The climate emergency is a direct consequence of carbon-heavy land-use and agriculture, transport, buildings and industrial processes and polluting energy sources. Without profound changes to these sectors and a drastic cut to carbon footprints, there is little hope of protecting the planet from the devastating effects of a warmer world.
Below are climate-related news and events from the United Nations and partners.
As negotiations continue for the global stocktake, the progress on methane is a reminder what can be achieved with concerted multilateral action. Indeed, one of the positive news stories from this COP has been the action on methane, which is responsible for about one third of the warming we are experiencing today.
More than US$1 billion in new grant funding for methane action has been raised since COP27, more than triple current levels, which will drive investment in methane reductions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
The world’s largest oil and gas methane emitters announced new policies, regulations, and national commitments to cut fossil methane, including: The European Union adopted its first-ever methane regulations, setting ambitious monitoring and abatement criteria for domestically produced and imported fossil oil, gas, and coal, including establishing a methane import standard by 2030.
The United States announced final standards to sharply reduce methane emissions from oil and gas operations, which will achieve a nearly 80 per cent reduction in future methane emissions expected without the rule.
Achieving the Global Methane Pledge goal of cutting anthropogenic methane emissions at least 30 per cent by 2030 from 2020 levels is the fastest way to reduce near-term warming and is essential to keep a 1.5°C temperature limit within reach.
A new report has shown that the world is set to burn more coal, gas and oil in 2023 than it did in 2022. The report from Global Carbon Budget revealed that global emissions this year reached a record high, at around 40.9 billion tonnes, part of a 10-year "emissions plateau" and nowhere close to the steep reduction in emissions that is needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
As negotiations in Dubai continue over the wording of the negotiating text of the global stocktake, with many countries and climate activists hoping that a "phaseout of fossil fuels" will be agreed.
The report also revealed that the current levels of technology-based carbon removal - touted by some fossil fuel producers as the answer to the climate crisis - are more than 1 million times smaller than current CO2 emissions.
Read more about UNEP's work on energy here.
Today is Indigenous Peoples Day at COP28, which aims to recognize the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ intergenerational knowledge, practices, and leadership in climate action and in stewarding planetary health, as well as mechanisms to improve their direct access to finance.
As well as these avenues, a growing number of Indigenous Peoples around the world are turning to the courts to compel countries to take concrete action to address climate change and other environmental issues.
Experts have called the cases a new frontier in the global environmental movement and are hopeful they can jumpstart what is, in many places, a halting political effort to counter some of the gravest threats to the planet.
“It is still early days, but these cases are changing the dynamics of the fight to save the Earth,” said Patricia Kameri-Mbote, the Director of the Law Division at UNEP. “That’s crucial because humanity is pushing the planet to the breaking point, and we need to reverse course – quickly.”
Today is Energy Day at COP28, which will address universal energy access and workers' need to achieve just transition in the energy sector. It will place an additional focus on cooling as a critical mitigation and adaptation factor.
UNEP event: How to increase adaptation effectiveness to reduce loss and damage: Insights from the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023
This event features opening remarks from UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Andersen and UNFCCC’s Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, and presents the key findings of UNEP's Adaptation Gap Report 2023. This is followed by a panel discussion focusing on the importance of increasing adaptation effectiveness, while assessing progress in global adaptation efforts, reducing loss and damage, and evaluating the current adaptation finance gap.
Time: 09.00-10.00am
UNEP event: What we need from the Global Stocktake – Insights from the latest UNEP Emissions Gap Report and UNFCCC NDC Synthesis Report
This joint UNFCCC and UNEP event features opening remarks from UNEPs Executive Director Inger Andersen and UNFCCCs Executive Secretary Simon Stiell and a presentation of the key findings of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2023. There will also be a discussion on what we need from the Global Stocktake, and how climate action and implementation can be sped up this decade.
Time: 10.00-11.00am
UNEP Pavilion: The Future of Energy: leaving no one behind
This event will explore technologies and innovations to develop renewable energy systems including green hydrogen as a flexible energy vector, while at same time highlight opportunities and challenges for developing countries for the production and use of clean energy technologies.
Time: 10.30-11.15am
Watch here.
UNEP event: Gender Just Climate Solutions Annual Awards Ceremony & Publication Launch
The Gender Just Climate Solutions Awards bring together environmental defenders worldwide who use gender equality and a women’s rights approach when implementing the Paris Agreement to fight the climate crisis.
Time: 11.30am-13.00pm
Watch here
UNEP Pavilion: A Stocktake: From climate technology needs to implementation
This event will present the new Climate Technology Progress Report, produced by UNEP-CCC and the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism, and discusses trends on climate technology progress, with a focus on urban transitions in the context of Asia.
Time: 11.45-12.30pm
Watch here.
UNEP Pavilion: Accelerating models for energy efficiency in Developing Countries
Industries are responsible for 23 per cent of global emissions, and while their emissions are to some extent increasingly being regulated, there are no limits to their energy consumption. The event will announce the new partnership between UNEP and the ASEAN Centre for Energy for the promotion of energy service companies in South east Asia.
Time: 13.00-13.45pm
Watch here.
UNEP Pavilion: Cooling cities: district cooling and its role in the energy transition and urban heat resilience
This event will feature national and subnational governments, industry and finance representatives on the efforts and challenges to scale district cooling, as well as its benefits, including emission reduction, climate and energy system resilience, and the reduction of the heat island effect. The panel will discuss how to accelerate uptake of district cooling in new markets in combination with passive cooling and heat-resilient urban design.
