Amid a series of climate agreement exits since United States president Donald Trump took office, United Nations (UN) executive climate secretary Simon Stiell has said that the renewables shift is “unstoppable” and in every nation’s self-interest.
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“When US$2 trillion flows into clean energy and infrastructure in just one year, as they did last year, you can be sure it’s not because of virtue signalling. That’s twice as much as in fossil fuels. Investors know that clean energy makes far more sense. The money-making opportunity is simply too big to ignore,” said Stiell on Thursday.
He was speaking at a diplomatic academy in Brazil, where countries are set to gather for the upcoming COP30 climate summit in November.
“A country may step back – but others are already stepping into their place to seize the opportunity, and to reap the massive rewards: stronger economic growth, more jobs, less pollution and far lower health costs, more secure and affordable energy,” said Stiell.
Last month, the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement – a 2015 climate deal to keep global temperature rise “well below” 2°C – and committed to more fossil fuel production under its climate-denying leader’s self-declared “national energy emergency”. Just days after, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is also the UN secretary-general’s special envoy, announced that his philanthropic entity alongside other US climate funders will step in to fund the UN climate body and make good on the country’s reporting obligations.
Reflecting on the past decade since the landmark climate treaty was adopted by 195 countries, Stiell said that “in a world that has become much more divided, our process has managed to buck the trend.”
While the world is on track for around 3°C of warming, which is “still dangerously high”, he argued that “without UN-convened global climate cooperation… we would be headed towards up to 5°C of global heating – a death sentence for humanity as we know it.”
Stiell, who urged every country to step up on climate adaptation efforts, beyond climate mitigation through a renewables shift, added that the world is “already headed in the right direction”. “We just have to implement, and implement more and faster.”
It has been well-established that breaching the 1.5°C guardrail could trigger changes in vital Earth systems that reinforce, rather than reduce, global warming. It would be impossible to rapidly reverse some of these tipped-over elements even if temperatures are brought back down by sucking carbon out of the air at a later stage.
While the world exceeded the 1.5°C warming limit for the first time in 2024, scientists have also recognised that limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C is not realistic without first overshooting the goal.
With only a few days to go until the 10 February deadline, only 12 countries – including the US – have submitted new 2035 climate plans, or nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to the UN’s climate body. Others who have done so include Andorra, Brazil, Ecuador, Marshall Islands, New Zealand, Singapore, St Lucia, Switzerland, Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
Describing these plans as “among the most important policy documents governments will produce this century”, Stiell said that “taking a bit more time to ensure these plans are first-rate makes sense”.
But countries will need to hand them in by September “at the latest” so they can be included in the UN assessment of the progress and gaps that remain in achieving the Paris climate accord’s goals, which will inform COP30 talks.
Apart from NDCs, countries were also expected to submit their inaugural biennial transparency reports (BTRs), which detail their progress in meeting initial climate commitments, by end-2024. As of January, only 109 countries have submitted their BTRs – including 11 least developed countries and small island developing states, though they were not subjected to the same deadline due to capacity constraints.
COP30 lookahead
Referencing the new global climate finance goal which was reached last year at COP29 in Azerbaijan, Stiell said that the “US$300 billion is a baseline not an endline”. This year, the UN body aims to set out, “step by step”, how to “unleash” the broader US$1.3 trillion annual funding goal, he added.
“Let’s be clear, climate finance is not charity,” said Stiell. “It is crucial to protecting global supply chains from spiraling climate disasters which are fueling inflationary pressures… Just take rising food prices, which have the fingerprints of climate-driven droughts, floods, and wildfires all over them.”
While he acknowledged that developing countries and vulnerable communities tend to be the hardest hit by the climate crisis, Stiell drew on the recent example of wildfires that ravaged California in the US to assert that “no-one is safe, in any country or any part of the income spectrum.”
“Just ask the wealthy investor in Los Angeles who turned to social media, pleading for private fire fighters to save his property, offering to pay any amount of money. His house burned down anyway,” he said.
Praising Brazil for its track record of “keeping kitchen-table issues front and centre” and embracing the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, civil society and young people, Stiell said he is confident that “the right series of real-world deals across sectors” can be made to progress on a clean and just energy transition at this year’s climate summit.
Despite Brazil’s NDC upholding a “transition away” from fossil fuels, as agreed upon at COP28, critics have pointed out that its plans for oil expansion over the next decade and its target range of 59 to 67 per cent emissions reductions by 2035 fall short of the ambition needed to be 1.5°C-aligned.
Editor’s note (11 Feb 2025): Paragraph 11 has been updated to reflect the latest number of countries who have met the submission deadline.
