‘Backsliding’: most countries to miss vital climate deadline as Cop30 nears | Climate crisis

The vast majority of governments are likely to miss a looming deadline to file vital plans that will determine whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown.

Despite the urgency of the crisis, the UN is relatively relaxed at the prospect of the missed date. Officials are urging countries instead to take time to work harder on their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and divest from fossil fuels.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said in a speech in Brazil on Thursday: “Because these national plans are among the most important policy documents governments will produce this century, their quality should be the paramount consideration … Taking a bit more time to ensure these plans are first-rate makes sense, properly outlining how they will contribute to this effort [to tackle the climate crisis] and therefore what rewards they will reap.”

New national plans on emissions cuts are urgently needed because current targets are dangerously inadequate. The world must cut carbon by about half this decade, relative to 1990 levels, to have a chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, the important threshold that scientists fear is already out of reach.

Governments are working to blueprints set out four years ago that would result in temperature rises of 2.6C to 2.8C by the end of the century, according to the UN’s environment programme. Poor countries want to see far faster action from the G20 group of the biggest developed and emerging economies, which are responsible for about 80% of global emissions.

Ilana Seid, Palau’s ambassador to the UN and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “It is essential that the G20 and other large emitters exhibit their leadership with new [national plans] that show ambitions and tangible progress. We need deep, rapid and sustained reductions commensurate with the 1.5C goal. In this time of unprecedented climate crisis, more than ever we need enhanced international cooperation to truly move the dial forward.”

Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change, said: “It is unacceptable that this devastation [that we are seeing] is caused by the pollution of just a few countries, specifically the G20, and they must take responsibility for their actions.”

Given the climate emergency – temperatures exceeded 1.5C above preindustrial levels for a whole year in 2024 for the first time – any delay to the deadline would usually be regarded as a crisis. But this year the world is facing a more immediate potential disaster in the US presidency of Donald Trump. Not only has he withdrawn the country from the Paris agreement, he has also embarked on a trade war with the imposition or threat of heavy tariffs on imports.

This has thrown important trading relationships, including that with China, into disarray. The disruption to geopolitics, already in turmoil after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza, has alarmed climate diplomats. Many privately believe putting off the publication of national plans, at least until Trump’s initial flurry of activity has died down, is preferable.

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, every five years countries must submit detailed plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – with clear targets on cutting emissions, or curbing them in the case of poorer countries. These are then discussed at a “conference of the parties” (Cop).

Last time, the deadline was in effect extended by a year: the Cop26 conference in Glasgow was postponed from November 2020 to 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This time, the deadline is technically 10 February – nine months before the Cop30 summit in Brazil this November – but with only a handful of countries so far having submitted plans, it looks likely that most will miss it.

Stiell has urged countries to file their submissions before September, when experts will prepare an official “synthesis report” showing whether the aggregated plans are sufficient to meet the 1.5C limit.

Among the dozen or so countries that have submitted their NDCs so far are Brazil, the host of Cop30; the United Arab Emirates, the host of Cop28 in 2023; and the UK, which under the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, has promised to show climate leadership.

One of the last acts of Joe Biden as US president was to submit a new NDC, but that is now largely symbolic. It will stand as a benchmark for those US states, local governments and businesses that maintain their climate commitments in defiance of the federal government.

Given the impetus in the US behind renewable energy, electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies, its emissions trajectory may not alter much under Trump for some time. But the impact of his return will be felt far beyond the country’s borders: petrostates and economies that have been laggards in cutting emissions may take cover from his shredding of climate commitments.

Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser now with American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, warned: “Tragically, Trump’s re-election will not only mean the temporary curtailment of US climate ambition, but it will take some pressure off China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other major traditional scofflaw emitters, who are likely to offer less ambitious NDCs than had Democrats won last November.”

China holds the key to Cop30: it is the world’s biggest emitter by a wide margin and responsible for almost a third of global carbon output – more than all of the developed countries combined. It has invested heavily in renewable energy, and the past two years have broken records in additional clean power generation capacity, with that pace likely to continue this year.

Yet emissions are still rising, albeit at a much slower rate. To meet the global carbon budget would require China to cause its emissions to peak this year, then fall by about a third by 2035. Such drastic cuts are possible, experts say. Li Shuo, the director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said: “We believe China is very well positioned to achieve that goal, based on its very rapid low carbon development.”

