Vienna - The coronavirus pandemic did not slow the relentless advance of climate change, according to the UN's United in Science 2021 report.

Between January and July, global fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the power and industry sectors were already at the same level or higher than in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic.

Overall emissions reductions in 2020, during the first Covid-19 wave, were a "brief lapse," the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other organizations said on Thursday.

The pandemic-related slump was widely accompanied by calls to rebuild the global economy in a more sustainable way. "This report shows that so far in 2021 we are not going in the right direction," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

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"If we fail with the climate mitigation, we would have a permanent problem for at least hundreds or even thousands of years - and both the economic and the human well-being effects would be much more dramatic than this Covid pandemic," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said a press conference.

So far this year, CO2 emissions from road traffic have been below the levels before the pandemic outbreak.

However, concentrations of the major greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming continued to increase in 2020 and the first half of 2021, according to the report.

"We are still significantly off-schedule to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement with regard to the efforts to keep the global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius.

According to UN figures, the global average mean surface temperature for the period from 2017 to 2021 is among the warmest on record, estimated at 1.06 degrees Celsius to 1.26 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850–1900) levels.

By 2025, the value could climb up to 1.8 degrees. Even if climate targets are met, sea levels could rise between 12 inches and 10 feet by 2300.

"We haven't heard enough commitments, but the political interest to mitigate is higher than ever," said Taalas.