Global | What lies ahead

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) painted a bleak picture in its Sixth Synthesis Report on climate change: the window of opportunity to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement is continuing to close.

Key points

• Key points:
• CO2 emissions are at record highs, and projections based on current policies or even announced commitments (which have been steadily improving) fall well short of the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C this century.
• How can we succeed? Knowing what to do is easy enough: incentivize spending, investment and financing decisions that will reduce atmospheric emissions while making those economic transactions that increase emissions more expensive (or simply setting a price when there isn't one already).
• We can also redistribute our combined wealth and resources to help out the most exposed and less responsive regions, firms and households in both emerging and more developed economies.
• Protecting a global public good —the climate— requires globally coordinated measures, which is harder than it sounds, considering that decarbonisation is now more of a geopolitical instrument than an end in itself. And the lack of international coordination is also a determining factor in the failure to increase climate finance to the level required.

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