Landmark Paris Agreement set a path to slow warming. The world hasn’t stayed on it

The world has changed dramatically in the decade since leaders celebrated a historic climate agreement in Paris a decade ago, but not quite in ways they expected or wanted.

The world has changed dramatically in the decade since leaders celebrated a historic climate agreement in Paris a decade ago, but not quite in ways they expected or wanted.

Earth’s warming climate has gotten nastier faster than society has been able to wean itself from burning the coal, oil and natural gas that emits carbon pollution that triggers global warming, several scientists and officials said.

There’s been progress — more than a degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) has been shaved off future warming projections since 2015 — but the lack of enough of it will be a big focus for the next two weeks as diplomats gather in Belem, Brazil, for annual United Nations climate negotiations.

“I think it’s important that we’re honest with the world and we declare failure,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. He said warming’s harms are happening faster and more severely than scientists predicted.

But diplomats aren’t giving up.

“We’re actually in the direction that we established in Paris at a speed that none of us could have predicted,” said former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped shepherd that agreement, which requires countries to come up with plans to fight warming.

But the speed of humanity’s climate-fighting effort is slower than the acceleration of climate’s harms, she said, adding that means that “the gap between the progress that we see on the ground and where we ought to be, that gap is still there and widening.”

U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said that the world is “obviously falling behind.”