ANALYSIS - Push to 'keep 1.5 alive' heats up, 100 days from COP26 climate talks

(Reuters, 22 Jul 2021) As climate change impacts get more severe, the urgency of keeping global warming to 1.5C is growing - and the race is on to secure the stronger pledges needed to cut emissions.

In 2015, years of efforts by small island nations worried about being swallowed up by rising seas as the planet heats paid off: they got world leaders to aim for a global warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Their campaign slogan - "1.5 to stay alive" - however, is now being reshaped by others as an increasingly urgent plea to "keep 1.5 alive".

Half a decade on, much of the world is under siege from warming-fuelled floods, heatwaves and wildfires, in countries from China to Germany to the United States, with impacts arriving faster than scientists had predicted.

Today the Earth's climate has already warmed by 1.2C above preindustrial times - and ahead of November's COP26 U.N. climate summit the 1.5C goal has become a rallying cry for politicians and activists who fear it may be slipping out of reach.

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Reuters, 22 Jul 2021: ANALYSIS - Push to 'keep 1.5 alive' heats up, 100 days from COP26 climate talks