Failure of climate-change mitigation

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

Most leadership teams are out of touch with the physics that is playing out in the physical world and as a result are setup for massive disruption.

The physics: We have to go from global emissions which are at 58 GtCO2e (2023) to 41 GtCO2e by 2030, that is a 17 Gt reduction, to have a 66% chance of limiting global heating to below 2°C

This means we have to reduce emissions on average by about 2.83 Gt per year for the next 6 years.

(We managed a 2.6 Gt reduction with Covid measures in 2020.)

This is a gigantic mitigation task that is going to require nothing short of a total revolution of business as usual.

We are now halfway through January of 2024 and there is no indication anywhere that we are going to attempt a 2.83 Gt reduction. We most certainly didn’t attempt it in 2023.

It would be accurate to call this a total mitigation failure.

At the end of 2023, 11,000 executives from 113 economies were given a list of 36 risks from which they needed to select the top 5 over the next two years for their economies, so 2024 and 2025.

One of the risks in the list was “failure of climate-change mitigation”

Here is the list:

Now considering what must happen in 2024, shaving 2.83 Gt off global emissions, and the failure to do so in 2023 already and the years prior to that, how many of the 113 economies listed “failure of climate-change mitigation” in their top 5 do you think?

Go an have a look for yourself. Access the results starting on Page 102 of the WEF Global Risks Report 2024