Given the constant flow of bad news around climate change – smashed heat records, shrinking polar ice, rampant wildfires, apocalyptic floods – you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s no cause for hope. But a new book by the head of the World Resources Institute (WRI) argues passionately for a more positive view.
Dasgupta, president and CEO of the US-based WRI, is far from evangelical about the global mission of green transition. His assessment of the state of play is rooted in realism – and, like many advocates for a sustainable world, he is disappointed with the pace of change so far.
But, he insists, that is no reason to give up. The book explains elegantly – drawing on some 60 real-world stories of success and more than 100 interviews with experts, leaders and change-makers – not just what’s holding things back but, most importantly, how to overcome those obstacles.
In an interview with Climate Home News before the book’s publication this week, the softly-spoken former head of infrastructure at the World Bank pointed to leaps forward in technology – from solar and wind power to greener cement and satellites that can monitor rainforest loss remotely – as the underlying enabler of climate progress. But he emphasised that technology alone will not be enough.
“We need to use technology as a starting point to orchestrate the change,” he explained. “We need to get the outcome we want that is not only good for climate, but good for people and nature at the same time.”
The top crude exporter is using its oil riches to position itself as a major player in clean energy supply chains. Investors are interested, but hurdles remain
Ethiopia’s logistics, infrastructure and climate diplomacy make it seem better placed to host the 2027 UN climate talks than its West African rival – for now
The Asian nation’s energy transition is entering a new phase, with soaring renewables reducing demand for fossil fuels, analysis shows
Focus on people – not carbon
A major failure of the climate movement so far, in Dasgupta’s view, is that it has focused too heavily on carbon – the damage it’s doing and how to reduce CO2 emissions – and not enough on people.
Unless voters understand that measures to tackle climate change will bring them benefits now rather than in a far distant future, they are unlikely to make green choices a priority, he argues – especially when those decisions come with an upfront cost such as replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump.
That’s why some governments, including in Europe, have run into trouble when trying to force low-carbon behaviour shifts. Dasgupta believes politicians have done a pretty bad job at telling citizens why it makes personal sense for them to switch to greener ways of living, working and doing business.
He noted that in 2024 – a historic year for elections, with about 70 countries holding polls – only one, the UK, saw strong campaigning on climate policies, with the centre-left Labour Party winning partly on a green ticket.
India-born Dasgupta, a trained architect who has many years’ experience of working on ways to make cities more sustainable, argues that climate policy experts need to offer politicians more help to demonstrate why it’s in the public interest to get behind climate action.
“I think for too long, the transition has been painted as about the sacrifices we need to do; don’t drive cars, take buses and [buy] heat pumps – but not the outcome that is there. That is clean air for our kids, abundant, affordable energy, food that doesn’t destroy nature, clean water,” he said.
Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute and author of “The New Global Possible – Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis” (Photo: Beverlié Lord)
Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute and author of “The New Global Possible – Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis” (Photo: Beverlié Lord)
Hydrocarbons “everywhere”
Yet the question still begs itself: why – if the advantages seem obvious – has it been so hard to make these changes at the scale and pace required? The answer, according to Dasgupta, is that their proponents are running up against a model rooted in 200 years of prosperity fuelled by coal, oil and gas.
As a result, hydrocarbons “are everywhere in the economy”, even in many daily essentials like shampoo – and the incumbents who got rich from extracting and selling fossil fuels are fighting to preserve the status quo.
“We have to find a path for them to change. They’re not just going to go away. They’re very economically powerful, politically connected,” Dasgupta said.
Renewed business and political support for the prevailing high-carbon economic model has led to a pushback against climate action in some parts of the West, not least in the United States where the administration of climate change-sceptic Donald Trump wants to “drill, baby drill” and is pulling the country out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Dasgupta doesn’t find this too surprising.
“I think this backlash was inevitable because when we signed the Paris Agreement, we thought we were signing a climate agreement. We didn’t realise we were signing onto a vast economic transition that we’re in the beginning of,” he said.
COP: “Imperfect but necessary”
The book does an efficient job at defending the UN climate process that yielded the Paris pact and its emblematic annual COP summits, which have come under attack in recent years for falling short of promises, getting bogged down in arcane arguments and turning into a travelling climate circus.
Dasgupta points to how – patchy as its implementation may be – action spurred by the Paris Agreement has brought down global warming predictions from around 4 degrees Celsius this century to 2.6C – and if all pledges made so far were to become a reality, even to 1.7C, within the promised range.
