Heavy on hype but light on action? Can the UN climate summit deliver?

A week after devastating flooding ravaged eastern Libya, the United Nations top brass hope their exclusive Climate Ambition Summit can coax governments and companies into doing more for the environment. U.N. insiders say that access to the high-profile event, which takes place in New York during the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 20 and is hosted by Secretary-General António Guterres, will be barred if attendees don’t come with new and tangible ambitions. But climate experts are concerned that the event could be heavy on hype but underdeliver on what the countries most vulnerable to climate change need. Guterres has made climate action a defining issue of his tenure, but many other key world leaders — including Emmanuel Macron, Rishi Sunak, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping — are not visiting New York at all this week, and the outlook among climate watchers for the summit is mixed. “If there are no big announcements, then it is just another talk shop,” Carlos Fuller, permanent representative of Belize to the U.N. and a longtime campaigner for small island developing states, told Devex. Others are more optimistic. Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate campaign group, said the summit was an opportunity to “set the terms of the [climate] negotiations and … focus on the most critical issues COP 28 needs to deliver,” and that Guterres’ approach was “not pulling any punches in laying out the stark reality of the climate crisis we are facing.” The summit is a “great vision,” Tom Evans, policy adviser on the climate diplomacy and geopolitics program at the E3G think tank, told Devex. “But compared to where countries are, there’s a gap, a distance between current political levels of ambition on climate and what he [Guterres] is looking for.” “The question is: What is the overall political signal and outcome from this summit if we don’t see scores of countries coming with tons of announcements?” added Evans. But the many items on the world’s climate to-do list mean that the summit leaves open a broad range of possible commitments. The one-day event will highlight Guterres’ Acceleration Agenda, which sets out the work that governments, businesses, and finance leaders need to do to speed up mitigation and preparation efforts for global warming. It will feature sessions showcasing “first mover and doer” leaders who presented new climate proposals — though officials have been tight-lipped about who will be given a platform — as well as thematic meetings on accelerating climate justice and decarbonization. Guterres will also hold a meeting on loss and damage financing with multilateral development banks. At the routine end, there could be pledges to the Green Climate Fund, or GCF — a U.N. body that provides money for countries’ climate needs, which is currently seeking donations. Large private companies might also announce new plans to show how they will wean themselves of fossil fuel dependency. At the higher end, it could include new country climate action plans — known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs — or pledges to the Loss and Damage Fund, an anticipated new fund providing finance to nations most impacted by climate change that is still being slowly debated by negotiators. But Evans warned that the summit does not overlap with the appropriate times for countries to submit new NDCs and that donor financing is strained. So, instead of these major announcements, he said the summit could help gain political traction on two high-ambition climate objectives: The international finance reform agenda and progress on an agreement to phase down fossil fuels. The summit could also display political momentum for other key objectives, according to Clare Shakya, director of strategic impact at the International Institute for Environment and Development. For example, it could offer signals that show progress toward doubling climate adaptation finance, a major unfulfilled climate conference COP 26 promise. Shakya also said the event could be an opportunity to galvanize support in improving more technical, but consistent challenges, like helping lower-income countries access climate finance from organizations such as GCF, which can be difficult and expensive to apply for because of the demands of the process. She will be “looking for signals that we’re moving towards a simplified process, not just putting more money into [climate] funds that are inaccessible,” she said. Shakya said it would also be welcome to emphasize the plans of the Least Developed Countries group to create a single application process to access climate finance from different funds — rather than the current “project-by-project approach, which is just so transactional heavy.” Echoing similar concerns frequently made in the international development space around their broad agenda to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, Evans mentioned the “challenge of implementation.” He said the international system was “trying to wrestle with this question of how … to deliver what we need, not just agreements in text, but real, concrete action. It’s a noble attempt to do that through the UN process, to use the Secretary-General’s convening power in this way.” In addition to its normal agenda of geopolitics and international development, UNGA week will see ministerial-level climate meetings, one focused on development on Sept. 19 and another focused on loss and damage on Sept. 22. UNGA follows two major waypoints for climate action, the group of 20 major economies, or G20, leaders summit and Africa Climate Week. Both summits were seen by experts as crucial to informing the negotiating positions of governments ahead of COP 28, where a global agreement must be made to keep climate action moving. But despite the advances, campaigners were mostly left disappointed at the previous summits, saying they were not enough for the moment. A report on the global stocktake, a thorough accounting of the world’s progress on climate, is now expected to inform future climate discussions and show the world is still far behind in many areas, including the supply of international climate finance and transitioning to low-carbon energy systems.