New UNEP Emissions Gap Report shows that current commitments are far from sufficient to meet Paris goals, and limiting warming to 1.5C is quickly "slipping out of reach" as emissions continue to increase. My latest at @CarbonBrief: carbonbrief.org/unep-1-5c-clim… 1/7 
If emissions had peaked and begun to decline after the year 2000, the 1.5C target would have been much easier to achieve, only requiring reductions of around 3% per year. By contrast, starting in 2019, without net-negative emissions, requires a ~15% cut each year. 2/7
The 2C target is a bit more achievable with delays, but even there a rate of around 4% to 5% per year is needed if emissions peak in 2019. If reductions are delayed for another decade, the 2C target becomes much more challenging, requiring emissions to fall by 7% per year. 3/7
If we assume large-scale net negative emissions we can make the slopes a bit less steep, but the technologies are untested at scale and the deployment assumptions for those (e.g. devoting 3x the land area of India to BECCS by 2100) are staggeringly large. 4/7
The UNEP report shows a large gap between what countries have committed to and what would be needed to meet Paris Agreement targets. Current NDCs leave emissions in 2030 ~12-15 GtCO2 short of whats needed for below 2C, and 29-32 GtCO2 short for 1.5C. 5/7
The one bit of good news is that the UNEP projects that current policies will move emissions substantially lower than most of the IPCC scenarios examining potential outcomes in the absence of any action to tackle climate change (so-called “no-policy baseline” pathways). 6/7
It puts emissions in 2030 at 60 GtCO2e, somewhere between SSP2-4.5 (57 GtCO2e) and SSP3-6.0 (62 GtCO2e), but well below SSP3-7.0 (69 GtCO2e) and the worst-case SSP5-8.5 (71 GtCO2e). This is similar to the IEA's recent decadal emissions projections: 7/7
