1.5°C refers to the upper limit for climate change—more precisely, for atmospheric temperature change—set by the international community. At the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, roughly 200 participating nations resolved to strive to prevent the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the average temperature of the mid-to-late 19th century industrialization period, when fossil fuel use exploded. A global consensus was reached to try to prevent temperature changes driven by global warming. Since then, 1.5°C has become established as a symbolic figure for responding to climate change—or the climate crisis.
Before the Paris Agreement, 2°C had also been set as a target range. The Copenhagen Accord, a result of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in 2009, included 2°C as a goal. The Paris Agreement supplemented the scientific evidence regarding the irreversibility of the impacts that a temperature rise beyond 2°C would bring, and thereby set the more ambitious target of 1.5°C. Parties to the Paris Agreement were required to voluntarily submit their greenhouse gas reduction targets to the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). South Korea also finalized a target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 24.4% by 2030 compared to 2017 levels.
The Climate Change Convention does not carry legally binding force. Nonetheless, the Paris Agreement requires parties to submit biennial transparency reports containing their current greenhouse gas emission status and the progress of their reduction targets, and uses the disclosed information to encourage implementation through mutual encouragement and peer pressure among the parties.
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[Reference Article]
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