Exceeding 1,000 gigatons means the world risks a temperature increase since preindustrial times of more than 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
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Global temperatures will increase by around 3 degrees Celsius despite current efforts to cut emissions and to limit the temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius, researchers have found.
And the upshot is both that countries have raised their climate ambitions greatly, but also that even by 2030, global emissions are expected to still be rising because of their efforts.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, said that the report represents about 86 per cent of all the green house gas emissions in the world and includes submissions of all industrialized countries and about 75 per cent of the developing countries. But after the last-minute rush, 119 plans had been handed in for 146 countries (the 28 European Union countries had handed in theirs collectively, well on time).
Collectively, the current INDCs will bring down per capita emissions by eight per cent by 2025, and nine per cent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, the United Nations said.
Leaders will be pushed to agree on a legally binding global climate treaty to curb carbon emissions and keep global warming below two degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
“An unprecedented world-wide effort is under way to combat climate change, building confidence that nations can cost-effectively meet their stated objective of keeping a global temperature rise to under 2 C”, it said in an assessment of the country pledges. Adaptation to the impacts of climate change, support for vulnerable countries that can not adapt, and finance and technology access are also part of the massive, global and public partnership required to fight climate change.
Ms Figueres said: “Fully implemented, these plans together begin to make a significant dent in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions: as a floor they provide a foundation upon which ever higher ambition can be built”.
“(Many have said) we need a carbon price and (investment) would be so much easier with a carbon price, but life is much more complex than that”, Figueres told a climate investor event in London.
Last Friday a draft text of new universal climate change agreement and its accompanying decisions were dispatched to Paris from Bonn (Germany) where a final agreement will be reached in December this year. Consumption levels in developed countries will have to be reigned in if emissions are to come down to sustainable levels.
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“While today’s report from the United Nations can only be viewed a step on the journey to a low-carbon future, we feel it is the latest in a series of positive signals for the 2015 worldwide climate discussions”. If not, it will be millions of the poorest families on the front lines of the climate crisis who have to pay the price.
