The study indicates that more than 90% of countries are at risk of repeating the years of extreme heat

Almost every country in the world could experience one in every two particularly hot years starting in 2030, according to a study released Thursday that highlights the main responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s major polluters.

• Read also – Climate: 2021 is a hot year

The study, published in Communications Earth and Environment, goes beyond historical emissions data and commitments made before the last COP26 global climate conference by the five largest global emitters — China, the United States, the European Union, India and Russia — to substantiate regional warming predictions by the end of the decade.

The result: Once every two years, 92% of the 165 countries surveyed are expected to experience extremely hot temperatures. Those years are defined as reaching all-time highs projected once every hundred years in the pre-industrial era, before the massive increase in emissions from human activity responsible for climate change.

Conclusion “emphasizes the urgency and shows that we are heading toward a warmer world for all,” according to Alexander Knowles, of the nongovernmental organization Climate Analytics, co-author of the study.

To highlight the contribution to the phenomenon of the largest emitters, the researchers then modeled the situation by recalling their emissions since 1991, the year after the publication of the first report of United Nations climate experts (IPCC), which highlighted responsibility for emissions. due to human activity.

Then the proportion of countries affected by these extremely hot years drops to 46%.

For Lea Beusch, of the ETH University in Zurich, the study highlights the “clear footprint” of large emitters in different regions.

“I think this is very important, because usually we’re talking about the abstract amounts of emissions, or global temperatures, that we know but don’t feel,” she told AFP.

The disturbance will be particularly noticeable in the African tropics. “Because this is an area where the year-to-year differences are generally very small, even a moderate increase that it will undergo, compared to other regions, really pushes it out of its way. The known climate pattern,” the researcher asserts.

In absolute terms, the strongest increases in temperature affect the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, a phenomenon that has already been observed.

The authors insist that the consequences could be mitigated by making significant reductions in countries’ emissions.

However, according to the United Nations, current commitments will see emissions increase by 13.7% by 2030, far from the halving necessary to maintain the 2015 Paris Agreement’s ideal target of containing global warming to +1.5°C compared to previously. Industrial age.

see also