Almost 10 years after the Paris Climate Change Pact was signed, the world is moving in the right direction towards achieving the landmark treaty’s goals, but at a slower pace than desired. That’s the biggest takeaway of the State of Climate Action Report, released on Wednesday. Particularly worrying is the fact that coal use registered a record high in 2024, even as the share of the fossil fuel in the energy mix went down appreciably. Although renewables produced more than 50 per cent of the electricity generated in the first half of this year, the increasing use of coal means that the world is nowhere close to containing the long-term temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the Paris Pact’s fundamental objective. The report’s conclusions are even more dispiriting, given that the effects of US President Donald Trump’s efforts to halt low-carbon projects are yet to make themselves felt in the form of more GHG emissions.
According to the IPCC, GHG emissions should have nearly peaked by now in order to attain the 1.5 degrees Celsius target. But, as the report points out, they have shown very little sign of slowing down, making the past 10 years the hottest on record. The silver lining, however, is that clean energy investments are also surpassing milestones. In 2024, they almost doubled the investments in fossil fuels. The momentum has carried over in the first part of this year — global investment in new renewable energy projects was up 10 per cent from the previous year. This is encouraging given that the US saw a more than 30 per cent drop in committed spending compared to the second half of 2024 . The sobering fact, however, is this: For the world to get anywhere close to the Paris Pact’s target, investment in clean energy needs to be high enough to neutralise the effects of fossil-fuel use. The International Energy Agency reckons that current investments are not high enough for that purpose.
In about two weeks from now, at the COP 30 in Belem in Brazil, parties to the Paris Agreement will submit revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that will determine the global emissions trajectory through 2035. The first round of NDCs, framed about 10 years ago, were out of sync with the pact’s targets. There are already indications that the revised commitments are not likely to be better. Negotiators at the summit will, therefore, need to find pathways to nudge countries to upscale ambitions.
