Will We Halve Emissions by 2030?

We need to stop our planet and atmosphere from getting much warmer or changes to our climate will only get worse. You may have heard talk of 1.5ºC, but what does this mean? Scientists agree that global warming at 1.5ºC is the tipping point into uncertainty.

Consequences will be unpredictable and could be very bad indeed – sea level rises, floods, heatwaves, drought, species loss… You’ve seen all the apocalyptic warnings. So world leaders set a target at the UN Climate Summit (COP21) in Paris in 2015: to keep global warming definitely under 2ºC and ideally at no more than 1.5ºC by 2100.  

Why is the planet warming? The consensus is that warming is caused by emissions from human activity – particularly the carbon dioxide (CO2) that’s released when we burn fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, but also other gases like methane (think cow burps). These ‘greenhouse gases’ trap heat in the atmosphere and disrupt the Earth’s well-established energy balance that created a stable climate for thousands of years.  

So how do we limit warming? Emissions must be cut. Particularly in higher-income nations, where most emissions come from. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), countries following their current emission reduction pledges would still mean a 2.5ºC increase by the end of the century. But if we can halve emissions by 2030, and get down to ‘net zero’ by 2050 (where emissions are balanced out by carbon removal), we should halt the current trajectory and keep temperatures at 1.5ºC or less.  

And is a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 possible? Some think so. The Exponential Roadmap Initiative, for example, has 36 scalable solutions across areas from transport and buildings to food consumption and industry. They hope to achieve the reductions from “sharp policy, from climate leadership by companies and cities, and from a finance and technology shift towards green solutions with exponential potential. 

Evidence like the fall in the price of renewable energy sources (the cost of solar energy has dropped 80% since 2010!) suggests this isn’t unrealistic. Great! But is a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 probable? That’s debatable. 2030 is only 7 years away. 

It was seven years past that the 1.5ºC limit was agreed in Paris and, though there have been some changes, we haven’t seen much of a shift in how we run our economies, power our lives and feed ourselves. 

 Emissions really fell in 2020 when our behaviour changed so dramatically due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, but they rebounded in 2021 and emissions from energy use actually rose. What’s more, big industry like agriculture and fossil fuel production is very powerful, profit-driven, and subsidised by governments, so it will fight to maintain the status quo. 

But I challenge the world to prove us doubters wrong! As climate scientist Tamsin Edwards writes in Greta Thunberg’s new book, “The future is looking better than we imagined, but it’s not yet as good as we hope.” We must act now to change humanity’s negative impact on our planet. The next three decades are crucial: could we live with ourselves if we saw the crisis coming but didn’t do anything to stop it?