At the same time, he argues for making COPs more effective by changing decision-making from the current consensus-based model to one that that “gives every country a voice but not a veto”.
Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement. (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)
Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement. (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)
In addition, to give the Paris process more teeth, he recommends greater transparency on individual countries’ progress, which would help civil society and citizens hold governments to account, along with the ability for the five-year stocktake to offer “remedies and rigorous regimes for improvement”.
In the end, making the Paris Agreement – and the national climate plans (NDCs) that underpin it – work as intended will require “a systemwide economic transition” that can only be achieved by uniting all government ministries, businesses and financial institutions behind that mission, the book notes.
“COP is an imperfect but necessary instrument for mobilising global climate action, but the harsh reality is that our success currently depends on voluntary contributions to be implemented beyond it,” Dasgupta writes.
Win-win-win?
Making this happen means convincing the world outside of COPs it’s an endeavour worth signing up for. The sixth chapter of the book is dedicated to how a loose consortium of researchers, top-level officials and organisation such as WRI and the World Economic Forum embarked on a monumental mission to do that by shaping a positive narrative around the economics of a low-carbon transition.
One piece of number-crunching in particular captured imaginations in the climate community and beyond: if done right, investing in climate action could result in $26 trillion of economic benefits by 2030 compared with business as usual, the New Climate Economy (NCE) research programme calculated.
Has hard data like this worked to win hearts and minds? It depends on who you ask. According to the book, in a statement released ahead of COP27 in 2022, NCE commissioners Sharan Burrow, Nicolas Stern and Paul Polman described this figure and the work supporting it as “a breakthrough”, showing “once and for all that ambitious climate action is a win-win-win for the climate, people, and the economy”.
Sadly, that victory may not have been as decisive as they had hoped, as evidenced in today’s culture wars over the costs of net zero in the UK, the conspicuous absence of climate and nature from election campaigns, and the dash by many fossil-fuel and financial behemoths to row back on their emissions-cutting pledges.
Despite recent setbacks, Dasgupta puts his hope in two ways forward: a push to translate global climate goals into national-level transitions in sectors like energy and food; and a combination of government regulation and voluntary business action to keep the private sector moving in the right direction.
“I don’t think we have the luxury to be disappointed,” he said. “I think we know what [has] to be done, what needs to happen. We just have to get to work.”
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio is a senior advisor on adaptation and resilience with the United Nations Foundation and Mattias Söderbergis global climate lead at Danish NGO DanChurchAid.
Recent extreme events – from wildfires and heatwaves in Europe to flash flooding following a glacier collapse in Nepal – have shocked and devastated communities, bringing years of warnings about such climate impacts to the doorstep of communities around the world.
One thing is certain: the new climate reality is here – and the adaptation strategies designed for yesterday’s world are no longer sufficient.
Attribution science has since shown that the hotter and more frequent heatwaves we’re experiencing around the world would have been virtually impossible without today’s high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate shocks are now so severe that they reverberate through supply chains, food and water systems, financial markets and the movement of people.
Following its recent Himalayan flooding disaster, the South Asian nation is seeking urgent help from a new UN climate fund, appealing for “stronger global solidarity”
With homes, hospitals and water storage destroyed, Palestine’s government says that Gazans have little protection from climate impacts and sets conditional emissions targets
They must be a catalyst for a new way of thinking about adaptation and resilience, and how we finance solutions that work. A failure to invest in adaptation in one region can create costs far beyond it, which is why the concept of shared resilience is critical for leaders to grasp.
Investment not charity
At the UN General Assembly (UNGA 81) this month, leaders have an opportunity to translate today’s urgency into concrete commitments on adaptation and loss and damage finance ahead of COP31.
Those commitments are needed to underpin global stability, shared prosperity and human security. Governments should use this moment to show what a new response looks like: finance that reaches communities faster, supports locally grounded solutions, strengthens national systems, and helps countries prepare before the next shock arrives.
If we want sustained economic growth, food and water security, and resilient and prosperous societies across every region, adaptation must be at the heart of today’s development and security agenda. It cannot be just a future planning consideration or a narrow issue for climate ministries. Adaptation is now everyone’s business – and it must be financed fast and fair.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly framed climate finance as an investment rather than charity, warning that “a world in climate chaos cannot be a world at peace” and describing human security as freedom from the chronic and sudden disruptions that climate change multiplies.
What’s more, adaptation delivers a real return-on-investment, with researchers estimating that every dollar invested produces $10 in benefits, saving lives, protecting livelihoods, and reducing the costs of future disasters.
