After year of climate disasters, world off-track to curb warming

After year of climate disasters, world off-track to curb warming

Catastrophic floods, crop-wilting droughts and record heatwaves this year have shown that climate change warnings are increasingly becoming reality and this is "just the beginning", experts say, as international efforts to cut planet-heating emissions founder.

The year did see some important progress, with major new legislation particularly in the United States and Europe as well as a deal at UN talks to help vulnerable countries cope with an increasing onslaught of devastating climate impacts.

But the goal of keeping warming within a safer limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era appears in peril, with carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels -- the main driver of global heating -- on track to reach an all-time high in 2022.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warned world leaders at a climate summit in Egypt in November that humanity faces a stark choice between working together in the battle against global warming or "collective suicide".

They opted to put off the most important decisions for another time, observers say.

This year UN climate science experts issued their strongest warning yet of the dangers facing people and planet, with a landmark report on climate impacts in February dubbed an "atlas of human suffering".

Since then a series of extreme