00:00 Let's talk now to John Christensen, who's director of the UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre.
00:05 Good to see you, John. Thank you for joining us on the programme.
00:07 So this report finds that the goals set under the Paris Agreement just aren't enough to make the difference that's needed.
00:14 What scenarios are we looking at if emissions keep on as they are?
00:19 Well, I mean, as the secretary general said, we're really looking at something that gets closer to three degrees at the end of the century.
00:26 And I mean, as a grandfather with kids that will have to grow up with the problems we live through, this is really scary.
00:32 What we've been seeing the last year, especially how reaching the sort of for the first time passing, it is temporarily one and a half degrees.
00:40 But that means in terms of forest fires, floodings, heat waves across the world, how costly it is,
00:47 both in terms of lives and also in terms of sort of financial impacts.
00:51 It is a little bit mind boggling that countries don't see that there's a need to raise emissions and really move fast,
00:58 because the only way we can change that situation is basically by reducing emissions really, really quickly.
01:05 So do you think enough is being spent on dealing with emissions, both in terms of attention and also the financing?
01:13 No, I mean, the clear answer to that is no. I mean, there's not enough going into that.
01:16 If you look at how much money is still being invested in oil and gas exploration at a time where all the international energy agencies and everybody else says
01:26 we have enough capacity to meet what we need in the short term and in the long term,
01:30 we need really to move towards non-fossil resources over time, wind, solar, hydro, whatever is the solution in a specific country.
01:38 And I think we need to make it a business case. I mean, there's not something that government money can pay alone.
01:43 But in most countries, renewables is fully competitive. It's if it's a market conditions.
01:48 And in some countries, developing countries, there may be need for financial support and guarantees to make it work.
01:54 But that's the way to go. And there's no alternative. You mentioned the word ambition just now.
02:00 Do you think governments and organisations are being ambitious enough? Where do we need to be?
02:06 Well, I mean, we have seen what happened with the plans that were submitted to Paris.
02:12 There's a big discrepancy between what countries said they would do and also the ambition they set themselves on the temperatures.
02:18 Then we've been monitoring every year how much is the ambitions growing.
02:22 And I think we have a gap of, let's say, 20, 20 gigatons around that. We've seen an increase in ambition of about five.
02:29 So we need really to put ambitions up by three or four times in the really short term.
02:35 It's tricky. It's difficult to do, but we need to do it.
02:38 So we're just days away now, really, from the COP28 climate conference.
02:43 What would you like to see come out of it? Do you think it's possible to make some progress there?
02:48 I hope so. I mean, it's of course a big challenge to take on.
02:52 I think countries are being asked to send new climate plans by 2025.
02:57 And I think if they can agree a COP28 for the roadmap and the ambition to be able to do that,
03:02 then I think we have a good chance of coming up with ambitious plan. You won't see them at COP now. That's unrealistic.
03:08 I think where you see movement at COP now, maybe on some of what we call short-lived gases,
03:14 on methane and some of the HFCs that are really potent, very short-lived.
03:19 So if you can reduce those quickly, you get a bit of a breathing space in the short term.
03:23 So there will be a lot of focus on that. You could hear that from the meeting between the Chinese premier and President Biden.
03:30 They want to focus really on methane and some of these short-term pollutants,
03:34 because they can have an impact short-term while you're decarbonizing.
