As the world’s climate negotiators gather in Turkey for the COP31 talks, it’s worth taking another look at the big picture. Here are some recent reports and headlines which caught my attention.
As set out in Carbon Brief’s latest state of the climate report, this year is likely to be the warmest year on record. If it’s not the warmest, then it’ll be the second warmest after 2024.
The effects of global climate change are becoming ever more visible here in the UK. Even if this summer’s heatwaves have faded from memory, it’s not normal for horse chestnuts to be flowering in November.
But 2026 won’t hold its hottest-ever record for long. The current El Nino cycle, coming as it does on top of man-made heating, is expected to help lift 2027’s average temperatures to around 1.7 decrees C over the pre-industrial norm.
And that’s likely to be an absolutely normal temperature rise within a few decades.
As the UN Environment Programme announced in October, there’s next to no chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees before we can stop net emissions of planet-heating gases. On current policies, we’re looking at an average rise of 2.8 degrees by the end of the century.
And, as UNEP declared this week, the world is not ready for that rise. Globally, we’re investing only a fraction of what we need to adapt to a radically different climate. Frankly, that’s not surprising given the costs of adaptation are at least an order of magnitude greater than the costs of just cutting emissions.
Brazil maps the way
How emissions can be successfully reduced is set out in two new roadmaps, belatedly released by the COP30 hosts in Brazil. One sets out how countries can transition away from fossil fuels, the other focuses on halting deforestation and forest degradation.
As the fossil fuel roadmap notes: “We can still keep the overshoot small and short, and that depends on how fast emissions fall in this critical decade and on the cost of bringing temperatures back down later, a cost that rises with every year of delayed action.”
The roadmap sets out the Belem Readiness Approach – not exactly a catchy name (with an unfortunate acronym), but a fairly simple premise. It aims to help countries end their fossil fuel addiction by breaking the challenge into three smaller pieces: energy demand, energy supply, and the economic consequences of the transition.
The forestry roadmap takes a similar approach, breaking the overall challenge into more easily managed areas of action.
The roadmaps’ publication was delayed by the Brazilian elections, the results of which came as a relief for anyone concerned with protecting the Amazon rainforest in particular, and global climate stability more broadly.
The US midterm elections also offer some hope for a return to stability. They were seen as particularly positive for the renewables industry, with a significant reduction in “regulatory uncertainty”. Which is a polite way of saying there’s less chance that energy projects will be blocked by reality-denying politicians.
There’s also good news from China (rarely troubled by election upheavals), with a 3.1% fall in quarterly emissions. That’s partly driven by the high costs of oil, of course, but there’s also a significant fall in coal consumption.
A shared response
Tackling the global climate crisis inevitably requires a global response. That can be used as an excuse for inaction.
There’s a persistent myth in the UK and other rich countries that it’s only wealthy decadent westerners who are bothered about cutting emissions. That’s clearly wrong, and needs to be challenged.
More than three quarters of countries now have targets for reaching net zero emissions, according to Net Zero Tracker’s latest stocktake of decarbonisation commitments. And almost two-thirds of major global public listed companies have their own targets. That’s down slightly on previous years, thanks largely to political pressures from populist right-wing governments.
I finished the week with a CIPR webinar on rebalancing the global climate narrative, which considered the different ways that climate impacts and actions are portrayed in the global north (those rich western countries) and the global south (everyone else).
Girish Balachandran of On Purpose Consulting discussed his forthcoming research which shows how countries and organisations in the global north are often portrayed as climate leaders driving progress, while those in the south are seen as victims in need of help.
Hearing more voices from the global south at COP31 and in the media could do a lot to overturn the myths and misconceptions. And a shared sense of realism can only help in creating and delivering a shared solution.
As the Belem roadmap concludes, “transitioning away from fossil fuels is inevitable and has already begun”. Whether it can be done efficiently and economically, with a minimum of painful disruption, is still a question that all parts of the world need to answer.