UNGA80 reporters' notebook: Day 3

<div id="jcl420pm" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>A slow drip of climate commitments</h2></div> By Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 4:20 p.m. ET Over 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to give viewers a sneak peek into their new climate commitments for the next five years. That might sound exciting, but these goals were due in February, so the announcements today were long overdue. These commitments, called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, are meant to show how each member of the Paris Agreement will help the world keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. So far, 47 out of 197 countries have published their NDCs, with around 10 of them coming in this week. On Wednesday, we had a chance to hear from a few other countries, including big emitters such as China and the European Union. China committed to reducing economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10%, increasing the share of nonfossil fuels to over 30%, and expanding the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times its 2020 levels. The commitment is modest for China’s renewable potential. In 2024, wind and solar electricity generation rose by 25% compared with the previous year. China is also the biggest investor in clean energy worldwide, spending $625 billion in 2024. “The NDC headlines from the climate summit is not the whole story,” Yamide Dagnet, senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Devex, referencing that China could do much more. “China is not going to slow down.” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, addressed some general concerns from climate activists in recent months — that Europe was starting to take a back seat on climate. Leyen promised that Europe would “stay the course.” “The world can count on the European Union’s continued climate leadership,” she said. She also announced that the NDC would be between 66% to 72% emissions reduction by 2035. She also said that the bloc is working toward a 90% emission reduction by 2050. Several of the world’s biggest emitters were missing from the discussion, including the United States and India. But the overall participation shows that much of the world is still interested in engaging with climate change diplomacy, despite comments yesterday by the Trump administration that undermined science and warned governments against renewable energy. <div id="em315pm" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Emissaries of praise</h2></div> By Elissa Miolene, 3:15 p.m. ET Three senior U.S. envoys gathered on the Concordia stage on Wednesday afternoon. They were there to talk about the evolving role of U.S. diplomacy — but instead, they talked about Trump. “His instincts are beyond belief,” said Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria. It was the first of a near ceaseless string of compliments poured on the president, with Morgan Ortagus, the U.S. deputy special envoy to the Middle East, beginning the session with a question: What was it about Trump that helped Barrack and Steven Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, “get deals on these incredibly hard challenges around the world?” “We are really emissaries of President Trump. It’s not us,” said Witkoff. “What makes the job easier is his indomitable spirit, his force of personality. It is what drives every negotiation out there.” For 25 minutes, the compliments continued. Barrack described the president as a genius and stressed those “foolproof” instincts. Witkoff spoke about Trump’s “indomitable spirit,” and claimed that foreign leaders’ strong respect for Trump gave the administration “an edge.” “It’s why we get attacked so much — because I think his administration, because of his policy prescriptions and the way he oversees it, has been successful,” said Witkoff. “And so I think people are envious of that, particularly people who have not been as successful and have been in the office before that.” Both men stressed their long relationships with the president: Barrack, a real estate investor, and Witkoff, another property tycoon, said they’d each been friends with Trump for more than 40 years. That being said, the envoys did discuss some foreign policy gains. On Tuesday, Witkoff said, the administration presented its 21-point plan for peace in the Middle East — something that Witkoff said addressed the concerns of both Israel and its neighboring nations. He described a “very productive” meeting between Trump and officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan. “We’re hopeful, and I might say, even confident, that in the coming days, we’ll be able to announce some sort of breakthrough,” he said. “Amazing,” Ortagus replied. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me.” <div id="jcl0107pm" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Lammy bridges the pond</h2></div> By Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 1:07 p.m. ET United Kingdom deputy prime minister, David Lammy, said “Palestinian statehood is a just cause” and defended the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship” during an interview at Bloomberg Philanthropies on Wednesday. Lammy said that the U.K.’s relationship with the U.S. remains strong despite President Trump’s speech in front of the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, during which he said London Mayor Sadiq Khan was “terrible” and “instituting Sharia law” across the city. “While America First was a strong sentiment, it wasn’t America only,” Lammy said. “The special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. is extremely important. Together, we have the biggest intelligence capacity in the world, and it keeps a lot of us safe. Our military partnership is key as well.” <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">UK Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy sought to calm concern about disagreements with the US after Donald Trump&#39;s comments at the UN on Tuesday. He spoke to Bloomberg&#39;s John Micklethwait <a href="https://t.co/6gCfWU4bdY">https://t.co/6gCfWU4bdY</a> <a href="https://t.co/eW2x2UykVE">pic.twitter.com/eW2x2UykVE</a></p>&mdash; Bloomberg (@business) <a href="https://twitter.com/business/status/1970882627189006350?