Climate Action the ‘Not-So-Secret Weapon’ Against ‘New World Disorder’: Stiell

A new era of climate action and implementation can be the “not-so-secret weapon we need to deliver security and prosperity” while countering the “new world disorder” in which countries currently find themselves, UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell told a meeting in Türkiye last week.

Stiell was speaking at a media conference hosted by COP31 President Designate Murat Kurum in Istanbul.

COP31, the latest in the series of annual UN climate summits set to convene in Antalya Nov. 9-20, “will take place in extraordinary times,” Stiell said, “a period of instability and insecurity. Of strong arms and trade wars. The very concept of international cooperation is under attack.”

But while “these challenges are real and serious,” he added, “climate action can deliver stability in an unstable world. In the face of the current chaos, we can, and must, drive forward a new era of international climate cooperation.”

The UN climate secretariat’s plan for making that happen depends on pushing climate action into a third era, Stiell told media. In the first, “we uncovered the problem. But instead of responding, we argued over its scale.” The second era brought the 2015 Paris Agreement and “didn’t solve the climate crisis—but it changed our course,” delivering a tenfold increase in clean energy investment and showing “that nations can deliver change on a major scale when they stand together.”

While those advances are “clearly still not fast or fair enough, it’s hard to think of a decade when international climate cooperation has delivered more real-world progress,” he said. And now, “not by coincidence, it is also under unprecedented threat from those determined to use their power to defy economic and scientific logic, and increase dependence on polluting coal, oil, and gas.”

Those forces are “undeniably strong” but “need not prevail” if countries stand together on the need to “speed up and scale up” their climate response, beginning with the targets adopted at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai: tripling renewable energy deployment and doubling the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, setting the transition off fossil fuels in motion, boosting climate resilience, and “ensuring more climate finance reaches people everywhere, especially the most vulnerable.”

But elsewhere, that line of thinking continues to lose ground. On the same day as Stiell’s media availability, the Atlantic Council reported that fewer geopolitical analysts are looking at climate change as an urgent threat to global security, even though they foresee conflicts over water security in the near future.

The survey of 450 experts found that “80% expect the world to become hotter over the next decade, and fewer than half think global greenhouse gas emissions have peaked,’ Semafor reports. “But whereas, two years ago, half of this group of experts expected climate change to be the chief driver of global political cooperation, now less than 20% share that view, and only 17% see climate change as the top threat to global prosperity. Yet 64% think a war over access to fresh water is likely before 2036.”

They also see China becoming the world’s dominant economic power in the next decade, “in part due to the global shift from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources.”

A day later, the chair of the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), declared that the drive to net-zero emissions is “not a political choice”, but the only option to stop global warming.

“It’s chemistry and physics that if you want to stop global warming, you have to achieve net-zero emissions, and that isn’t a political choice,” British physicist Jim Skea told the Financial Times.

To get that done, there are “some very challenging policies that would need to be put in place,” so it’s “perhaps not surprising that there’s a debate out there,” Skea said.

He added that only about 50 U.S. scientists are participating in the next round of IPCC reports, none of them nominated by the Trump administration and none of them from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), historically one of the world’s leading climate science agencies. “By contrast, dozens of scientists nominated by China and Russia will contribute to future assessments,” the Times says.