Nearly a decade after the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, are developed economies are on track to meet their own climate commitments. In a detailed but blunt report titled The Climate Paradox, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change warns that the current approach to climate action focused largely on domestic decarbonization and lifestyle changes is increasingly disconnected from political, economic, and public realities, and is at real risk of failure.

The Risk of Failing Paris

The Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal: limit global warming to well below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C. But emissions reductions in many developed countries have stalled in the last few years, partially due to the fact that the initial reductions were achieved from targeting the low-hanging fruit initiatives and enacted during a time of relative stability and prosperity.

That scenario seems unlikely to return anytime soon, and in fact the near-term prospects seem to be deteriorating further. Cost-of-living pressures, global conflicts and populist politics are become real factors growing resistance to climate efforts.

But even more significantly, does it even matter what developed economies are achieving? As per the report:

Despite the past 15 years seeing an explosion in renewable energy and despite electric vehicles becoming the fastest-growing sector of the vehicle market, with China leading the way in both, production of fossil fuels and demand for them has risen, not fallen, and is set to rise further up to 2030. Leaving aside oil and gas, in 2024 China initiated construction on 95 gigawatts of new coal-fired energy, which is almost as much as the total current energy output from coal of all of Europe put together. Meanwhile, India recently announced they had reached the milestone of 1 billion tonnes of coal production in a single year.
 
...by 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia. Yet the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years.
 
These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.

The report has drawn predictable criticism, one of the most common is because of the perceived pro-fossil fuel messages it contains, but these criticisms and dismissals are a good example of why the emission reduction effort is faltering, focussing on messaging over basic facts.

So What Should We Do Instead?

Two key takeaways from the report are:

• the global population needs to be a willing participant in the emission reduction effort, less lecturing and ideological legislating, more truth and open discussion
• acceptance of climate science also means we need to accept that some impacts from climate change are now inevitable, plans and solutions need to be addressed

Adaptation to climate change must also move up the agenda because the impacts that are already locked in cannot all be mitigated in the time available. But adaptation has always been the poor relation of climate action because it seems to accept that some climate change is inevitable.

What does the ASRS say

One of the requirements of the ASRS is for organisations to develop and publish 2 scenarios which cover the estimated impact to their business from a 1.5°C increase on global temperature and one covering a minimum increase of 2.5°C. The current predicted timeframe for a permanent increase of 1.5°C is somewhere between 2030 and 2035, so very much on the mid to long term planing horizon for large organisations.

The predicted timeframe for a 2.5°C increase is much more variable, a rough range of 2060 to 2100, which would place it outside of most organisations planning timeframe, but is a requirement of ASRS as well as global frameworks such as TCFD and ISSB.