Stark Inequalities Stall Global Climate Action Stalls, Deepening Concerns of a Crisis

Despite unanimous global agreement that much more needs to be done to draw the planet back from the brink of a climate disaster, nations continue to drag their feet on the big steps required to combat climate change at a fast enough pace.

Without exception, studies indicate that real results by way of concerted global action continue to lag, thereby widening the gap between pious pledges and real climate action.

Recent history of climate action is replete with missed opportunities and broken promises. A prime example is that G7 Western leaders repeated the "net zero by 2050" promise in April 2024 after consistently reneging on the pious commitments they made at the 2021 UNFCC conference of parties in Glasgow, such as ending coal burning for energy.

Such lethargy flies in the face of the urgent global need for nations to drastically step up their climate mitigation efforts to achieve the UNFCC'S 1992 mandate to stabilise "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic or human-caused interference with climate systems."  Just as worrying is the fact that the COP 2024 agreement includes several serious exemptions with regard to calculating greenhouse gas emissions, such as for military purposes and air and marine transportation.

Parallely, several developing countries have invoked Common but Differentiated or CBDR, principles to bargain for more time. For example, India has announced a 2070 deadline. In other words, the target of achieving net zero by 2050 is now beyond reach, setting up the planet for severe climate-related disasters.

Such inertia is despite the warning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that even achieving  net zero by 2050 would not prevent global temperatures from breaching the 1.5 degrees well before that. Also, the IPCC had expressed its doubts over the efficacy of carbon capture and sequestration technologies when implemented on scale.

 The most unfortunate consequence is that poor nations like Ghana, bear the brunt of the climate-related depradations despite contributing just 0.2 per cent of global emissions. According to a recent Oxfam report, the richest 1 per cent emit as much carbon as the poorest two-thirds of the human population, exposing the shocking inequities that mark the global climate order.