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Meeting Paris Agreement goals that have put the world on track for warming of 2.6C this century would halve the average number of hot days globally each year in comparison with a scenario of unchecked rising emissions, new research has found.
Before the 2015 treaty, the world was headed for heating of 4C by 2100, which would have caused about 114 hot days annually compared with the 57 recorded today, said scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) partnership and research organisation Climate Central.
“The Paris Agreement is a powerful, legally binding framework that can help us avoid the most severe impacts of climate change,” said Friederike Otto, climate science professor at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London.
However, she said countries need to do more to shift away from oil, natural gas and coal, calling on political leaders to “take the reason for the Paris Agreement much more seriously … because every fraction of a degree of warming – whether it is 1.4, 1.5, or 1.7C – will mean the difference between safety and suffering for millions of people”.
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The Paris climate pact commits countries to try to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, but the UN Environment Programme’s 2024 Emissions Gap Report said countries’ current national targets meant the world was on track for a 2.6C increase.
Curbing future heat
The group of 18 researchers drawn from the WWA and Climate Central mapped 207 countries, analysing weather data and climate models to track the frequency of heat-related events since cooler pre-industrial times.
They found the reduction in projected warming from 4C to 2.6C by 2100 would result in at least 100 fewer hot days per year on average in nearly 30 countries and 57 fewer days globally. In Kenya, that could mean 82 fewer hot days, a reduction of 30 in India and the US and a drop of 29 hot days in China and Britain.
They also applied their analysis to six heatwaves, including a deadly heatwave that swept Mexico and part of the southwestern United States last year, killing scores of people.
Since the Paris Agreement was signed, the research found that the Mexican heatwave had become 86% more likely and about 0.3C hotter.
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Under the 2.6C warming scenario expected this century, similar heatwaves are expected to become an additional 1.7C hotter. But under the 4C outlook, such events would have been 3.5C hotter than what was observed in 2024, the researchers said.
But while the global treaty has helped avoid the worst possible outcomes, Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, said the world was still headed for “a dangerously hot future”.
“The impacts of recent heatwaves show that many countries are not well prepared to deal with 1.3C of warming, let alone the 2.6C of warming projected if – and it’s a big if – countries meet their current emissions reduction pledges.”
Dahl said “faster, deeper, and more ambitious emissions cuts are crucial to ensure future generations live in a safe climate”.
CO2 levels soar to record
On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere soared by a record amount to new highs in 2024, putting the planet on a course for greater long-term temperature increases.
In its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the UN agency traced the increase to human activities, wildfires and a decline in absorption by so-called carbon sinks such as forests and the ocean.
WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said the heat trapped by greenhouse gases was “turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather”.
“Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being,” Barrett said.
Following a series of intense heatwaves across the world in 2024 – the hottest year on record, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that extreme heat has become the “new normal” and appealed to countries to reduce the devastating consequences.
Despite 500,000 heat-related deaths recorded annually, access to early-warning systems is limited in some regions and heat adaptation continues to lag, particularly when it comes to finance, governance and long-term measures, the WWA and Climate Central researchers said.
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They called for improved early-warning systems, heat action plans and monitoring mechanisms, especially in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, and said such policies should extend beyond the health sphere to be integrated into urban planning, labor protection, infrastructure and social policy.
They emphasised the importance of heat warnings by national weather services, currently only issued in about half of all countries, adding that long-term solutions such as increasing shaded areas and trees in cities and strengthening health systems could prevent about 100,000 deaths each year.
“The danger of heat will only increase this century, so it is crucial that every country implements measures that help keep people safe,” said Roop Singh, head of urban and attribution at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
The post Paris Agreement helping to avert dozens of hot days each year, scientists say appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement helping to avert dozens of hot days each year, scientists say
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
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