The Future of International Climate Policy: Moving Toward Accelerated Implementation

After Glasgow, the world moves into the important phase of implementing the national climate pledges made under the Paris Agreement. UN Climate will now head into the first Global Stocktake in 2023. Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, significant attention has still been paid to concluding the multilateral rules for climate cooperation. But concrete climate action still significantly, and dangerously, lags behind what is needed to match the Paris Agreement’s goals. What is needed from the international policy community to successfully usher in this transition to a massive acceleration and scaling-up of implementation?

At present, countries’ national pledges also fall short of limiting the rise in global average temperature to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature target. How does this same policy community work to ratchet ambition to close this gap, and how is the balance struck for building a system of implementation, measuring and holding countries to their pledges, and ratcheting ambition?

Beyond the world of the UNFCCC, climate change has become more intertwined with the broader international agenda. How does this process now relate to other international processes and platforms, as well as other efforts and coalitions around global economic governance, global health, and geopolitics? In a moment of turbulent and still shifting geopolitics, what is needed to keep international climate action on pace to peak emissions and begin the drastic reduction toward net-zero by mid-century, as part of future-proof sustainable development approaches?

Perhaps most importantly, the world is now entering a phase where climate impacts are increasingly present. Adapting to these impacts and responding to loss and damage is no longer something to look at down the road, nor has it been for many most affected countries and populations for years. How do we manage these impacts and the possibility of overshooting the 1.5°C temperature rise limit? Are there firewalls that need to be put up around the conversation, so that the international policy community can take seriously the situation many face going beyond this limit on planetary stability, while keeping ambition as high as possible?