In July, when Cop28 chief Sultan Al Jaber laid out his battle plan for the upcoming climate summit in Dubai, he issued a plea to all governments: raise your climate targets by September.
His appeal has gone totally unanswered. Two and a half months later no country has updated its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the Paris Agreement-mandated blueprint to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
The deafening silence comes as the UN restates the urgency of stepping up action. More ambitious targets are needed as current NDCs are not collectively sufficient to limit warming to 1.5C, the Global Stocktake report said last month.
Tom Evans, a policy advisor at E3G, says it was always “quite unlikely” countries would submit updated NDCs before Cop28. “I don’t think there are tonnes of appetite among governments to revise their targets so often,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s challenging politically because these aren’t light decisions, and it’s challenging technically as it takes time with lots of modelling to do them properly.”
Ambition gap
Current NDCs are short of what is needed. If countries meet their 2030 emission targets in full, global heating could only be limited to 2.4-2.6C this century, according to the UN Emissions Gap report. Emissions need to decline by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its latest report.
Global emissions pathways according to the IPCC. Credit:IISD/ENB -IPCC Synthesis Report
NDCs are an integral part of the “ratchet mechanism” built into the agreement: each climate plan should be stronger and more ambitious than the one that is replacing. In 2015 governments agreed to update the documents every five years, but since then many have called for more frequent reviews.
What is the global stocktake of climate action and why does it matter?
Like with Al Jaber’s plea, they have mostly gone unheeded. At Cop26 in Glasgow, governments agreed to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 emission targets so that they are aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement by the end of 2022.
Only a handful of countries submitted new NDCs within that timeframe and, crucially, none of them produced one that is compatible with keeping global warming below 1.5°C, according to Climate Action Tracker.
Big emitters missing
“There is a bit of a deja vu”, says Mia Moisio, project lead at Climate Action Tracker, referring to Al Jaber’s call. “There is a clear sense of urgency in the scientific community but, unfortunately, that has not trickled down to decision-makers in the way we’d hope to see.”
Most of the world’s biggest polluters have not drafted new climate targets in years. European Union states last updated their NDCs in December 2020, the US, Canada, Japan and China did so in 2021. The UK submitted a new document in 2022, offering more transparency but no stronger targets.
New IEA net zero report leaves big polluters less room to hide
Mexico, one of the latest G20 nations to issue an update, has been accused of breaching the Paris Agreement’s commitment to step up targets over time. Its latest climate plan would lead to higher emission levels than the targets the Central American country had pledged in 2016.
Previously also accused of backsliding on commitments, Brazil announced two weeks ago it would go back to the stronger climate targets it drew up in 2015 while it works on new and improved ones.
E3G’s Evans said many governments are likely to be putting their efforts into preparing their new targets for 2035, which are due in two years’s time. “Despite the massive ambition gap, the focus is less on their current targets,” he added.
UAE’s new targets
Cop28 host United Arab Emirates is among the very few nations to have revised its national climate pledge this year – just days before Al Jaber’s appeal.
The oil-producing Gulf state, which has one of the world’s highest emissions per person, strengthened its reduction goal. It now plans to limit emissions to 182 MtCO2e by 2030, a 14% improvement compared to the previous target. The new strategy also provides more transparency, setting a clear 2019 baseline and moving away from the much-criticised “business as usual” scenario used before.
Climate Action Tracker’s Mia Moisio said it was a positive move for the UAE but questions remain. “In terms of communication, it was the right step for the Cop host to take the leadership on this issue,” she added. “But the target is not 1.5C-compatible and big question marks remain over how they would meet it”.
The nation is planning to significantly increase oil and fossil gas production in the next years, with a goal to become “gas self-sufficient” and increase exports. Its main energy company, Adnoc, has announced a $150 billion investment plan to boost oil and gas production capacity over the next four years. Sultan Al Jaber is the CEO of Adnoc.
The Cop28 organisers have been invited to comment.
The post Cop28 boss’ appeal to raise climate targets met with total indifference appeared first on Climate Home News.
Cop28 boss’ appeal to raise climate targets met with total indifference
Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.
When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.
Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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