Will climate action be voted out for now?

With financial analysts forecasting a challenging 2024, economic uncertainty is likely to influence decisions across countries, companies, and households. The new year was rung in amidst ongoing geopolitical turmoil and war in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with approximately 50 countries, including the US, UK, Russia, South Africa, and India—representing half of the world’s population—heading to the polls.

Given this forward-looking uncertainty for 2024, how much attention can we expect the world to give to meeting the UN goals for climate action? Without economic viability, it will be difficult to sustain the other two pillars of sustainable development: environmental protection and social equity.

A significant takeaway from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC’s) Conference of the Parties (CoP28) in Dubai last year was the Global Stocktake. The five-year review of the Paris Accord’s progress aimed to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, focusing on mitigation, adaptation, and finance. It identified gaps in climate action and proposed pathways and solutions to steer countries back on course.

The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Adaptation Gap Report and the Emissions Gap Report had already stated that progress on climate adaptation was slowing down, that the world was heading for a temperature rise far above the Paris Agreement, and that the world was ‘under-financed and under prepared’ to deal with the vagaries of climate change. What this meant was that the world was lagging in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and strengthening resilience to climate change, posing significant challenges to combating global warming.

"The Global Risks Report 2024 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has found that both Covid-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war exposed cracks in societies, “yet the global system has thus far proved surprisingly resilient. A widely anticipated recession failed to materialise last year, and financial turbulence was quickly subdued, but the outlook remains uncertain.”

The WEF report also found that extreme weather conditions were the top risk that respondents chose in the WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey 2023–2024 (GRPS). Respondents were asked to select up to five risks in 2024, and the top risk selected was extreme weather (66 per cent), followed by AI-generated misinformation and disinformation (53 per cent), and societal and/or political polarisation (46 per cent). Then came the cost-of-living crisis (42 per cent), and cyberattacks (39 per cent). Disrupted supply chains for food were listed at 18 per cent, and disrupted supply chains for energy were listed at 14 per cent.

Given this uncertain future, the pledges that came from CoP 28 in Dubai give hope. Countries agreed to speed up action across the spectrum, including transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable fuels such as wind and solar by 2030. This means countries would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 and triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. As far as pledges go, only time will tell how far these can be accomplished.

Another major takeaway from CoP28 was the creation of a loss and damage fund. According to the UNFCC website, this dedicated fund gathered $600 million during the first week of CoP28 after it got operationalized on the first day of the summit and “is an important symbol of global solidarity.”

Targets were also agreed on for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) to ensure that the world is on track to become resilient to climate change. As the GGA framework covers a wide spectrum of issues, including water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, poverty eradication, and cultural heritage, there is hope here, as there are several focus areas that countries and communities can work on.

There was also an effort to link the triple planetary crisis, as it is often referred to, of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, with a call made on governments to look at ecosystems, biodiversity, and carbon stores from forests when planning their national climate action plans. This also includes “terrestrial and marine ecosystems acting as sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases and conserving biodiversity.” All these efforts were aimed at eliminating global emissions by 14 per cent.

And despite all the analysts’ predictions of turmoil and turbulence ahead, we should celebrate any effort, however small, that nations, businesses, communities, and homes take to preserve what is not broken and repair what is broken to heal the planet.

(The writer is a journalist and author)