In fight to curb climate change, report shows world struggle to get on track

Washington: The world is off track in its efforts to curb global warming in 41 of 42 important measurements and is even heading in the wrong direction in six crucial ways, a new international report calculates.

The only bright spot is that global sales of electric passenger vehicles are now on track to match what’s needed along with many other changes to limit future warming to just another couple tenths of a degree, according to the State of Climate Action report released on Tuesday by the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker, the Bezos Earth Fund and others.

On the flip side, public money spent to create more fossil fuel use is going in the wrong direction and faster than it has in the past, said study co-author Kelly Levin, science and data director at the Bezos Earth Fund.

“This is not the time for tinkering around the edges, but it’s instead the time for radical decarbonisation of all sectors of the economy,” Levin said. “We are woefully off track and we are seeing the impact of inaction unfold around the world from extensive wildfire fires in Canada, heat-related deaths across the Mediterranean, record high temperatures in South Asia and so on,” she said.Later this month, crucial international climate negotiations start in Dubai that include the first time world negotiators will do a global stocktake on how close society is to meeting its 2015 climate goals. In advance of the United Nations summit, numerous reports from experts are coming out assessing Earth’s progress or mostly the lack of it, including a US national assessment with hundreds of indicators. Tuesday’s 42 indicators offers one of the grimmest report cards, detailing multiple failures of society.

The report looks at what’s needed in several sectors of the global economy power, transportation, buildings, industry, finance

and forestry.