Climate Policy Is Working

Climate change is not just transforming the environment: it is also exacting a marked toll on mental health. In July 2023, scientists at Yale published a study of the psychological effects of climate change on adults in the United States and found that seven percent were experiencing mild to severe climate-related psychological distress. Among millennials and members of Gen Z, the figure is ten percent. A global study published in 2021 by The Lancet Planetary Health found that 59 percent of respondents between the ages of 16 and 25 were very worried or extremely worried about climate change.

These young people despaired of attempts by their governments to address the climate crisis and reported feeling that older generations had betrayed their generation and future ones: 77 percent of young Brazilians felt this way, as did 56 percent of young Americans.

The distress and anger are in many respects understandable. The world is warming faster than scientists had anticipated. In the summer of 2023, the average global temperature was 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than the average of the summers between 1951 and 1980, according to NASA, and a new record. Last summer, Arctic sea ice shrank to its sixth-smallest coverage on record, and the extent of Antarctic sea ice dropped suddenly to alarmingly low levels. The loss of ice is not just a symptom of global warming but also a cause of it. With less ice covering the surface of the Earth, less sunlight is reflected into space and more heat is absorbed by the ocean, land, and atmosphere, magnifying the warming effect.

Global greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ever. After a brief downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic, emissions surged back, reaching their highest level on record at 57.4 gigatons in 2022. Preliminary estimates for 2023 indicate they rose by one percent beyond that. To be sure, emissions from most industrialized countries have already peaked and are now declining, but emissions from many developing countries are still growing, some very rapidly. If global emissions do not peak and start to rapidly decline in this decade, the earth’s average temperature increase since the preindustrial era will likely reach 1.5 degrees Celsius before 2030 and 2.1 to 3.4 degrees Celsius later in this century—even if governments meet their commitments under the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. Heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, wildfires will spread farther, and fresh water will become harder to find in some regions. Rising sea levels will inundate low-lying coastal regions and some small island states, and tropical cyclones and hurricanes will probably intensify.

Despite this gloomy future, global negotiations to curb climate change are faltering. In late 2023, the annual UN conference on climate change delivered an equivocating final text asking countries to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”—a result that fell far short of the clarion call for which many observers had hoped. To achieve net-zero global emissions in 25 years—which scientists say is necessary to avoid warming above 2 degrees Celsius by the middle of the century—countries must embrace rapid, substantial, and sustained reductions in emissions. The global temperature increase will likely exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius in the coming decade, but if global emissions peak within the next few years and then decline sharply in the following two decades, it is possible that global warming could be held to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Last year’s UN climate conference, COP28, concluded by reiterating targets that had already been accepted by G-20 countries: to double energy efficiency and triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030. It also established a new fund to help countries cope with the damage already caused by a warming climate. Those measures, while laudable, will not produce the change that many analysts think is necessary.

The strategy that governments have developed to tackle climate change is working.

For instance, the mobilization of financing to support developing countries in both transitioning away from fossil fuels and adapting to the consequences of a warming planet remains insufficient. In 2022, governments and the private sector belatedly reached the goal established in 2009 of raising $100 billion a year in climate financing by 2020. Yet that sum, according to the Independent Expert Group established by the G-20 and chaired by the economists Larry Summers and Nand Kishore Singh, is not nearly enough: by 2030, they say, developing countries (not including China) will need around $1.8 trillion annually. A new global fund established at COP28 to help vulnerable countries cope with the losses associated with climate change has generated only $800 million so far, a pittance compared with what is needed.

That the 2023 UN climate conference was hosted in Dubai by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major exporter of petroleum, stirred further cynicism. The fate of the world seems to have been put into the hands of oil and gas interests. The next iteration of the conference will be hosted by Azerbaijan, where oil and gas production accounted for nearly half the country’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its export revenue in 2022. In 2025, the conference will be held in Brazil, which just joined the alliance OPEC+ as South America’s largest oil-producing nation. And the United States, which plays a leading role in setting the agenda for international cooperation on climate change, has become the world’s largest oil producer—producing even more than Saudi Arabia or Russia. This increase in oil production has been a boon for U.S. energy security, reducing gas prices at the pump and undermining the geopolitical power of authoritarian petrostates, but it certainly hasn’t been good for the climate.

