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Posted: 2020-12-21T08:00:50Z | Updated: 2020-12-24T07:27:05Z

As bushfires and storms raged, and even the Arctic broiled and burned, scientists dire climate warnings came to life in frighteningly vivid fashion in 2020. With political leaders and the public preoccupied by COVID-19 , the world careened closer to the brink of environmental catastrophe.

When 2020 began, a youth climate movement was gaining traction, a key summit in Glasgow, Scotland, looked like a chance to breathe new energy into the Paris climate agreement as it neared its fifth birthday, and many hoped this might be the year leaders finally moved with the urgency the planetary crisis demands. The stakes were momentous every day without action, the window to prevent catastrophic climate change narrows. This is really a minute to midnight, said Inger Andersen, director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

Yet hopes that 2020 would be a pivotal year for climate action evaporated as the coronavirus upended governments priorities. Summits were put on hold and climate action dropped down political agendas.

As the year ends, the possibilities it offered seem to have drained away or at least, like so much else in this virus-plagued year, been postponed. And with unprecedentedly rapid action needed to avoid the most disastrous scenarios, the consequences of the lost focus, missed chances and lurches backward could be grave.

Governments Last, Cant-Miss Opportunity To Change Course

Andersen offered a chilling assessment of where things stand. Without a course correction, she said, were heading for 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming by centurys end, a catastrophic level scientists say would drown some coastal cities, intensify heat waves, droughts and floods, and make swaths of the world all but uninhabitable, driving hunger, disease, conflict and migration.

To turn that around, fossil fuel production must drop by 6% a year for the next decade, UNEP reported . Yet countries are still planning average annual increases of 2%, it said. And so far, the 20 biggest economies have poured $233 billion of coronavirus spending into boosting fossil fuels, compared to $146 billion for renewable power, energy efficiency and carbon-cutting areas like biking and walking infrastructure, according to the report.