Beyond the Limits: New IPCC WG II Report Highlights How Gambling on Overshoot is Pushing the Planet Past a Point of No Return (Feb 2022)

A joint publication of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and Heinrich Boell Foundation, “Beyond the Limits: New IPCC Working Group II Report Highlights How Gambling on Overshoot is Pushing the Planet Past a Point of No Return” examines the IPCC Working Group II report’s findings and significance for: overshoot scenarios, technologies and approaches common to those scenarios, and the implications of climate change and responses to it for human rights, Indigenous rights, and social justice.

It highlights three critical messages and themes that emerge from the WG II report:

  • Even temporary overshoot of 1.5°C is exceptionally dangerous and would result in adverse impacts irreversible on time-scales from centuries to millennia, or in the case of species extinctions, simply irreversible;
  • Approaches that deploy unproven technologies to reverse or mask overshoot may prove ineffective and risk further disaster;
  • Climate responses, including adaptation, must integrate social justice and equity and center Indigenous and local knowledge.

A recognition of these critical messages is important both to a proper understanding of the WGII report itself and to evaluating the mitigation options to be discussed in the forthcoming report of IPCC Working Group III.

Some of Working Group II’s most sobering findings were diluted or deleted from the final Summary for Policymakers approved by State Parties. But Parties cannot negotiate away the science. The underlying chapters of the WGII report, including the technical summary, leave no doubt: surpassing 1.5°C will lead to irreparable harm, whether or not return to lower temperatures is even possible. Technologies like SRM and large-scale CDR that purport to enable such return may not only fail to deliver their claimed climate benefits, they also may trigger significant adverse impacts of their own. Policy choices that lock the world into overshooting 1.5°C and gambling on return, rather than immediately and drastically slashing emissions—including through rapid phaseout of fossil fuel production and use and a halt to deforestation—invite permanent loss and irreversible damage to humans and ecosystems around the world. In the face of this latest IPCC report, such choices are indefensible.

Read the full analysis: Beyond the Limits: New IPCC Working Group II Report Highlights How Gambling on Overshoot is Pushing the Planet Past a Point of No Return