Time: 14.30-15.15pm
Watch here.
UNEP event: UN raising ambition and delivery on the ground: multilevel climate action for local resilience
This session discusses approaches to achieve multilevel climate action and unlock climate finance for local sustainable development. It is framed around three questions: How can we connect local, national and global levels to accelerate local climate action?; How can international partners support local action for an integrated approach to sustainable development and climate resilience?; and how can we unlock climate finance for local governments, in particular for the most vulnerable?
Time: 15.00-16.30pm
UNEP event: Announcement of New Programmes and Expansion of the Adaptation Fund Climate Innovation Accelerator
This event will bring together policy makers, industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and key stakeholders to discuss how the Adaptation Fund Climate Innovation Accelerator accelerates innovation in climate adaptation.
Time: 15.00-16.00pm
UNEP Pavilion: Passive cooling and nature-based solutions for building comfort
Organized by UNEP, UNEP-led Cool Coalition, Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, and UN ESCAP, this event discusses challenges and opportunities for adopting passive cooling solutions to address sustainable cooling and thermal comfort in buildings in an energy-efficient, affordable and resilient way.
Time: 15.45-16.30pm
Watch here.
UNEP and the European Space Agency signed an memorandum of understanding today at COP28, which will see the integration of data from ESA’s Earth Explorer missions, Copernicus Sentinel satellites, together onto UNEP’s platforms, such as the World Environment Situation Room.
UNEP's Executive Director, Inger Andersen said: “The partnership between UNEP and ESA will strengthen UNEP’s capacity to deliver science-based, data-driven early warning systems for the environment."
The aim is that ESA's "innovative geospatial and space technologies" can support more accurate policymaking, prevent social and economic losses, and boost the use of digital technologies to develop innovative solutions to address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution. This can offer particular hope in addressing plastic pollution and implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework," Andersen added.
Climate data is a vital tool with which to fight climate change as it enables decision makers to make informed choices and understand the scale of and the most effective solutions to the climate crisis.
The past few days at COP28 have seen some new pledges around methane and other non-CO2 gases, but much more needs to be done, particularly around finance, says UNEP's Executive Director, Inger Andersen.
With the launch of the Cooling Spotlight Report tomorrow, Andersen also highlighted UNEP's work on sustainable cooling. "The UNEP-led Cool Coalition supports action on sustainable cooling, [while] UNEP is a partner of the COP Presidency’s Global Cooling Pledge, which will be announced on December 5. Achieving the Pledge would save 78 billion tonnes of CO2e by 2050, increase access to sustainable cooling and save money.
Finance is required to turn this these ambitions into concrete actions on the ground, Andersen added.
"There have been initiatives from multilateral development banks, donors and philanthropies on methane. But methane abatement finance must increase at least 3.5 times by 2030. The latest replenishment of the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund boosted efforts to phase down hydrofluorocarbons. But action on other gases remain underfunded."
Read more about why countries are contemplating a cooling pledge at COP28.
Record-setting endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh is this week's guest on the Awake At Night podcast hosted by UN communications chief Melissa Fleming.
Pugh, a UNEP ocean advocate, has swam in every ocean of the world, often in freezing conditions, in an effort to raise awareness about the mounting threats to the world’s seas.
Earlier this year he swam the 500km length of the Hudson River in New York to raise awareness of the importance of protecting the world's rivers, which are under increasing pressure from both pollution and climate change.
“Rivers are the Earth’s arteries,” said Pugh. “Our planet is a living system and every living thing needs clean water. Without clean rivers, every community and every ecosystem suffers," he said at the time.
An event taking place right now at the UNEP Pavilion will examine how greening public investments can accelerate SDGs and Paris Agreement goals, fostering economic dividends, job creation, and resilience against climate risks.
This event will also explore efficient pathways for African and developing nations, organizations, financial institutions, and the private sector to accelerate sustainable infrastructure investments, design policies, attract financing and foster public-private partnerships for a climate-resilient world.
This year, humanity came face to face with an ever-worsening climate crisis, as wildfires, storms and floods caused devastation around the world.
Countries must dramatically scale up their efforts to adapt to the climate crisis, say experts. Developing nations alone need $215 billion to $387 billion to contend with the fallout of climate change, found UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2023, released last month.
While current spending is only a fraction of that total, there are some rays of hope. From Cambodia to Peru, a range of innovative projects are helping communities weather a variety of climate-related perils. Read about five of those efforts here.
Plastics are not a lifeboat for the fossil fuel industry as the world decarbonises - that was the message from UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen today at COP28.
"Business-as-usual growth in plastics would burn through up to 20 per cent of the carbon budget for 1.5°C by 2040 – mainly from the production of primary polymers and conversion into products," she said at The Climate Impact of Plastic Production - The Road to a Global Plastics Treaty event in Dubai earlier today.
Andersen highlighted some of the other climate impacts of plastic pollution, including the fact that ocean and coastal ecosystems are vital to store carbon and build resilience to climate change, yet "there can be no adaptation in a sea of plastic."
She also outlined what a plastic pollution free future looks like: "We need to use fewer virgin polymers, less plastic and no harmful chemicals. We need to ensure that we use, reuse, and recycle resources more efficiently. And dispose safely of what is left over. This is how we protect ecosystems, human health and the climate. Create new jobs. And save trillions in social and economic costs."
The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) process is underway to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.
The next stage of the INC process will take place in Ottawa in April next year.