Whether China grasps those opportunities will be a political decision. Within Beijing’s top echelons of power, tumultuous arguments rage between those who want to push harder still for the burgeoning green economy, and the advocates of coal. Calculations of the impact of Trump, and his tariffs, will fuel those disagreements further.

“The US backsliding is definitely not good news for China’s climate ambition and global climate action,” Shuo said. “But China is at the very forefront of the low-carbon economy, which is already yielding a lot of benefits. And China wants to project stability and predictability, on the international stage.”

China was at a similar crossroads nearly a decade ago: in early 2016, analysts estimated that China’s emissions may have already peaked. Instead, the country made a sharp reversal by returning to coal-fired power. That process began before the election of Trump in November 2016 but was confirmed by his anti-China stance. Could Trump’s second ascendancy trigger a similar retrenchment? “I would not rule out a return to coal,” Shuo said.

Bernice Lee, a senior adviser at Chatham House, said: “With Trump’s return, there will inevitably be voices – even in China – pushing back against clean energy or arguing against faster decarbonisation. But China has made major investments in clean energy, and its economy is no longer driven solely by coal interests. The signals so far suggest it plans to stay the course.”

India, the world’s fifth largest economy and third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, will also be closely watched. After the gavel came down at Cop29 in November, India’s negotiator criticised the $1.3tn climate finance deal agreed there as a “travesty of justice” and “betrayal” of developing countries.

Solar and wind power are thriving in India, which is the world’s third biggest producer of renewable energy. B, b but the powerful coal lobby enjoys favour with the authoritarian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who argues that developed countries must take responsibility for cutting emissions while the developing world should expand its carbon footprint.

Climate diplomats told the Guardian it was likely India would frame its targets in terms of emissions intensity rather than absolute cuts to carbon – that is, reducing the amount of carbon per unit of GDP.

For most of the past two decades, the EU has led the world on climate ambition. This year, however, with a populist backlash across the continent threatening the environmental consensus, the two biggest champions – France and Germany – are in the throes of political crisis, and several other governments have taken a rightwing and anti-climate turn. The bloc is not expected to reach agreement on its NDC until this summer.

Japan’s prospective NDC has been criticised by campaigners as too weak but it has not yet been submitted. Canada is facing elections after the resignation of Justin Trudeau, and Australia is also gearing up for political fights over climate in the long run-up to its election.

There is little hope of strong NDCs from two of the biggest climate influencers among the G20: Russia and Saudi Arabia. Neither country is likely to commit to significant cuts, although both are nominally signed up to a net zero target.

Even if China, India, the EU and some other G20 states come forward with relatively strong NDCs, the chances that they will add up globally to the drastic emissions cuts needed to keep the 1.5C target safe are small. Rachel Kyte, the UK’s climate envoy, said: “When you add up all the NDCs, my expectation is they may not get us back on track.”

But this need not be the disaster it might appear, she added, as the NDCs could be negotiated and updated. For instance, some NDCs were likely to contain a range of possible targets, some of which might be conditional on countries receiving finance or other support. “These are not static [documents], and the targets are floors, not ceilings,” she said.

Quite how dynamic countries are prepared to be is up for debate. At Cop26, countries – in theory – agreed that NDCs should be updated more often than every five years. But since then, few have increased the level of ambition in their plans.

Even if ambition is lacking on the core carbon targets in NDCs, properly focused plans could offer the world a breathing space by going beyond carbon to other greenhouse gases – chiefly methane. Global emissions of methane, which comes from agriculture and escapes from fossil fuel extraction sites, have been rising strongly in recent years, to the increasing concern of scientists, as methane is roughly 80 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Cutting methane yields big rewards: halving methane would avoid a 0.25C rise in temperatures by 2030, one study found. Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, said: “Methane is the emergency brake that can slow down warming enough to keep us from going over the cliff of irreversible tipping points. All countries need to target methane in their NDCs.”

Some countries already had policies on methane, which should be strengthened, and those without must put them in place, he said. “Our window to act is the next five years, 10 tops. If we don’t cut methane now, we’ll see the rate of warming continue to accelerate, and we’ll soon be past the first series of irreversible tipping points.”

NDCs are detailed documents, going far beyond the headline emissions targets. Experts also want them to address the global imperative to “transition away from fossil fuels”, agreed at Cop28. All countries are supposed to be tripling their renewable energy generation and doubling energy efficiency, but so far those targets are being missed.

Kyte said governments should see NDCs as an economic opportunity. “NDCs should be investable plans,” she said. “And investable plans for sustainable development can be NDCs.”