Hitting adaptation limits
The urgency to scale adaptation systematically is growing. The newly released “Limiting Overshoot” report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) confirms what scientists have long warned: exceeding global warming of 1.5C is now unavoidable under current policies. Yet, how high temperatures rise – and how long the world remains above the 1.5C threshold – will determine whether communities, economies and entire ecosystems can keep pace.
There are limits to adaptation. When we breach those limits, lives and livelihoods are lost, and people and ecosystems suffer greatly. We cannot simply build yesterday’s infrastructure a little stronger and assume it will be enough.
We need to fundamentally change the systems that determine how societies anticipate, absorb and recover from both immediate and evolving non-linear climate shocks. This includes transforming physical systems, such as infrastructure, and the governance systems that affect where and how we live to how we maintain our health and wellbeing.
Finance today is nowhere near the scale of the challenge.
The UNEP “Adaptation Gap Report 2025” estimates the shortfall in adaptation finance in developing countries at $284 billion–$339 billion a year – roughly 12 to 14 times current international public flows of around $26 billion. That gap is a development, economic and human security problem, especially for the most vulnerable populations who have contributed the least to causing the climate crisis.
Building resilience into financial systems
There are already signs of what a more systemic adaptation response could look like. Communities around the world are delivering practical solutions at local level, even as adaptation finance remains notoriously, and appallingly, difficult to access. Cyclone-resistant homes, local forecasting capacities, drought-resistant crops, heat insurance for pregnant informal workers and mangrove restoration are rooted in local knowledge and lived experience, while delivering benefits far beyond the communities where they originate from.
But local innovation alone is not enough; the systems around it need to be resilient too.
Jamaica offers one example. The country has built a multi-layered disaster-risk financing framework, including a catastrophe bond and contingency funds, through sustained fiscal discipline and proactive investment. Its debt-to-GDP ratio fell from around 147% in 2012 to around 62% in 202-25. That groundwork matters when disaster strikes.
Following Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica was able to secure billions of dollars in reconstruction financing from multilateral banks – finance that might otherwise have been much harder to access. The lesson is clear: resilience can be built into the financial architecture of a country before a crisis arrives. That is the shift we now need to make at scale.
The foundations already exist – in Kingston’s fiscal reforms, in early-warning systems from the Sahel to the Pacific, and in every community that adapted before disaster struck. What is still missing is the political will, and the finance, to take what works and put it to work everywhere, at the speed our world’s new climate reality demands.
Lidy Nacpil is the coordinator of Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD).
Recent reporting on international climate negotiations has highlighted a sharpening divide within civil society and multilateral diplomacy. A troubling, simplistic narrative has taken root: that the UN climate process is witnessing a binary struggle between defenders of science and those attacking it.
This framing is not only inaccurate; it is dangerous. Characterising a substantive methodological and political debate in these terms misdiagnoses the stakes and stirs conflict instead of clarity.
No one disputes that climate action must rest on science. Science tells us what has led us to the climate crisis – the accumulation of historical emissions – and how much carbon budget remains if we are to keep temperature rise below 1.5C. It tells us how much global emissions must drop, and how fast. Science is also essential in assessing each country’s historical contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Responsibility, however, must also be based on capacity. For those who generated the largest share of historical emissions, that capacity includes the enormous wealth and economic power accumulated through the same fossil-fuel-intensive development that generated those emissions.
While principles that should guide human action aren’t scientific questions – they are matters of values – applying them to real-world problems requires scientific grounding. Equity recognises the scientifically established reality of differentiated responsibilities among countries and within societies. Putting equity into practice demands scientific rigour.
Scrutiny of IPCC models
Today, critics are scrutinising the assumptions and frameworks behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), used to project future scenarios and map global mitigation pathways. These concerns centre squarely on equity and justice.
The economic, technological and policy assumptions used in IAM scenarios are normative choices rather than scientifically prescribed or neutral facts. These include choices about discount rates, economic growth, energy demand, technology costs, carbon prices, land availability and the regional location of mitigation. Many IAM scenarios reproduce existing global inequalities rather than transform them. Questions about transparency, representativeness and diversity in the scientific process are deeply urgent.
Most IAM scenarios are built primarily around global cost-effectiveness – directing emissions reductions to places where mitigation is modelled as cheapest rather than allocating effort according to historical responsibility, capacity and development needs.
