Nations are getting serious about climate action. Just not serious enough.

The world’s countries are taking more concrete steps to tackle climate change than ever before, but they are still far from the sweeping changes needed to keep global temperatures at relatively safe levels, according to a report from the United Nations released on Tuesday.

The annual assessment, known as the Emissions Gap Report, maps the gap between national ambitions to combat global warming and what scientists say is needed to prevent catastrophe. That gap has narrowed slightly in the past year, but remains large.

At least 149 countries have updated their pledges from the 2015 Paris climate agreement to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the report found. Nine countries did so this year, including Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

If every single country were to implement its announced plans (a big if), global greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade would be 2 to 9 percent lower than they are today.

But that would still cause the Earth to warm about 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, the report found. With every fraction of a degree of warming, the risks of deadly heat waves, wildfires, droughts, storms and species extinctions increase significantly, scientists say.

Under the Paris Agreement, world leaders pledged to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius, to limit the risks of climate catastrophe. The planet has already warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Current policy does not come close to achieving these objectives, the report shows. To stay below 2 degrees Celsius, global emissions would have to fall by roughly 29 percent between now and 2030. To stay at 1.5 degrees Celsius, global emissions would have to fall by about 43 percent.

“We see countries making progress in implementing the climate plans they have already announced,” said Anne Olhoff, a climate policy expert based in Denmark and co-author of the report. “But those plans are far from sufficient to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

The report comes at a time when global temperatures are expected to reach their highest levels on record this year. The Earth will continue to get hotter and temperature records will continue to be broken, scientists say, until countries manage to reduce their emissions to near zero.

“The world must change course, otherwise we will say the same thing next year – and the year after that, and the year after that, like a broken record,” wrote Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in a foreword to the report.

Next week, representatives from nearly 200 countries will gather in Dubai as part of the United Nations climate summit known as COP28. There, diplomats will discuss whether and how action against climate change can be stepped up.

Some countries, including the United States and China, have suggested that countries should try to triple the amount of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, installed worldwide by 2030. Others want an international agreement to ‘phase out’ coal burning. , oil and gas, unless their emissions can be captured and buried underground.

Most governments are not expected to unveil new plans to cut emissions at the summit. Instead, countries will have to come back by 2025 with new targets and plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.

But unless countries dramatically step up action this decade, the United Nations report said, it will become “impossible” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and extremely difficult to keep below 2 degrees. Countries would also have to rely more heavily on still-unproven technologies to suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

The report makes a number of suggestions to further reduce emissions.

The world’s 20 largest economies, known as the Group of Twenty, still need to implement additional policies to achieve their stated climate goals. For example, the Biden administration has pledged to cut U.S. emissions 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, but the clean energy subsidies approved by Congress so far will only partially do that.

Collectively, the G20 is expected to fall short of its commitments by around 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2030 unless further action is taken.

Moreover, more than two-thirds of global emissions now come from developing countries, which are rapidly increasing their use of fossil fuels to lift themselves out of poverty. Many of these countries are saddled with heavy debt burdens, and the cost of financing renewable energy projects in countries such as South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa can be up to seven times higher than in the United States or Europe, the report said. .

“International financial assistance will therefore need to be significantly scaled up from existing levels,” the authors noted, “and new public and private sources of capital better distributed among low-income countries.”