(NEW YORK) — Countries around the world will need to do more than make lofty climate promises — they will need to keep them to actually keep them to prevent global temperatures from getting to catastrophic levels.

Scientists are now painting a clearer picture on the likelihood of keeping global warming below the 2-degree Celsius mark since the Industrial Revolution, the “worst-case scenario” outlined in the Paris Agreement. A study published in Nature on Wednesday suggests that, while the climate pledges have the potential to mitigate warming, current trajectories based on how they are implemented show otherwise.

In the five years preceding COP26, 153 parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement submitted new or updated climate mitigation goals for 2030, and 75 parties provided longer-term targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But analyses of updated pledges made before COP26 suggest there was still a higher than 50% chance of temperatures exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which would push global temperatures past the point that any human civilization in history has experienced.

When the researchers took into account the updated climate pledges made in October, they argued that there is still a chance to limit warming to just below 2 degrees Celsius, according to the study. The net-zero pledges are “big news,” because it is the first time governments have come forward with specific targets that hold temperatures below that 2-degree threshold, Christophe McGlade, head of the energy supply unit at the International Energy Agency and another one of the study’s authors, said during a news briefing on Tuesday.

The authors estimated that if all pledges are implemented in full and on time, peak warming could be limited to 1.9 to 2 degrees Celsius — still above the conservative figure established by the Paris Agreement at 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, chances are still low, experts say.

“Unfortunately, the revised pledges hold only a 6–10% chance of meeting the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious goal of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 °C, unless substantially more mitigation action happens this decade,” the researchers said.

Long-term targets should be treated with “skepticism” if they are not supported by short-term commitments to put countries on a pathway to meet those targets in the next decade, the researchers said. Otherwise, the world is going to “blast through the remaining admission carbon budget for 1.5 degrees just this decade,” Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne and one of the authors of the study, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“It’s not a good news story, because our study clearly shows that increased action this decade is necessary for us to have a chance of not shooting past 1.5 degrees by a wide margin,” Meinshausen said.

In addition, based on the policies that governments currently have in place, the researchers estimate that it could lead to a whopping 2.6 degrees Celsius in warming by the end of the century if the climate goals are not implemented drastically in the upcoming years, said Christophe McGlade, head of the energy supply unit at the International Energy Agency and another one of the study’s authors, said during the briefing.

“This is clearly far too high, and will lead to massive climate damages around the world,” McGlade said.

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(HONG KONG) — China’s largest city is buckling under its biggest COVID-19 outbreak of the pandemic, with infections continuing to rise, despite a strict lockdown of more than 25 million Shanghai residents.

Cases in Shanghai surged on Wednesday to another record high of 26,330, of which just 1,190 were symptomatic. There is no end in sight to the lockdown, despite there being no official deaths reported.

Yet the Chinese government continues to relentlessly pursue its no-tolerance ‘Zero-COVID’ strategy as the costs on the economy and social stability are mounting.

China has hit back at the United States for ordering its non-emergency consulate staff and diplomats’ families to leave the locked-down city, saying it was “weaponizing” the issue.

The U.S. State Department announced the decision on Monday, saying it was “due to a surge in COVID-19 cases and the impact of restrictions.”

The U.S. pointed to the risk of children and parents being separated by a policy that has now been partially relaxed.

In March, as Omicron snuck into the financial, commercial and shipping capital, Shanghai had vowed not to impose a lockdown. They reversed course as cases climbed. Two weeks later, the normally lively streets of Shanghai are eerily quiet, as its millions of residents underwent several rounds of mass testing.

Under the “Zero-COVID” policy, all infected people are sent to hospitals or isolation centers.

Shanghai resident and expat Alessandro Pavanello told ABC News that he was moved from his home to an isolation facility on April 9 after testing positive. He showed ABC the partitioned mass hall where he sleeps. He was given a bucket and cloth to wash himself at the sink, as there are no showers.

“Everyone is in close contact with each other, and, as you can imagine, there is absolutely no privacy,” Pavanello said.

Other Shanghai residents’ experiences have been less intensive. Jamie Peñaloza compared it to memories of summer camp: “Announcements, call to duty, chores, and rest time.”

Peñaloza, who lives in Shanghai’s affluent Former French Concession, told ABC News that the most “surreal” part of the lockdown is being told to go for testing at short notice.

Peñaloza described loudspeakers blaring, giving updates and the “get tested now” orders, over birdsong in her eerily quiet neighbourhood. She said the empty and off-limit roads are now populated only by blue and white protective gowns gliding along by foot, bicycle or ambulance.

“While the communication is unpredictable,” she said, “The procedures are very organised. At the blink of an eye, the streets were cordoned off and testing sites pitched up, with queues that moved fast and registration requiring no more than a few taps of a button on an app and a gowned attendant scanning the resulting QR on your phone screen.”

While some residents complained of food shortage, Peñaloza said the recent government rations to her compound have been plentiful: “Millions of individual grocery packages were bagged and distributed within two days, for each and every single household of each and every single building; imagine!”

Shanghai this week begin easing some movement for residents in low risk zones, but the restrictions could be tightened as soon as cases are detected in their areas again.

“One person can test positive and that just sets the score back to zero,” Peñaloza said.

Japanese bank Nomura estimates there are now almost 200 million people subject to partial or full lockdown across 23 Chinese cities, including Shanghai. The large southern port city of Guangzhou immediately ordered testing of its 18 million residents after detecting just three positive cases last Friday.

Truck drivers have been prevented from taking goods to major shipping ports in Shanghai, which may cause further disruptions to global supply chains. American companies operating in China, from Apple to Tesla, have also been impacted by their factories being unmanned.

“There are signs that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to implement this policy as the social economic cost is rising rapidly and exponentially in a way,” said Yanzhong Huang, a public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S.

Huang said that prolonged lockdowns in Shanghai could hurt the competitiveness of China’s export economy in the longer term, especially as the city contributes to about a third of China’s total GDP.

“When other countries now are learning to coexist with the virus and their economy and the manufacturing capacity recovered by China’s, the export sector will be affected,” Huang said.

But, for now, China is doubling down.

Liang Wannian, head of China’s National Health Commission COVID-19 response expert panel and one of the principal architects of the “Zero-COVID” strategy, said earlier this week that China “doesn’t believe in ‘laissez-faire’.

”Dynamic Zero COVID is a scientific policy that, if implemented properly and correctly, will yield the most benefits at a minimal cost,” Liang said, “China will stick to this policy under the guideline of putting people and their lives first.”

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