The resulting pathways allow developed countries to retain disproportionately high levels of energy and fossil-fuel consumption while requiring developing countries to undertake substantial mitigation and carbon removal, including land-based measures that threaten food security and local development.
Northern models often assume uniform access to cheap financing. In reality, Global South economies face far higher capital costs, driving up the price tag of rapid infrastructure shifts.
Constraints on development space
Scenario constraints also limit the development space poorer nations need without guaranteeing adequate climate finance. When models treat profoundly unequal starting points as uniform baselines, policy pathways lock in global inequality under the banner of scientific objectivity.
Pointing out these structural flaws isn’t rejecting science. It is essential scientific scrutiny aimed at producing stronger, fairer, and more actionable results.
The fight is not about whether we want to keep temperature rise below 1.5C, but about how we get there. A pathway can be technically compatible with 1.5C or 2C while still being deeply unequal in who gets to consume energy, who must reduce emissions, and whose development is constrained. Temperature compatibility alone does not make a pathway fair.
Critiquing IAM scenarios from an equity perspective is neither an attack on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) nor an attack on science. Rigorously examining IPCC reports – their substance, assumptions, and processes – is an acknowledgement of the IPCC’s importance and entirely consistent with scientific method.
Tensions over AR7 timing
There is a separate but related tension over the cycle and timeline of the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7). Some governments and civil society voices advocate completing its Working Group reports in time to feed directly into the UN’s Second Global Stocktake in 2028.
The motivation makes sense: policymakers need timely science. But several developing-country negotiators and researchers have warned that meeting that deadline could severely disadvantage the Global South.
Global North authors and institutions remain disproportionately represented in the research underlying IAM assessments. Developing-country researchers often work with fewer institutional resources, smaller research budgets, and less administrative support. Accelerated publishing and assessment schedules can further limit their ability to generate, submit, and peer-review research in time for inclusion.
The AR7 timeline concerns boil down to inclusivity, representation, and equity. Requiring the IPCC to meet tight political calendars without ensuring meaningful support and participation for developing-country researchers risks reproducing the very inequalities being challenged.
Cooperation requires equity
Political interests are indeed at work in UNFCCC negotiations and must be surfaced. Bad-faith actors seek to evade fossil-fuel phase-outs or shirk climate-finance obligations. Many developed country parties are guilty of both, including those who style themselves as “Friends of Science.”
We must not lump legitimate scientific critiques raised by several Global South researchers and many civil society organisations concerning representation, economic assumptions and fair-share accounting together with obstructionism. Doing so risks misrepresenting and delegitimising critical scientific work and Global South equity and justice perspectives.
The climate movement is strongest when it aligns rigorous science with global equity and justice. Achieving the Paris Agreement’s goals requires robust science that fully integrates the experiences, economic realities and academic contributions of the Global South. Effective climate action also requires international cooperation, and without equity, such cooperation cannot be sustained. We do not have to choose between science and equity. We need both.
More than 300,000 solar panels and 120 battery containers are helping to power Africa’s largest copper mine with continuous clean energy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,as miners turn to solar as an alternative to expensive diesel and energy imports.
The project at the Kamoa Copper mine in the south of the DRC, which became operational last month, is one of the largest solar and battery facilities generating baseload power on the continent.
The clean electricity is displacing millions of litres of polluting diesel and costs less than a fifth of the price of generator power per kilowatt hour, the mining company said.
The project is part of a massive solar deployment across the continent. Recent data from global energy think-tank Ember found record solar capacity of 17 GW will be installed in Africa this year – a 45% rise from 2025.
Installed by CrossBoundary Energy, a developer of distributed renewable energy systems, the solar-battery facility at the DRC mine is “proof of concept” that solar and battery systems can provide the reliable power at scale needed by remote industrial operations, Annebel Oosthuizen, managing director at Kamoa Copper, told Climate Home News in an interview.
“There’s always been this perception in the DRC that solar isn’t ideal because it is raining half of the year. But it’s perfectly ideal. We are seeing a lot of interest from other mines that are still depending on generators and power imports,” she said.
Mining drives solar and battery surge
Like Kamoa Copper, a growing number of miners in the DRC are looking to solar power to compensate for the country’s chronic energy deficit at a lower cost as global diesel prices hit record highsamid ongoing attacks on oil infrastructure in the Middle East.
As a result, the mining sector has become a key driver of the country’s growing clean energy demand and one of the biggest importers of large-scale solar equipment.
Ember found the DRC is set to install a record 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels this year – a 544% increase compared to 2025 and the equivalent of adding more than 60% of the country’s entire 2023 grid capacity.