And yet as dire and dispiriting as this all may seem, there are still reasons to be optimistic. The climate crisis can seem daunting and immune to small human actions, but the world has made and continues to make remarkable progress. That is because the strategy to tackle climate change that governments have developed in the last 30 years is working. It should be strengthened, not disparaged. Most industrialized countries and even some developing ones are well on their way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in pursuit of net-zero goals. Technological advances are making renewable sources of energy cheaper and more efficient. Both governments and civil society groups are now more adept at crafting the policies and legislation needed to address climate change.

What is needed now, however, is not just hope but also further concerted action. Rather than succumbing to the pessimism that assumes humans cannot arrest rampant climate change, countries should reaffirm their commitments to helping one another meet emissions reduction targets and work harder to generate the necessary financing. The longer the world delays in acting, the harder it becomes to prevent catastrophic change. And the more countries reduce their emissions—starting today—the more they can limit the climatic change that future generations will have to contend with. Every ton of emissions that is avoided counts in constraining rising temperatures. If global emissions peak around 2025 and then rapidly and steadily decline thereafter for the next 25 years, reaching net zero by 2050, it will still be possible to limit warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius and thus avoid aggravating the already evident effects of climate change.

THE WORLD’S FIGHT

Governments first came together to address climate change in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Officials set initial goals for reducing emissions, along with targets and timetables. They agreed, in principle, that because the problem had overwhelmingly been caused by the emissions of wealthier industrialized countries, those states should take the lead in reducing emissions and provide the technology and money to help developing countries make the transition to cleaner energy. Though trailing industrialized countries by a decade or more in the effort, developing countries would adopt stricter limits on emissions. Such an approach was reasonably successful in rebuilding the earth’s ozone layer through the 1987 Montreal Protocol: emissions of key ozone-depleting chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons peaked before 2000 and are still declining, and the ozone hole is expected to fully recover between 2050 and 2060.

Negotiators initially took the same approach in tackling climate change when they founded the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. They set gentle targets for industrialized countries with the aim of reducing emissions to 1990 levels but envisioned gradually setting more stringent ones, as they did with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Under these two global agreements, developing countries had no obligation to reduce emissions, as the plan for action embodied the principle of “common but differentiated capabilities.” As a result, some countries’ emissions, especially China’s, began to grow very rapidly and at mammoth scale, offsetting the emission reductions of the industrialized countries. China would overtake the United States in 2006 and become the world’s biggest emitter. For its part, the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and continued to let its emissions rise until 2007. Countries made several attempts to set up dedicated climate finance funds, but the financing mobilized never matched the scale of the need.

From the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 until the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015, industrialized countries took a zero-sum horse-trading approach to negotiating emission reduction commitments. Each country pressured others to deliver stronger commitments while resisting outside pressure to act itself. Developing countries, defined at the time as the members of the G-77 and China, were treated as a monolithic category and asked to make only voluntary contributions. Indeed, most developing countries had produced a tiny fraction of the world’s cumulative emissions, so it was only fair for the industrialized countries to take the lead.

When negotiations collapsed at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, partly because of disagreement between industrialized and major emerging economies about who should be responsible for what, governments realized the limits of their approach. What had worked to fix the ozone hole would not work when it came to the bigger problem of climate change. In 2010, states under the aegis of the UN climate change framework established a new multilateral fund called the Green Climate Fund. Subsequently, governments took a bottom-up approach that emphasized “nationally determined” contributions. In this formulation, every country was asked what it could do to contribute to the global effort. No external pressure was brought to bear on any state. The United States and China surprised the world in 2014 by announcing their own commitments at a presidential summit, and a year later, almost every country in the world submitted such a commitment at the 2015 UN climate conference in Paris. Many of these pledges have been updated, and they are scheduled to be revised again at the 2025 climate meeting in Brazil.

This combination of approaches—focusing first on lowering the emissions of industrialized countries, then encouraging developing countries to follow suit—has produced tangible results, albeit too slowly. Emissions from most industrialized countries are now below 1990 levels, and some are far below. Germany’s emissions are around 40 percent below 1990 levels, and the United Kingdom’s, nearly 50 percent lower, although the British economy has tripled in size over that period. U.S. emissions are three percent below 1990 levels after peaking in 2007. Among industrialized countries, the emissions from Australia, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union, are on a downward trajectory.

