The world made a ‘covenant with the future’ – and we broke it

September 3, 2026 — 7:00pm

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When the world came together in Paris a decade ago and agreed upon a 1.5 degree global warming target, the mood verged on jubilant.

Then United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared the Paris treaty “a covenant with the future” and said the world was now in a race against time to arrest global warming.

On Wednesday, in a new report by the UN called Limiting Overshoot, it finally conceded that the race to that target had been lost. Due to our collective failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough, the most optimistic scenario would see warming crash through 1.5 degrees by the end of the decade, warm to 1.8 degrees later this century and then – if we are lucky – we may be able to stabilise the climate and force down temperatures over centuries to come.

In the report, this is referred to as “overshoot, peak and decline” and is a strategy that will require not only the sort of radical cuts in emissions we have so far failed to achieve, but the mass deployment of devices to remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it safely away. These technologies do not yet exist at scale.

Even if this was achieved, the world we are left with will be permanently damaged by our 275-year-long experiment with fossil fuels at immeasurable cost to human life and wellbeing, let alone to the natural world.

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© The Age