“When US$2 trillion flows into clear power and infrastructure in only one 12 months, as they did final 12 months, you may be positive it’s not due to advantage signalling. That’s twice as a lot as in fossil fuels. Traders know that clear power makes much more sense. The cash-making alternative is just too large to disregard,” stated Stiell on Thursday.
He was talking at a diplomatic academy in Brazil, the place international locations are set to assemble for the upcoming COP30 local weather summit in November.
“A rustic could step again – however others are already getting into their place to grab the chance, and to reap the large rewards: stronger financial progress, extra jobs, much less air pollution and much decrease well being prices, safer and reasonably priced power,” stated Stiell.
Final month, the US withdrew from the Paris Settlement – a 2015 local weather deal to maintain international temperature rise “effectively beneath” 2°C – and dedicated to extra fossil gas manufacturing underneath its climate-denying chief’s self-declared “nationwide power emergency”. Simply days after, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who can be the UN secretary-general’s particular envoy, introduced that his philanthropic entity alongside different US local weather funders will step in to fund the UN local weather physique and make good on the nation’s reporting obligations.
Reflecting on the previous decade for the reason that landmark local weather treaty was adopted by 195 international locations, Stiell stated that “in a world that has grow to be far more divided, our course of has managed to buck the pattern.”
Whereas the world is on monitor to for round 3°C of warming, which is “nonetheless dangerously excessive”, he argued that “with out UN-convened international local weather cooperation… we’d be headed in direction of as much as 5°C of worldwide heating – a demise sentence for humanity as we all know it.”
Stiell, who urged each nation to step up on local weather adaptation efforts, past local weather mitigation by way of a renewables shift, added that the world is “already headed in the best path”. “We simply should implement, and implement extra and quicker.”
It has been well-established that breaching the 1.5°C guardrail may set off adjustments in important Earth methods that reinforce, somewhat than scale back, international warming. It could be unimaginable to quickly reverse a few of these tipped-over components even when temperatures are introduced again down by sucking carbon out of the air at a later stage.
Whereas the world exceeded the 1.5°C warming restrict for the primary time in 2024, scientists have additionally recognised that limiting the worldwide common temperature rise to 1.5°C just isn’t sensible with out first overshooting the purpose.
With only some days to go till the ten February deadline, solely six international locations – together with the US – have submitted new 2035 local weather plans, or nationally decided contributions (NDCs), to the UN’s local weather physique. Others who’ve accomplished so embody Brazil, Switzerland, Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates and the UK.
Describing these plans as “among the many most necessary coverage paperwork governments will produce this century”, Stiell stated that “taking a bit extra time to make sure these plans are first-rate is sensible”.
However international locations might want to hand them in by September “on the newest” to allow them to be included within the UN evaluation of the progress and gaps that stay in attaining the Paris local weather accord’s objectives, which can inform COP30 talks.
Aside from NDCs, international locations had been additionally anticipated to submit their inaugural biennial transparency stories (BTRs), which element their progress in assembly preliminary local weather commitments, by end-2024. As of January, solely 109 international locations have submitted their BTRs – together with 11 least developed international locations and small island growing states, although they weren’t subjected to the identical deadline as a consequence of capability constraints.
COP30 lookahead
Referencing the new international local weather finance purpose which was reached final 12 months at COP29 in Azerbaijan, Stiell stated that the “US$300 billion is a baseline not an endline”. This 12 months, the UN physique goals to set out, “step-by-step”, easy methods to “unleash” the broader US$1.3 trillion annual funding purpose, he added.
“Let’s be clear, local weather finance just isn’t charity,” stated Stiell. “It’s essential to defending international provide chains from spiraling local weather disasters that are fueling inflationary pressures… Simply take rising meals costs, which have the fingerprints of climate-driven droughts, floods, and wildfires throughout them.”
Whereas he acknowledged that growing international locations and weak communities are typically the toughest hit by the local weather disaster, Stiell drew on the latest instance of wildfires that ravaged California within the US to say that “no-one is secure, in any nation or any a part of the revenue spectrum.”
“Simply ask the rich investor in Los Angeles who turned to social media, pleading for personal hearth fighters to avoid wasting his property, providing to pay any sum of money. His home burned down anyway,” he stated.
Praising Brazil for its monitor document of “preserving kitchen-table points entrance and centre” and embracing the views of Indigenous peoples, civil society and younger individuals, Stiell stated he’s assured that “the best collection of real-world offers throughout sectors” may be made to progress on a clear and simply power transition at this 12 months’s local weather summit.
Regardless of Brazil’s NDC upholding a “transition away” from fossil fuels, as agreed upon at COP28, critics have identified that its plans for oil enlargement over the following decade and its goal vary of 59 to 67 per cent emissions reductions by 2035 fall in need of the ambition wanted to be 1.5°C-aligned.
