can challenge politicians and say ‘have you read the IPCC report?’”, she says. “It's become the definitive text by which we are challenging decisionmakers to take action.” And it's all thanks to a report that for many didn't seem truly necessary. Growing out of consumption?Just over a year ago, the IPCC published a Special Report outlining what it would take to prevent global heating of more than 1·5°C and 2°C above preindustrial levels, and the projected impacts of each outcome. For many climate change insiders this felt like it was going to be a “more of the same” report. One that provided updated and stronger, but largely confirmatory information on the emission cuts needed to avoid the most damaging effects of climate breakdown and meet the Paris Agreement objectives. Full-Text PDF Open Access