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 24, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> In response to a question about Trump’s statements on immigration — telling nations that they were “destroying their countries” by allowing immigrants in, and that their countries were “going to hell” as a result — Lammy said that all Western governments have to have an answer on issues of cost of living and immigration. Lammy also made a strong push for the recognition of a Palestinian state, saying that it is a “spur for change, not a substitute to achieving peace in the Middle East.” <div id="em1pm" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Healthy returns</h2></div> By Elissa Miolene, 1 p.m. ET For months, the world has been scrambling to understand how the United States will approach foreign aid. The release of the country’s “America First Global Health Strategy” began to answer that question — and on Wednesday, the State Department’s Jeffrey Graham fleshed it out even more. “We’re thinking about this as an opportunity to do things a little bit differently than we’ve done in the past,” said Graham, who leads the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. “We’re not just doing health responses that may go on forever. We’re trying to figure out how do we provide market opportunities, but in a way that helps us eventually shift the burden so that countries can have a more sustainable approach to their own health responses?” There are a few ways his team wants to do that. The first, Graham said, was prioritizing private sector engagement when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and delivery systems in target countries, and utilizing private laboratories or pharmacies to pull companies on board. He nodded to the idea of “commercial diplomacy,” a phrase repeatedly used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to describe the use of diplomacy to support a nation’s trade, investment, or business interests. The second, he added, was removing silos: Graham hopes to integrate the country’s response to HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Ultimately, Graham said, the U.S. will focus on helping countries build robust health systems of their own — and eventually, replacing U.S. global health support with monitoring platforms instead of long-term aid. “We have gotten a really warm welcome in particular from African governments, who said this is long overdue, and we like the idea of having more control over our own destiny, and our own health systems,” said Graham. <div id="em1145am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Free speech on the line</h2></div> By Elissa Miolene, 11:45 a.m. ET Helle Thorning-Schmidt — former prime minister of Denmark and former head of Save the Children — had a message for women at Concordia’s Wednesday breakfast event: free speech is under attack. And in an ever-more-complicated world, it has never been more important to safeguard it. “I am probably the one in this room who’s met the most dictators,” said Thorning-Schmidt from a stage. “What I learned … is that you still need to talk to each other. And you still need to keep that open dialogue.” Her remarks came hours after American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was brought back on the air — an appearance that followed a weeklong suspension by the media company that hosts Kimmel’s show, Disney. Earlier this month, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot while addressing college students in Utah, prompting Kimmel to liken Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death to “how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.” In response, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission threatened to take action against Disney if Kimmel’s show wasn’t pulled from the station — resulting in not just the physical attack against free speech at Kirk’s event, but a regulatory one on the air. “Dialogue is what we need to come back to again and again,” said Thorning-Schmidt, who is now a co-chair of The Oversight Board, which makes moderation decisions on Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. “And what we are seeing in the world right now is that dialogue, and continuing dialogue with people you don’t agree with, is under attack.” Today, more than two-thirds of the world‘s population has less freedom of expression than they did a decade ago, according to the 2025 Global Expression Report. In fact, freedom of expression has deteriorated in 77 countries over the last decade, while during the same timeframe, just 4% of the world’s population have experienced improvements in the same regard. And despite his government’s response to Kimmel’s show, the need to protect free speech was also something President Donald Trump — in theory — seemed to agree with. “Together, let us defend free speech and free expression,” Trump told the United Nations during his speech to the multilateral body on Tuesday. <div id="jcl1015am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>From chimps to the Treasury: Industry legends call for action on biodiversity</h2></div> By Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 10:15 a.m. ET Jane Goodall joined former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Wednesday to issue stark warnings about the accelerating destruction of nature. "The biodiversity crisis is, in my judgment, more harmful than climate change alone,” said Paulson. “It is moving faster, and it is more immediate, and while we can quantify some of the costs, there are unknowns we can't quantify." He added that we are currently on pace for half of the species on Earth to be extinguished by the middle of this century. The conversation comes as Bloomberg Philanthropies announced new support for Brazil’s “30 by 30” conservation targets ahead of the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP30, focusing on coastal ecosystems critical to both carbon storage and community resilience. Paulson, now chair of the Paulson Institute, unveiled a new report updating his landmark 2020 biodiversity finance study. The findings were grim: species loss is outpacing expectations, the global funding gap for nature has swelled to nearly $1 trillion annually, and poorly planned renewable energy projects are inadvertently damaging fragile ecosystems. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c8qnXIXmP_E?si=KRWCkhOQmZtTrZrg&amp;start=2149" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Forum 2025. Via YouTube. “We looked at the threat to our economic security, and it's also pretty significant,” he said, adding that over half of the world’s estimated global value — or global gross domestic product — “is either moderately or highly dependent on nature." He stressed, however, that new financial mechanisms and policy tools exist to scale solutions if governments and investors act with urgency. Goodall, a giant in the world of global advocacy for biodiversity, said that conservation cannot succeed without addressing the needs of local communities. She pointed to education, microfinance, and women’s empowerment as vital tools for reducing pressure on forests. Despite the dire trends, both speakers insisted there is reason for optimism. For Paulson, it lies in a new generation that understands the value of nature and demands action. For Goodall, it is in the resilience of ecosystems and the ability of people — especially young people — to drive solutions. Their message was clear: the biodiversity crisis is immediate and severe, but recovery is possible if political will, financial resources, and community action align.