Countries are collectively falling short of keeping the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach by the end of the century. To limit global warming to 1.5C or 2C by 2100, countries should first cut their emissions drastically and unprecedentedly, while also investing in carbon dioxide removals to tackle residual emissions. They are not doing enough. According to the latest report presented by the UNFCCC right before COP30, current nationally determined climate plans under the Paris Agreement (the NDCs) will bring, if fully implemented, a 19-24% emissions reduction in 2035 compared to 2019 levels, a figure sadly distant from the -43% by 2030 requested under the 1.5C scenario, or the -27%by 2030 under the 2C scenario. Moreover, full implementation should not be taken for granted, as most national plans partially rely on policies conditional to international financial support.
The 2024 Baku compromise on climate finance, a small but important step forward in a very complex multilateral situation, will not solve existing issues in mobilizing all the necessary resources to make all these goals achievable. According to the UNFCCC, if international climate finance will not be able to sustain the conditional parts of current NDCs under the Paris Agreement, as expected, current plans will lead to a disappointing +0,8% in global emissions in 2030 compared to 2019. But, is the game already over?
National climate plans under the Paris Agreement must be revised and updated every five years, according to a “progression” policy cycle stated in the Agreement itself. Every new round of NDCs should, then, steer the emissions arrow increasingly towards net-zero over time. A progressive downward adjustment to keep the aggregate trajectory of the world in line with the latest science and available policies, and technologies. Moreover, this process is accompanied, under the Agreement, by a UNFCCC-specific collective, qualitative evaluation system, the Global Stock Take, which provides the global collective with an aggregate assessment of climate policies every five years, two years in advance of the submission deadline for each new NDC cohort. The first Global Stock Take took place in 2023, and a new wave of NDCs was expected for 2025 – sadly, only 64 countries out of almost two hundred presented one.
In theory, this should be a resilient, flexible, collective ambition mechanism, equipped to survive political earthquakes – if support for the overall system is nurtured at the global level by a vast majority of countries.
The system, however, has never been so weak. The beginning of this decade is marked by the return of large-scale, State-organized armed violence as one of the main dialogical instruments in multipolarized, increasingly weaponized international relations. Climate action is among its easier victims. Multilateral institutions anchored in the post-WWII Western-centric system are suffering the re-emergence of political impulses aimed at re-balancing a power equilibrium based on cultural, economic and military conditions which are simply not factual anymore.
The management of current international affairs might clash with the multi-faceted reality of international climate politics, as the latter is solidly made of coexisting temporal dimensions, all with a political impact: past responsibilities, visible in GHG terms through scientific observation; the current reality, which can coincide with the one observable in power and energy dynamics; and future, “long problem” planning, to quote the recent seminal book by Prof. Thomas Hale. Countries tend to underline the first two dimensions, or just one, in their multilateral discourse, depending on convenience. The coexistence of these dimensions, however, makes the climate domain harder to manage from a governance point of view, as every political moment in world history survives, physically speaking, in the atmosphere and in the domain of climate responsibilities for decades at least. To try to understand, influence, or steer climate negotiations as if they were anchored in mere multilateralism and power dynamics only, without keeping in mind this coexistence, might prove a useless effort.
But let’s be real. Ongoing armed conflicts as part of the wider post-pandemic geopolitical reshuffling, together with the decision of the people of the United States to opt for state-led climate denial at least until 2028, will not lead to any groundbreaking development in multilateral climate policies in the next five years at least. Sobering, as it sounds, only economic drivers in energy production and commercialization – surely ignited by a decade of politically inspired climate-positive Zeitgeist – are now leading towards a global peak of emissions and a wider diffusion of renewable energy applications, mainly and just because it (now) makes economic sense. Not politics, or at least not at the multilateral level. But political trends pass (as also wars do) and it is now urgent to adapt this multi-temporal-dimension feature of international climate politics to our goals: to do what can be done from inside the shelter now, also based on past facts, and start working on what will need to be done as soon as we’ll come out of it.
The world needs its best leaders to act as World War II Monuments Men. Strategic climate partnerships, or groups of ambitious countries and jurisdictions coalizing towards higher climate ambition, must lead the way over the next five to ten years by sheltering the Paris architecture and inspiring action through national policies and multi-stakeholder initiatives. They’re now tasked with keeping the UNFCCC system alive with small steps forward every year on energy, adaptation, land use, loss and damage, and transparency, also by leveraging the ever-decreasing cost of energy production from renewable sources. They can already start doing so by presenting ambitious 2035 NDCs during or after COP30 – at this point, it doesn’t really matter whether on time: they should be good. The European Union, locked in its own personality crisis between climate, competition, welfare measures, and Vladimir Putin, must continue to play a leadership role in the future UNFCCC in partnership with China, despite all (trade-related) possible odds. Also, to prepare for a future return of the United States in the game.
Climate finance can play a key, political, and concrete role in enabling a wider, structural climate-centered collaboration between Beijing and Brussels, and in maintaining active spaces for dialogue between the G7, G20, BRICS+, and G77 in the years to come. In Glasgow, in 2021, Western leaders blatantly underestimated the relevance of the finance dossier and of Article 9 of the Paris Agreement. In the years to come, positive results in finance mobilization can create the conditions for a re-composition of groups of allies and climate sympathizers, while governments will be busy in also guaranteeing security and food security to their citizens.
European countries should then embrace a new mission in their collective and individual external action, towards the mobilization of all resources promised in Baku, and beyond, for mitigation, adaptation, and – yes, this should be included – loss and damage. It is now clear that trust will be built on the capacity to mobilize the needed resources to increasingly support what is currently marked as “conditional” in developing countries’ NDCs. China, on the other hand, is set to collect easy, “voluntary” wins on the post-Baku finance dossier if let alone in the field, with the possibility to quickly get to an even more polarized multilateral finance conversation each year, to the detriment of this much needed bilateral dialogue.
