COP26 has 'mountain to climb' with world still set for 2.4C warming

The president of the UN climate talks said on Tuesday there was still a mountain to climb towards a goal of capping the global temperature rise at 1.5 Celsius, as a research group said existing pledges would allow the Earth to warm far beyond that.

Britain's Alok Sharma told reporters that COP26 officials would soon publish the first draft of the so-called cover decision, which summarizes the commitments of more than 190 countries, in a bid to focus minds in the three days remaining.

"We are making progress at COP26 but we still have a mountain to climb over the next few days," he said.

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) research group put a sobering number on the size of that mountain, saying that all the national pledges submitted so far to cut greenhouse gases by 2030 would allow the Earth's temperature to rise 2.4C from pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Scientists say 1.5C - the aspirational goal set down in the 2015 Paris Agreement - is the most the Earth can afford to avoid a catastrophic rise in the intense heatwaves, droughts, storms, floods and crop failures that it is already experiencing.