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.”
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so farthis year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
The head of the United Nations Antonio Guterres (right) with the head of the UN’s climate arm Simon Stiell (left) at COP30 (Photo: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Ed Miliband meets José Manuel Albares Bueno in Madrid on 29 July 2026. (Picture by Ed Morris / FCDO)
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiplecommentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
Mapped: How climate change affects extreme weather around the world
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago
Climate Change2 years ago
Renewable Energy9 months ago
Carbon Footprint2 years ago