Strategic partnerships based on the reciprocal acceptance of both past responsibilities and current capacities won’t be enough, and here comes the third dimension, the future. The IPCC helps in structuring this future with dates and times. The world must reach net zero GHG emissions by the half of the century, 2050, to keep the Paris goals alive. Given the current policies and plans, as we saw, the world is far off track. Current geopolitical scenarios, as indicated, will probably impede bolder multilateral climate action for at least another four to five years, while a relatively small group of ambitious players might keep the structure, the process, and trust in the process afloat, somehow.
This means that the last resort to implement diriment climate policies lies already, considering the traditional times of acceptance, development, and scale of any public policy, in the very last decade before 2050. I have always been among the ones advocating against inaction and deadlines far in time without intermediate checks, scared of unscrupulous postponement, and dangerous plateau effects. I will continue doing so in my limited agency. But it’s perhaps more responsible to be realistic and state that we’re getting there already.
That means that we will need to have a strong multilateral, legally binding proposal for the last decade before 2050, as soon as we will be able to come out of the shelter. To make this proposal workable, implementable, countries will need to reach a minimum consensus on it between 2033 and 2035 after the third Global Stock Take, to reach a formal agreement at COP40 in 2035 at the latest, with strict provisions on what needs to be done during the following 2040-2050 period. And here I mean all countries, beyond the 1992 developed-developing distinction under the UNFCCC, which by 2035 will be 43 years old, and even more blatantly unrealistic than it is today.
It is indeed impossible to think that the 2015 Paris cycle alone will be enough to bring all countries back on track after these war years without a renewed town hall momentum, followed by a political milestone. It’s politics, and it’s also the cycle of life: many among those who negotiated the Paris Agreement in 2015 will probably be enjoying their retirement by 2035, and many among the 2035 young climate activists will have been born after the Paris Agreement was signed or will simply be too young to remember it. So, what might seem to resemble only a surrender to current inaction is instead a call for action towards a concrete milestone to fight for in the years to come, while carefully sheltering Paris. This new political construct needs to be thought of now, at least in its basic structural elements.
This idea can be concretized in an Amendment to the Paris Agreement specific to the 2040-2050 period. Its multilateral development can accompany and follow suit the one on the new UN global goals, which might substitute the UN Agenda 2030 for the post-2030 period, if the scheme is to be kept, perhaps with the possibility of the current SDG deadline being also postponed to 2035 because of the impact of the pandemic? This political timing could also collimate with electoral cycles in the US, and if the usual UNFCCC geographical rotation scheme is to be kept, a 2035 COP40 would probably take place in Latin America, thus, far from the capitals of the despised, post-colonial Global North.
Different from the Paris Agreement itself, however, the proposed Amendment shouldn’t dive too much into general goals and policies (such as poverty eradication) to serve its mandate. It should be centered on acute, final mitigation to better serve Article 2 – the temperature goals – of the Paris Agreement. The requested rapid emissions nosedive must be accompanied by clear targets for all top emitting countries (the top 10, 20?) in terms of emissions peak year (if not already reached, as it should be), net zero emissions target year and related internationally monitorable strategies, plans, and indicators (also regarding the scale deployment of carbon removal technologies), together with indicators on the safeguard of human rights related to all enacted and planned climate policies. Sanction-like measures should be introduced for those not respecting their commitments, beyond mere prestige maintenance – for instance, but not limited to, temporary limitations to the access to multilateral funds for national actors and projects, and the temporary freezing of corresponding adjustments from cooperation under Article 6.
International climate finance provisions between 2025 and 2035 based on the 2024 Baku decision will be key in building trust towards this final political step; future negotiations (and political confrontation) on the post-2035 collective quantified goal expected to take place in the years between 2030 and 2034 will have indeed the potential to help in further building momentum beyond the current polarization – or, if badly managed, to disrupt any early attempt.
Importantly, the proposed 2035 Amendment should also act as an innovative transnational governance tool, aiming at putting order in the current fragmentation of policies and laws in key climate policy fields such as land rights connected to a wider deployment of nature-based carbon dioxide removals, the governance of liability and environmental protection in trans-boundary carbon capture and storage, ocean alkalinization, and all other nascent CO2 removal technologies which will need to be scaled massively to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Ambitious, well-written national and regional regulations can and must precede these multilateral obligations between now and 2035, to then serve as good practices around which to build a larger consensus in the future, as it recently happened with high-integrity carbon credits standards proposed by universities and multi-stakeholder initiatives, and rules under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism adopted from COP29 onward.
A disturbing reality check indicates that policy and environmental leakages, as well as a certain degree of unwelcome implementation of otherwise promising technologies, will have to be taken into account during these martial years of climate delay, sheltering, preparation, and experimentation before getting to the new political momentum and multilateral milestone. On the other hand, all current experiences aimed at cutting emissions and bringing order in big jurisdictions through regulation and carbon pricing can inspire path dependencies and have the potential to lead towards better-informed multilateral governance-building in the near future. Innovative early decisions on a truly global scale seem impossible to achieve in the current context, but good seeds should be planted and taken care of.
Rescuing the Paris Agreement “only” in 2035 might not seem an ambitious idea vis-à-vis the dimension of the climate crisis. It is not. Indeed, it’s a quasi-worst-case scenario. But it’s perhaps the one we’re living in. We all need to be politically creative. Straw man proposals at which to shot, such as this one, might be worth an intellectual exploration. Anticipatory thinking in multilateral climate policy and climate diplomacy is now needed more than ever, given the circumstances and, on the other hand, all possible options science is already providing us with, also building lessons learned from three decades of climate negotiations.
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