NEGOTIATORS and stakeholders headed to Bonn, Germany, for this week’s United Nations climate summit, continue to confront a range of questions surrounding one essential query: How do we meet the imperative to lower greenhouse gas emissions now — quickly — to minimise the most severe impacts of climate change?
To address this challenge, World Resources Institute and partners launched Climate Watch, a new data visualisation platform. Climate Watch brings together dozens of data sets for the first time in an online platform that lets policymakers, researchers, media and others analyse and compare national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement, access historical greenhouse gas emissions data, discover how climate objectives can help achieve sustainable development goals, understand links between climate risk, poverty, vulnerabilities and readiness to adapt to climate impacts and use models to map new pathways to a lower-carbon future.
Since the 1850s, when the industrial revolution was gathering steam, global heat-trapping emissions have grown from less than 1 gigatonne — 865 megatonnes or 1.9 trillion pounds — to 46.6 gigatonnes in 2015: 46,600,000,000,000 kg (93 trillion pounds) or about 1.4 million kg (3 million pounds) every second. While global emissions have begun to stabilise in the past three years and some top emitters have reduced emissions, time is not on our side. We need to rapidly reduce global total emissions to have a chance at limiting warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Every country needs to play its part. To do that, Climate Watch makes it easy to analyse and visualise the latest available international greenhouse gas emissions data, how it has changed and what areas of the economy need the largest change.
To build confidence and trust between the public and private sectors and among countries, ensuring transparency and accessibility of national climate targets (known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) is essential to encourage ambitious climate action.
Climate Watch lets stakeholders explore all countries’ NDCs with a searchable database that makes it simple to learn from different countries’ plans, and identify areas for further investment.
For example, Climate Watch allows users to delve into what any country is proposing within their NDCs to do on mitigation, adaptation and finance, or see what economic sectors, such as agriculture and energy, different countries are focusing on to meet emissions targets. The platform has identified about 400 sector-specific climate targets and found that three quarters of national climate plans cover adaptation measures.
Because climate action and sustainable development are two sides of the same coin, aligning climate targets (NDCs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be critical to decarbonising economies and building climate resilience in a way that leaves no one behind.
Climate Watch identifies the links between countries’ NDCs and SDGs for 2030, finding that climate actions communicated in NDCs are aligned with 154 of the 169 targets of SDGs. The greatest alignment is found in the energy, forest, land-use and agricultural sectors, but with opportunities across all 17 SDGs. It’s the first time they have been mapped together, providing a resource to understand and maximise synergies between the agendas.
Climate Watch’s emission scenarios (available mid-November) shows what more than 60 countries or regions can do through economic and energy policy, drawing from a variety of modelling tools, to chart a more ambitious path to reduce emissions and limit global warming.
In addition to national-level insights, Climate Watch users can explore how temperatures might change under different emission trajectories. For example, the Global Change Assessment Model shows that if current national targets under the Paris Agreement were achieved, they could limit warming to 2.8°C.
With analytical tools and access to the latest climate data, Climate Watch is a powerful tool to help countries meet the climate challenge. The platform will continue to be improved and expanded, with new tools, more robust data sets and information about national policies and legislation, such as carbon pricing, climate finance, adaptation measures and more. -- IPS