Where is the global leadership fighting climate change now?

World leaders from more than 100 countries gathered last month at the United Nations climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, at COP29, to discuss the threats of a rapidly warming world.

Under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which has been signed by almost every country in the world, there is a requirement for countries to submit their own climate targets, reflecting their “common but differentiated responsibilities”. Hence, every nation at COP will be offering an update on their plans to reduce emissions.

Overall, the world is falling short, according to a new UN report ($$). New Zealand, meanwhile, is going steadily backwards. The huge reductions in EV car purchases are a major indictment of this Government’s anti-climate policies. The others include removal of the “Ute tax”, the much-needed penalty for purchasing fuel-inefficient internal combustion engine vehicles; the lowering of petrol taxes; less support for buses and the removal of incentives to use public transport, especially for children; and lack of support for walking, cycling, and local road infrastructure projects.

This year will probably be the hottest year in recorded history ($$), with extreme weather driven by climate change wreaking havoc around the globe. Now the world is confronting a second Donald Trump term. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accord in his first term, promoted the expansion of fossil fuels and in effect renounced American leadership on environmental issues, until the Biden administration reversed most of these for the last four years.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump continued to call climate change a hoax. He said he would pull out of the Paris accord again, pledged to expand oil and gas production and roll back pollution controls. He also threatened to eliminate federal incentives that promote renewable energy and electric vehicles.

His election is likely to be a giant step backward for addressing climate needs. This was supposed to be the year that the world figured out how to pour huge amounts of money – estimates range from $100 billion a year to $1 trillion or more – for climate mitigation and adaptation into the developing world.  

COP27 in Egypt in 2022 concluded with a historic decision to establish and operationalise a loss and damage fund. That is, a fund established to pay reparations arising from climate change, on the grounds that most of those countries affected have done little to create climate change.

These are meant to provide compensation for the economic toll of climate-fuelled disasters, such as floods, wildfires and hurricanes as well as slowly-developing climate impacts, such as sea-level rise, that can cause irreversible damage over time.

But assigning blame is incredibly complicated.

Damage and disasters relate to the event itself and the location of the event. If a major storm occurs over the ocean, the impacts are mostly small, whereas a direct hit on a large city may cost thousands of lives and cause billions of dollars of damage. In most cases, the event may be exacerbated by human-induced climate change, but the consequences may have been largely unavoidable and the result of too many people placing themselves in harm’s way – living in low-lying coastal regions, for instance, or on flood plains. It is this dichotomy that makes the matter of who pays especially problematic.

A UN environment programme report published this month, The Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come hell and high water warned that developing nations needed hundreds of billions of dollars a year in aid to adapt to a warming planet. Many countries are trying to protect themselves from heat waves, floods and other climate shocks, according to the report, and at least 171 countries now have at least one national climate adaptation plan in place. 

But those efforts remain badly underfunded, particularly in poor countries. Though wealthy nations provided US$28b in aid for climate adaptation in 2022, developing nations need between US$187b and US$359b annually in additional funding to cope with climate change disasters. 

The agenda at COP29 was underpinned by discussions around “adaptation”, and what that means. That means talking about vulnerability; that nations take a good hard look at infrastructure and procedures to determine what could happen under various likely scenarios.

I would hope that nations would start planning for what to do about reducing and eliminating particular vulnerabilities; building resilience where that is possible and where it is not, at least planning for what to do in the event such vulnerabilities are realised. That involves many steps including assessments on human, medical, animal, and housing fronts. 

There always will be an element of luck when it comes to the weather, but the kinds of events related to climate change include enhanced storms of all sorts, especially heavy rains and local flooding, and erosion, especially in coastal regions where storm surges may occur. Downed trees and poles may cause electricity outages and trigger fires. Extreme shifts in weather patterns, from very dry sunny conditions to very wet conditions and back again increase vulnerability because soils shrink in dry conditions, opening cracks, and then rain waters flow into the cracks and enlarge them.