Bill Hare is the CEO of Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute working to accelerate climate action.
The word ‘implementation’ has featured long and loud recently in discussions about the UN climate process.
The host government of last year’s COP30 summit, Brazil, argued that it should be an “implementation COP”. And if you talk regularly to influential participants in the UN process, you’d be surprised how many will tell you that in the current political climate, it’s all about implementing the pledges and targets governments have already made, rather than aiming to raise them.
This interpretation of ‘implementation’ is dangerously wrong. You can see that it is wrong by simply going back to the Paris Agreement. Article 4 states that Parties (countries) “shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), and that each new NDC “will represent a progression” beyond the Party’s previous one and “reflect its highest possible ambition”.
In other words, regularly increasing ambition is a central element of implementing the Paris Agreement. Governments pledged to increase ambition regularly, and the community of people who care about climate change needs to hold them to that pledge.
Raised expectations
Even a cursory look at the current state of emissions shows that without increased ambition, the other central pillars of the Paris Agreement will not be realised. The global emissions peak will not come “as soon as possible”, net zero will not be reached in the second half of this century, and global warming will race beyond the 1.5°C limit, with catastrophic impacts beginning in the most vulnerable countries and risks increasing for everyone.
Since the Paris summit in 2015, expectations and obligations on governments to step up on decarbonising their economies have increased. In 2021 and 2022, governments declared via the UN Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly that the right to a healthy environment is a universal human right. An environment of dangerous climate change is not a healthy one, so the obligation to cut emissions further and faster is clear.
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Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that 1.5°C is the primary limit of the Paris Agreement and constitutes a legally binding target. It clarified that states have obligations, not only under the UN climate convention, but under customary international law, human rights law and the Law of the Sea.
It also reaffirmed that governments’ NDCs must reflect their highest possible ambition. Last month, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution endorsing the ICJ ruling, with governments voting 141 for, and only eight against.
Failing on ambition
Nonetheless, most governments are not showing the ambition required by their international obligations. Fifty-two countries have not submitted their third NDC with emission-cutting targets for 2035, which they were supposed to do more than a year ago.
Many submitted NDCs fall well short of what is required, with Indonesia, Russia and Saudi Arabia among countries whose level of ambition, if reflected globally, would usher in at least 4°C of global warming.
We know from our own analysis that if countries just implemented their present level of ambition through 2035, the world would warm by 2.6°C above preindustrial levels by 2100, a catastrophic scenario.
But we also know that if countries implemented policies consistent with their highest possible ambition, we can limit overshoot of 1.5°C to about 0.2°C, halt global warming within 25 years, and bring it down to about 1.2°C by the end of the century. Other analyses paint a similar picture.
Make no mistake: this level of overshoot will have serious adverse consequences. But two things are very clear: we can get warming back below 1.5°C before 2100, and countries can be far more ambitious than they are now.
Meanwhile real-world events are demonstrating more clearly than ever that moving quickly and decisively to an economy powered by clean electricity bolsters energy security, reduces energy costs and avoids the geopolitical blackmail and bullying associated with dependence on a continuous supply of fossil fuel imports.
Back the collective process
Because the various UN declarations and decisions outlined above are taken collectively by governments, we can make an interesting deduction: most governments themselves recognise that they need to show more ambition. There are many reasons why each of them doesn’t do so on its own; and one of the key aspects of the UN climate process is that it allows and encourages them to do so with some degree of collectivity.
What all of this speaks to is the need to increase the focus on raising ambition, to continue to use the UN climate process as the key convening forum, and to use COPs as the place where governments are held accountable at a high political level every year. There is no other forum that does that and no other place in which vulnerable countries are at the table on equal terms with the biggest emitters.
Right now, the geopolitical going is tough; and the tough need to get going towards the trouble, not run away from it.
Yes, delivery of existing pledges is absolutely necessary. If governments use this decade to honour the Global Stocktake outcomes from 2024 – if they triple renewable energy capacity, double the rate of energy efficiency improvements and make deep cuts in methane emissions – that will go a long way to keeping global warming below 2°C. Most are not on track – so yes, full implementation of what countries have already agreed is sorely needed.
But ambition must also be strengthened, urgently. It’s not an either-or: ‘implementation’ has to include ‘increasing ambition’. Climate science, international law, climate justice and the needs of the world’s most climate-impacted societies demand nothing less.
The post The UN climate process needs ambition – the law demands it appeared first on Climate Home News.
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.