The emissions of some middle- and lower-income countries have also peaked and begun to trend downward, including those of Albania, Cuba, Jamaica, North Macedonia, and South Africa. Although it is too early to say for sure, China’s carbon emissions may have peaked in 2023 and may start to fall in 2024 as a result of the country’s weakening economic growth and a steady push to use low-carbon energy sources. And eight developing countries have already achieved net-zero emissions: Bhutan, Comoros, Gabon, Guyana, Madagascar, Niue, Panama, and Suriname. Almost all these net-zero pioneers do not consume vast quantities of fossil fuels and are rich in carbon-dioxide-absorbing forests.

Meanwhile, 150 countries have announced or are considering targets to achieve net-zero emissions by the middle of the century, including, as of early 2024, the top emitters: China, the United States, India, the EU, and Russia. Judging from this progress, and assuming full adherence to the commitments that governments made in Paris in 2015, countries should manage to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2.8 to 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That is far lower than the worst-case scenario of nearly 5 degrees Celsius imagined in the 2023 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body assigned to track the science of the warming planet. But it is still not low enough.

According to the climate change panel, the world has not experienced a temperature rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius for more than three million years. And with an increase of 3 degrees Celsius, climate-induced losses and damages would be significantly worse than at 1.5 or 2 degrees. The soil in most of South America, the western United States, southern Europe, and southern Africa would become much drier. If the planet becomes 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer, it would lose one to ten percent of its species; with a rise of 3 degrees Celsius, the projection is ten to 80 percent of all species. If the rise were between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, coral reefs would diminish by 70 to 90 percent; with a rise of 3 degrees Celsius, they would virtually disappear. And the more emissions grow, the greater the likelihood of reaching crucial tipping points, as witnessed with the formation of the ozone hole in the 1980s after years of gradual ozone depletion. Some climatic changes will be irreversible, including species extinction and the loss of biodiversity and ice sheets.

At the 2025 UN climate conference in Brazil, countries must submit new and improved targets and goals. If they manage to raise their overall ambitions and adhere to these commitments, the rise in global temperatures could be kept below 2 degrees Celsius over this century. If countries significantly increase their goals, there is a small but real chance that they could limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which would result in a vastly more livable world.

A PATH OUT OF RUIN

Countries will seek to meet these targets in large part by taking advantage of technological advances and turning to renewable sources of energy, which are becoming ever cheaper and more efficient. In the early 1990s, when governments first started taking climate change seriously, wind and solar energy were prohibitively expensive, and no electric vehicles were on the market. But much has changed in three decades. Solar energy cost nearly $10 per watt to generate in 1992, but just 26 cents per watt in 2022. Today, in many places, electricity produced by wind and solar energy is as cheap as that made by coal or natural gas. Similarly, the cost of electric vehicle batteries has declined far more quickly than experts predicted. Battery pack prices fell 90 percent between 2008 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

China provides one of the best illustrations of how lower-cost technology can enable the rapid deployment of clean energy. According to the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, China is on track to almost double its current wind and solar capacity by 2025 and thus meet its target of generating 1,200 gigawatts from clean energy five years ahead of schedule. Conversely, although the United States has had great success in directing new investment to domestic clean energy manufacturing since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, it has been slower to deploy renewable energy and encourage the production and purchase of electric vehicles, thanks to bureaucratic delays and weak supply chains as well as local opposition to new clean energy infrastructure.

Eight developing countries have already achieved net-zero emissions.

Such is the pace of technological advances that decarbonizing the economy may become even easier in the future. Continued investment in green innovation will help improve technological performance, further reducing costs and providing new options for carbon-intensive sectors such as steel, petrochemicals, airplanes, shipping, and cement. Fusion energy, long a figment of science fiction, may become a viable source of power in the coming decades. Interest in hydrogen as a fuel that produces only water as a waste product when consumed in a fuel cell appears to be booming around the world. The challenge remains to figure out how to make hydrogen cleanly and inexpensively. Governments must also determine what technologies they will need to achieve net-zero emissions and begin researching, demonstrating, and deploying these technologies at scale. For instance, technologies that extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere could help countries attempting the difficult transition from fossil fuels reach their net-zero targets more swiftly.

