It may take the richest countries 220 years to reduce their emissions to zero...

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2030 is the year set as a reference in the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There are only seven years left and the large world economies that have made the effort to increase their GDP without emitting more CO 2 are on the wrong track to achieve it : none reach a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC. A study published in the scientific journal The Lancet states that, if we continue as before, eleven countries – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Canada and Sweden – will take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions to zero and would emit more than 27 times their share of the global carbon budget set to not exceed 1.5 ºC .

Between 2013 and 2019, the eleven countries (of the 36 analyzed) recorded reductions of 1.6% annually. Those necessary to reach the 2030 goal are 30% annually by 2025. That is, countries such as Australia, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Canada would have to reduce their emissions more than 30 times faster than now . The United Kingdom, the most favored country, would have to do it five times faster by 2025 and seven times faster by 2030. These estimates, however, do not take into account emissions from agriculture, forestry and land use, nor emissions from international aviation and shipping, so the publication notes that "the addition of these Special Data emissions " It would mean that high-income countries would have to reduce their emissions even faster . " The emissions reduction rates needed for high-income countries to meet their 1.5°C fair share (blue) are several times faster than the emissions reduction rates they have achieved through complete decoupling from GDP and CO 2 emissions (red).



Source: The Lancet . Growth is incompatible with emissions reduction " Greater economic growth in high-income countries is incompatible with the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement ." That is the conclusion reached by the authors of this study, Jefim Vogel , from the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), and Jason Hickel , from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. (UAB). “If high-income countries exceed their carbon budget, they will either aggravate climate breakdown or hijack the carbon budget of low-income countries, or most likely do both. There is nothing ecological about this ," they argue. Therefore, “narratives celebrating the achievements of decoupling GDP and CO 2 emissions in high-income countries as green growth are misleading and represent a form of greenwashing .