Climatologist Carlos Nobre, a global reference on the subject, considers the proposals presented so far by the countries at the , which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, to be insufficient.
According to Nobre, the parties to the Paris Agreement have not yet been able to advance the goal of reducing the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by COP28 and, if they were able, this strategy would no longer be efficient in maintaining the increase. of planetary temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius (ºC) above the pre-industrial period. “. There is a huge risk that it will not go down any further. From now on, if it stays at 1.5 degrees for three years, the temperature will no longer drop,” he says.
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Reaching 43% is already a challenge for a world that continues to see greenhouse gas emissions grow and that still depends on fossil fuels, the main villains of the problem, explains the scientist. “If we continue with this practice, reduce emissions by 43% now by 2030 and bring net emissions to zero, only in 2050 will we be able to reach 2.5 degrees”, he says.
Most signatory leaders of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, however, do not follow the urgency. A few months before the deadline for updating targets, in February 2025, few countries have renewed their ambitions.
Brazil, as the next host country for the conference in 2025, was one of the few to update the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), lowering the greenhouse gas emissions target over the next 11 years. The numbers were presented last Friday (8), the last working day before the opening of negotiations in Baku, where vice-president Geraldo Alckmin will present the Brazilian proposal.
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“This COP29 has to be challenging. It cannot be the same as COP28. We really have to start debating the risk of our planet reaching 2.5 degrees by 2050. We are on the way to planetary suicide if we don’t accelerate the reduction of emissions”, reinforces Nobre.
In addition to gradually reducing problems, the climatologist reminds us that countries also need to prepare for what will never come back. “Extreme events have exploded almost everywhere in the world and, even in developed countries, these extreme events are serious. See the increasingly stronger hurricanes hitting the United States, Mexico. Hurricane Leme, before Milton, killed more than 200 in the United States. This one, in Valencia, Spain, was not a hurricane. This is an extreme rain event, almost 500 millimeters of rain in six hours, killing hundreds more”, he says.
For Carlos Nobre, the adaptation of poorer, and therefore more vulnerable, countries is a topic that cannot be left out of global leaders’ negotiations.
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Although public policies and high financing of actions are initiatives within the reach of global decisions, the climatologist remembers that everyone can contribute, as technological advances have increasingly made conscious consumption possible. “In Brazil, 75% of emissions were from deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado. Another 25% were emissions from agriculture, mainly livestock. There are already meatpacking markets that sell meat from sustainable livestock, from livestock with much lower emissions. Then the price of this meat is the same, because regenerative livestock farming is more profitable, more productive, so there is no price variation”, he explains.
In addition to meat, solar energy has proven to be cheaper than thermoelectric energy, just as electric cars have also proven to be less expensive when fossil fuel is included in the bill, explains Nobre. “We really have to take our leadership, because in societies like ours, democratic, with complete freedom, buying an electric car makes perfect economic sense. Buying meat from sustainable livestock, with low emissions, makes perfect sense, and the price is the same”, he concludes.
*The reporter traveled at the invitation of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