Technological progress has accompanied another striking advance: an undeniable improvement in policymaking and legislation on climate change at the national level. Both industrialized and developing countries have experimented extensively with climate policies over the last 20 years and learned much about what works, what does not, and why. Altogether, 56 countries accounting for 53 percent of global emissions have passed laws intended to limit greenhouse gases. Even countries without framework climate laws have enacted legislation that has resulted in emission reductions, such as the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, which mandated many energy efficiency measures, and the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.

Governments have also learned how to enact climate policies in more effective ways. Leaders contemplating reforms to existing policies or drafting new ones can do so more confidently than before. Countries that have successfully reduced emissions started early and then phased in their policies over time to build political support and momentum, steadily ratcheting up the scale of these measures. On the road to achieving its deep emissions cuts, Germany passed legislation in 2000 that created a renewable energy industry and associated jobs, and in 2005 it helped establish the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme. China’s Renewable Energy Law of 2005 and its 13th Five-Year Plan, adopted in 2015, set targets, established tariffs, and required grid operators to use renewable electricity. China has repeatedly strengthened its “nonfossil” targets to be ever more ambitious in each five-year plan and consequently now has three times more installed renewable capacity than the United States. These countries took an incremental approach to passing laws and designing, implementing, and enforcing technical regulations. Over time, they can surgically address industrial sectors or specific greenhouse gas emissions that the law does not yet cover.

THE RISK OF FALLING SHORT

Those despairing about the state of the world’s response to climate change should take heart in this evidence of success. But nobody should feel complacent. In the near term, achieving net-zero goals by 2050 will require more concerted action. For starters, countries must ensure that they actually meet their targets. The UN Environment Program’s 2023 Emissions Gap Report, which assesses the difference between where global emissions are heading given the commitments of each country and where they need to be to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, estimated that the gaps range between a relatively small two percent in China’s case to 27 percent in the case of Canada. The U.S. gap is 19 percent, and the British gap is 11 percent. Governments must translate prior commitments into concrete laws and policies. In the United States, for example, new siting policies are needed to make it easier to build transmission lines that enable the distribution and use of new renewable electricity capacity. Experts in every country can estimate the gaps between policy and implementation, and nongovernmental organizations can press for concrete action to remedy them.

For their part, developing countries need much more support in drafting, introducing, and enforcing the required policy frameworks. Many countries remain at an aspirational stage, with high-level targets, plans, and strategies in mind but few concrete and specific policies on the books. And governments with specific policies often lack the capacity or will to enforce them—for example, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam. It also remains challenging for developing countries, apart from China, to secure financial resources for building clean energy generation capacity and for adaptation—measures to prepare societies to endure the effects of climate change. To date, countries have not devoted as many resources to or developed the same policy competence in adaptation as they have to what is known in climate parlance as mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But governments have to pay attention to both adaptation and mitigation.

The good news is that the work of mitigation, adaptation, and fostering socioeconomic development often overlaps. In the United States, for instance, the Inflation Reduction Act has already generated $239 billion in new investment in the manufacture and deployment of cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, which in turn has created 80,000 jobs and reduced emissions. Distributed systems for renewable energy generation and storage are often more resilient in extreme weather and can help limit blackouts or prevent them altogether.

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITY

Crucially, governments must do more to raise climate financing for developing countries that have done little to create the crisis but already suffer some of its worst effects. The main objective at this year’s UN climate change conference in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, will be setting a new goal for climate financing now that the $100 billion yearly target dating from 2015 has been achieved. Given that 18 times that figure will be required by 2030, governments will need to muster the creativity and determination to figure out how to unlock public and private sources of financing in practical ways.

One possible solution is to ask countries to make their own commitments to raising the money, much as they have with respect to reducing emissions. But such a broadly collective effort is not in place. Currently, a set of richer countries, among them Canada, Japan, the United States, and those of the European Union, are obligated to provide climate financing to the developing world. But many other countries that are perfectly capable of furnishing climate financing, such as China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, have no obligation to do so. Some do nonetheless: China, for example, provides overseas development finance through its Belt and Road Initiative and its South-South Cooperation Fund on climate but does not disclose how much it provides to whom and for what purpose. Every country in the world should assess how much financing it can raise for climate projects at home and abroad.

