Business and finance shame world leaders

The UN Climate Action Summit held on 23 September failed to deliver on its key goal – action by the world’s leading emitting nations (with the G20 accounting for 80% of global emissions).

Dire predictions of looming climate change-related global disaster in three recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – on the +1.5c global temperature increase goal, land management and oceans and the cryosphere – have yet to impress political decision-makers, though sparking two global “climate strikes” (20 and 27 September) involving 6 million people in 170 countries.

Heads of state and government at the Summit politely applauded 16year-old Swedish climate activist and schools’ strike initiator Greta Thunberg’s furious condemnation, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ desperate urgings and the Pope’s video admonitions. But the 69 nations, formally announcing their intention to table upwardly revised post-2020 goals for their current submissions to the UN, accounted for hardly 7% of global emissions.

European Council President Donald Tusk said “we know that Europe must go further and faster. The President-elect of the European Commission will present a European Green Deal. She has also suggested the strengthening of the EU's emission reduction target (currently 40% below 1990 levels) for 2030 to 50% or even 55%. Early next year, the European Union will submit an ambitious long-term strategy – the objective of climate neutrality by 2050 has already been endorsed by a large majority of our member states. In the coming weeks, the EU, in partnership with like-minded countries worldwide, will launch the International Platform on Sustainable Finance. President Macron and Chancellor Merkel, both under fire at home for inadequate climate change policies, also promised to try harder.

In contrast, various new initiatives emerged from business formations and financial actors, such as the commitment of 300 multinationals with $5.5trn combined revenue to action, 200 leading companies to switch to renewable energy supplies, a new Asset Owner Alliance managing $2trn to transition to carbon-neutral portfolios by 2050, initiatives on zero carbon buildings, slashing shipping emissions and land transport emissions and private sector support to nature-based solutions.

However, oil major CEOs at the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative meeting across town, made it clear that actually reducing production of fossil fuels was not part of their future vision.

Closing the summit, Guterres said: “You have delivered a boost in momentum, cooperation and ambition. But, we are not yet there. Much more is needed to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and keep temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century; more concrete plans, more ambition from more countries and more businesses – all financial institutions, public and private, to choose, once and for all, the green economy and much more progress on carbon pricing and ending coal and other fossil fuel subsidies in the months to come. Although the large number of coal power plants, still projected to be built, are a looming threat to us all: I repeat my appeal – no new coal power plants should be built after 2020.”

“December’s UN climate conference in Santiago, Chile is our next critical milestone. I will be there.”