Just before the Antalya climate summit, researchers work out how warming could come to a halt around 2050

The research group Climate Analytics has released a new study ahead of COP31, the UN climate conference that opens on Monday in Antalya, Turkey. Targeted measures against short-lived climate forcers such as methane would slow warming by around 12 percent by 2035, the researchers write. Combined with a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, warming in the 2030s could proceed at half the pace and halt around mid-century at 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels. In the Netherlands, the Reformatorisch Dagblad reported on the study.

In the most ambitious scenario, which also includes measures on land use and carbon removal, temperatures peak at around 1.6 degrees in the early 2040s and fall to about 1.2 degrees by 2100. Neither track alone is enough to get back below 1.5 degrees this century, Climate Analytics stresses. According to co-author Anna Kanduth, halting warming is still possible, but there are no shortcuts.

Researchers at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) are gloomier. Detlef van Vuuren calculated that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 degrees stood at about 130 gigatonnes of CO2 at the start of 2026, according to the news agency ANP as quoted by nieuws.nl; with global emissions of some 40 gigatonnes a year, little of it remains. He speaks of lean years for climate policy, partly because of the United States' withdrawal. His colleague Michel den Elzen does note that renewable energy is growing much faster than expected and that Chinese emissions have almost stopped rising.