In determining how much will be forthcoming, each government should ask its private sector and philanthropists what they can do, as well. Private companies should make clearer commitments within a national context, and they must stop financing high-carbon infrastructure at home and abroad. If firms cannot make and deliver on these commitments, they will need to be regulated—first, by requiring them to disclose their investments in high- and low-carbon infrastructure and later, if necessary, by simply prohibiting investments in certain types of high-carbon projects.

Of course, many countries will struggle to raise meaningful contributions, but this broader approach to mustering climate finance would almost certainly yield more funds from a wider set of countries. The likes of China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—all significant emitters with financial capacity—might contribute their fair share. If more countries contribute, obstacles might give way elsewhere. In the United States, where Congress has persistently resisted making commitments to international climate financing, legislators may finally agree to act if China and the Persian Gulf countries are also known to be contributing.

With nationally determined financial commitments in place, countries would need to report on their progress toward reaching these targets as part of their obligations under the Paris agreement. To do so, they would need to create institutional mechanisms for collecting the financial data, just as they have for emissions. Every five years, analysts could measure the absolute sums raised against the overall global need, perhaps the bar of $1.8 trillion per year by 2030 identified by the G-20’s International Expert Group. Governments could jointly decide to establish a national approach to climate financing at the UN climate conference in Azerbaijan this year and pledge to report their commitments at the 2025 summit in Brazil.

Countries should also find a better way to mobilize and deliver their financial contributions. Wealthy countries largely channel public financing through multilateral or bilateral finance institutions such as the World Bank or the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Currently, most multilateral institutions and funds move too slowly and are highly risk-averse. Some continue to support fossil fuel projects because they don’t know how to develop alternative solutions. Countries have to apply to individual bilateral and multilateral funds or development banks for climate financing project by project, which is a sluggish and administratively burdensome process. Public and private financiers do not always blend their resources in ways that maximize climate and development outcomes. A more efficient and effective approach would first require countries to adopt compelling policy frameworks with aligned incentives that are durable enough to allow investors to calculate returns. Once these policies are in place, each country could set up conferences for potentially interested financiers. Not all projects will produce a high return on investment, particularly those on the adaptation side, so funding for such ventures should be treated as development or climate aid. Success will be contagious; once one or two countries manage to procure funds this way, other developing countries will be highly motivated to set up stronger climate policy frameworks to secure similar levels of funding.

GROUNDS FOR HOPE

From wildfires in Canada, Hawaii, and southern Europe to extreme flooding in Brazil, Greece, Hong Kong, Libya, and Taiwan, the climatic damage was intolerable in 2023 and is only likely to get more severe. The world needs greater ambition from nearly every country to meet the challenge ahead. Yet that difficult task need not drive people to despair. Countries have the tools to address the threat of climate change; what is needed now is action.

In the run-up to the 2025 UN climate summit, each country must determine what it can do to scale up its commitments to reduce emissions and raise climate financing. On the emissions side, each country’s commitment for 2030 to 2035 must clearly put it on a path to net zero by 2050 to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The need for greater ambition is also an opportunity for leadership from powers that have not traditionally guided global diplomacy on the environment. China, the United States, and European countries have historically led various stages of global climate negotiations, but others should step up now, including Azerbaijan, Brazil, India, and the UAE.

The G-20 and UN climate summits are the two most important multilateral forums for climate action. When India hosted the G-20 climate conference last year, it proposed multilateral development bank reform to mobilize more financing. Brazil wears the mantle of the G-20 presidency this year and can follow India’s example by encouraging a nationally determined approach to climate finance. While neither Azerbaijan nor Brazil has traditionally been a major actor on the world climate stage, each has the opportunity to spur solutions in assuming the presidency of the UN climate summit in 2024 and 2025. And nobody should forget the power of individual example: each country that proves that resilient low-carbon development is possible will inspire others. This is why every country, no matter how small, matters.

As governments grow more committed and ambitious in reducing their emissions, and the public and private sectors more concertedly raise financing, the climate crisis need not inspire resignation or dread. Hope is not a strategy, but a strategy does exist to restrain climate change, and it is one that should give even pessimists grounds for optimism.