World on ‘catastrophic’ path to 2.7C warming, UN chief warns

Countries’ latest pledges to cut emissions would fail to avert disastrous climate change, UN report says.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has warned that a failure to cut global emissions is setting the world on a “catastrophic” path to 2.7 degrees Celsius heating.

A UN report on 191 countries’ emissions promises found that they would not meet the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit human-caused global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

Instead, it showed “the world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7-degrees of heating”, Guterres said in a statement on Friday, just weeks before crunch talks at the COP26 summit in November aimed at securing more ambitious climate action.