As the G20 drags its feet, the UN’s global climate statistics show a major deficit

The GST report pointed to shortcomings in all areas of climate action – mitigation, coordination, finance, technology and capacity building. “While the movement is still ongoing, much is needed now in all sectors,” he said. The report will be presented at the annual end-of-year climate change conference, this time held in Dubai, and is expected to inform and influence its findings.

In response to this report, Sultan Al Jaber, the president who identified the meeting in Dubai, said that the road ahead is difficult but not impossible. “…We must urgently disrupt business as usual and unite like never before to move from ambition to action and from rhetoric to real results,” he said in a statement.

“I call on leaders from the public and private sectors to come to COP28 (Dubai meeting) with real and actionable commitments to address climate change. We need to rapidly decarbonize both the supply side and the demand side of the energy system simultaneously. “We need to triple renewable energy by 2030, sell other zero carbon solutions like hydrogen and scale up the energy system without all fossil fuels, while removing the emissions of the energy we use today… Architecture built in the last century,” he said.

But in another reminder of the difficulty in all agreeing to more ambitious climate action, G20 countries are still struggling to agree on climate change-related paragraphs in the joint communique. In fact, climate change was a major obstacle in preparing a consensus decision at the G20, apart from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And, this is just a group of 20 countries. The climate change conference involves more than 190 countries and decisions must be taken by consensus.

In fact, the G20 Working Group on Environment and Climate Sustainability that concluded its deliberations in Chennai in July was unable to reconcile the different positions of developed and developing countries within the group. While developed countries are pressing to extend mitigation goals to everyone, developing countries in the group are focusing on the realization of unfulfilled promises related to finance and technology and are urging developed countries to do more.

At the Chennai meeting, there was also a proposal to commit to reducing global production by 60 percent by 2035 from a 2019 baseline. The scientific consensus, so far, is that countries must reduce their emissions by about 45 percent from 2019 levels by 2030 to maintain hope of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius target.