Climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra has warned the world is on track for ever more severe climate-related damage as it speeds past warming thresholds, in an unusually sombre address in New York
The world is already around 1.3°C hotter than in the late 19th century when industrialisation took off. Europe is heating up twice as fast, yet global emissions are still rising and Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement for a second time.
“The reality is, it is going to get worse before it gets better,” Hoekstra said at a side event on Monday, as senior officials gathered for the UN general assembly and a last chance to talk climate before the COP30 summit in November.
“We are cracking the formula of how to tackle this huge, huge problem,” he said. “But we are already at the verge of or beyond 1.5 °C,” he added, referring to the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement to arrest global temperature rise before that point. The absolute limit agreed in the French capital a decade ago is two degrees.
“The economic impact, the societal impact and the impact on our ecosystem, unfortunately, will become worse in the years to come,” the Dutch politician said. “As much as we seek to double down, the price tag will only go up.”
Hoekstra, who will represent the EU at the crunch climate talks in Brazil, is hamstrung by European governments who have so far proved unable agree the pace of domestic CO2 cuts, effectively rendering him empty-handed on the eve of a UN meeting on Wednesday, 24 September. Parties to the Paris climate pact are supposed to present their planned contributions to the global effort in the form of 2035 targets.
The effects of climate change are real and costly, the EU’s top climate official warned: Slovakia had lost 11 to 12% of GDP in the 2023 floods, more than the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. “The patterns of damage are only going in the wrong direction,” Hoekstra said.
(rh)