‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5ºC climate target, says UN head

Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5º C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned.

In his only interview before next month’s Cop30 climate summit, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with “devastating consequences” for the world.

He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.

“Let’s recognise our failure,” he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumaúma. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5ºC in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.

He said the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

The planet’s past 10 years have been the hottest in recorded history. Despite growing scientific alarm at the speed of global temperature increases caused by the burning of fossil fuels – oil, coal and gas – the secretary general said government commitments have come up short.

Fewer than a third of the world’s nations (62 out of 197) have sent in their climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. The US under Donald Trump has abandoned the process. Europe has promised but so far failed to deliver. China, the world’s biggest emitter, has been accused of undercommitting.

António Guterres giving his speech at Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024. 

Guterres said the lack of NDC ambition means the Paris goal of 1.5ºC will be breached, at least temporarily: “From those [NDCs] received until now, there is an expectation of a reduction of emissions of 10%. We would need 60% [to stay within 1.5ºC]. So overshooting is now inevitable.”

He did not give up on the target though, and said it may still be possible to temporarily overshoot and then bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5ºC by the end of the century, but this would require a change of direction at and beyond Cop30.

He called for governments to rebalance representation at Cops so that civil society groups, particularly from Indigenous communities, will have a greater presence and influence than people paid by corporations.

“We all know what the lobbyists want,” he said. “It’s to increase their profits, with the price being paid by humankind.”

He said a transition away from fossil fuels was a matter of economic self-interest, because it was clear that the era of fossil fuels was coming to an end: “We are seeing a renewables revolution and the transition will inevitably accelerate and there will be no way in which humankind will be able to use all the oil and gas already discovered,” he said.

Asked if he had raised this with the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose government has just given the green light for oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon, he said: “Not yet. I’ll take advantage of the Cop [to do this].”