The deployment of combined solar and battery storage solutions to deliver stable energy supplies to mines has also caused battery imports to surge. In dollar terms, the DRC’s imports of batteries from China far exceeded that of solar in the year to June 2026, according to Ember.
A crippling power deficit
The DRC holds significant energy resources and some of the world’s largest reserves of the minerals required to manufacture clean energy technologies. It is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, which is needed to make batteries, and Africa’s top producer of copper – a metal sought after for its electrical conductivity which is pivotal to the world’s electrification efforts.
Yet just 22.5% of the DRC’s population had access to electricity in 2024 – one of the lowest rates in the world, according to the World Bank. And as mining expands and more of the minerals extracted are being processed in the country, unreliable power supply has become a major constraint for the sector, which contributed to more than a quarter of the country’s GDP in 2024, excluding oil and gas.
The country has enormous hydropower potential, with the hydroelectric potential of the Congo River estimated at around 100 GW. But only a fraction is being harnessed.
A solar power revolution is gathering pace in Africa and Nigeria wants a slice of the fast-growing industry, but competing with Chinese imports won’t be easy
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) could drive clean tech manufacturing in Africa but shortfalls in finance and data are still limiting deployment at scale
Europe is investing in Egypt’s bid to position itself as a clean electricity exporter to reduce its emissions and generate a new source of income
Still, virtually all of the DRC’s grid-connected electricity is generated by hydropower by the state-owned utility, Société Nationale d’Électricité (SNEL).
The electricity then has to be transported more than 1,500 kilometres to reach the mining belt in the south – a challenge made more difficult by ageing grid infrastructure and limited transmission capability. SNEL did not respond to a request for comment.
“It is estimated that there’s around a 1 GW energy deficit for the DRC mining sector,” said Matt Tilleard, CEO of CrossBoundary Energy, which owns the solar and battery equipment at the Kamoa Copper mine and provides the power as a service.
“The interest in solar from the mining industry is not theoretical – it is already translating into large-scale solar and battery procurement for mining operations in the region,” he added.
Solar displaces gas, saves energy costs
The facility installed by CrossBoundary is part of a plan by Kamoa Copper to supply more of the electricity it needs with solar energy and batteries as its operations expand, a faster solution than relying on harder-to-build hydropower projects.
“Our processing capacity has increased drastically over the last couple of years. We’ve constructed the largest copper smelter in Africa and that is so power-intensive,” said managing director Oosthuizen.
A joint venture between Canadian firm Ivanhoe Mines, Chinese company Zijin Mining Group and the DRC government, the mine needs 235 megawatts (MW) of power, which is expected to nearly double to 450 MW in the next five years.
Kamoa Copper currently receives 100 MW from state utility SNEL – “and the rest we have to find a solution for”, said Oosthuizen.
Aerial view of a vast solar park and battery storage containers powering the Kamoa Copper mine in southern DRC (Photo: Kamoa Copper SA)
Another 30 MW solar and battery baseload facility is expected to come into operation this month, enabling around 25% of the mine’s power needs to be generated by solar energy. An additional 60 MW of continuous solar power will be added by the end of 2027, and the company is exploring options for more solar capacity and two hydropower projects.
The operational 30 MW of clean electricity provided by CrossBoundary Energy will power pumps that prevent 400 million litres of water from flooding the underground mine every day.
In August alone, the facility has reduced the mine’s diesel consumption by around four million litres, generating an estimated $11 million dollars in savings at current diesel prices, Oosthuizen said.
The mine still relies on generators to meet a 20-40 MW deficit and to power the trucks used in the mine, which Oosthuizen said would be difficult to electrify in the next five years because the technology isn’t yet ready to operate in the mine’s tough and wet conditions.
Avoiding a two-speed transition
To prevent a major imbalance between industrial players’ access to clean, reliable energy and the millions of Congolese who remain without power, the government requires private electricity producers to reserve at least 10% of their generated power for local communities living near rural production sites.
Delivering this, combined with rural electrification, mini-grid development and national grid expansion, is critical to prevent a two-speed energy transition that leaves people behind, said Catherine Mukobo, head of ACERD, the Congolese Association for Renewable and Decentralised Energies.
“Without implementing these policies, the DRC could get in a situation where mines have access to abundant modern energy while a large part of the population remains without electricity,” she said.
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago
Climate Change2 years ago
Renewable Energy11 months ago
Carbon Footprint2 years ago