Energy transition
CLIMATE DIPLOMACY
Not on course for destination 2030
It’s no exaggeration to say that the next 10 years will be among the most consequential in human history. As the pandemic abates, governments must focus on tackling the climate challenge – and they will have to ramp up their ambitions rapidly. Jennifer Johnson reports.
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espite a wealth of newly declared targets and goals, governments are not yet approaching the level of ambition needed to limit global temperature rise to around 1.5°C. In the rush to jumpstart stalled economies, there’s a danger that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will rebound – and that reductions observed during the pandemic will be a fluke, rather than the start of a terminal decline. The United Nations has said that humanity must slash its GHG output by 45% by 2030 from 2010 levels, meaning that the need for deep decarbonisation across all sectors is urgent. Slow to act Stark as these warnings are, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that policymakers are not yet heeding them sufficiently. In February, the research group BloombergNEF (BNEF) revealed that the world’s largest economies are largely failing to stick to the
16 Energy World | April 2021
The US, Canada, Mexico and Australia made investments supporting oil and gas in their COVID-19 spending packages. Photo: Shutterstock
promises they made under the Paris Agreement. The firm’s G20 Zero-Carbon Policy Scoreboard evaluated the decarbonisation policies of the world’s 19 largest economies plus the European Union, and found that even countries with progressive and far-reaching climate policies are falling short. Analysts confirmed that much of the progress in reducing GHGs to date has come from the power sector, with all of the countries they studied having some government scheme to support the rollout of clean electricity. The countries covered in the Scoreboard were marked out of 100% based on 122 qualitative and quantitative metrics relating to the number, robustness and effectiveness of their decarbonisation policies. According to the report, no country has a perfect score for all areas, with those for the industry and buildings sectors most commonly the lowest.
Governments will therefore need to consider how to best address these weaknesses if they wish to achieve their climate targets. ‘While some power sector policies have delivered results, most countries have done little elsewhere in the economy,’ says a statement from Victoria Cuming, Head of Global Policy Analysis for BNEF. ‘And even within each sector, it’s not enough to implement incentives for one technology – multiple pathways are required.’ The UN has called for the world’s largest emitters to step up their ambitions ahead of November’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow. Parties to the Paris Agreement were meant to have submitted enhanced nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – or climate action plans – to the UN by the end of last year. However, only 74 countries (including the 27 EU countries), representing 28% of global emissions, followed through by the deadline. Notably absent were
