Opinion On climate talks, the US shadow

Issued every five to seven years, the UN’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) is a significant report card on the world’s ecological health. Its recommendations inform national policies and feed into assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Unlike most reports on the environment, which have a narrow focus on climate change, forests or biodiversity loss, GEO joins the dots between global warming, pollution, depletion of nature and the broader global political economy. Its seventh edition, released earlier this week, concludes that the climate crisis can no longer be seen as simply an environmental challenge  — it is undermining human health, food and water security and leading to conflicts in several parts of the world. The report calls for safety nets to ensure that the “poorest in society” are not harmed during the turmoil. Significantly, the GEO-7 also quantifies the health and economic benefits of an ecologically sustainable pathway to development.

The latest GEO report, however, has been marked by a lack of consensus on phasing out fossil fuels, switching to renewables and reducing the use of plastics. The Donald Trump administration reportedly sided with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran to weaken the report’s language on climate change and the switch to clean energy. The dissension meant this was the first time that a GEO report was published without a summary —a statement, negotiated line by line, that distils science into plain language for policymakers. The US did not send a delegation when the report was being put together in Nairobi. But America’s representatives reportedly intervened when the negotiations on finalising the report were underway.

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As the world’s second-largest carbon emitter, the US’s decision to obstruct global initiatives on clean energy has major implications for a rapidly warming planet. Trump’s dismantling of his predecessor’s policies means that US emissions will go up by 7 billion tonnes — more than double India’s annual emissions — in the next five years. The last GEO report tried to quantify the reduction in fossil fuel use that will be required to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change. The latest edition does not, however, show a pathway out of the challenge posed by the US backpedalling on its climate commitments. It only asks countries to “drastically ramp up the generation of renewable energy”. The recently concluded COP 30 showed that the world is taking early steps to put in place a climate governance architecture after the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Pact. The undermining of the GEO report shows that the endeavour remains fraught.