Choose it or lose it - Australia has a last chance to avert climate catastrophe.

Australia has become the “poster-child for irresponsibility on climate change” according to Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, who was instrumental in delivering the Paris Agreement in 2015. Figueres is in Australia on a speaking tour, and in an interview this morning said the world had to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030 if it wished to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. “If we are not at that point by 2030,” she says, “we will not be able to control the consequences of unmitigated climate change anymore, and the entire world will see scenarios like the Australian bushfires.” In her co-written book The Future We Choose, Figueres paints a frightening picture of a worst-case 2050, in which huge swathes of Asia, Africa and Australia are uninhabitable. But Figueres is also surprisingly optimistic: she laughs off the suggestion the Paris Agreement is unravelling; she highlights the possibility that global emissions may finally have peaked and will trend downwards after flattening last year; and she insists that if the world can reach net zero emissions by 2050, it is not too late to keep warming to 1.5 degrees.

Christiana Figueres.

Figueres says of 189 countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement, only one – the United States – has pulled out, and while both Brazil and Australia have raised serious concerns, neither has indicated an intention to withdraw. More worrying, according to Figueres, is that so far only 80 countries have registered improved national emissions reduction targets ahead of this year’s climate talks in Glasgow – as part of the Paris Agreement, signatories are meant to ratchet up their level of ambition every five years – and mostly those are small economies. “It is really important to see the larger countries doing the same,” she says. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s gambit of taking some form of technology target to Glasgow, rather than a commitment to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050, will not suffice, according to Figueres. “I frankly think every industrialised country has to take on an economy-wide target.”

Read the story from The Monthly by Paddy Manning - “Choose it or lose it - Australia has a last chance to avert climate catastrophe.”