Climate promises

They are bouncing. It’s time for a bank of actions

- ARUNABHA GHOSH

After nearly 10 days of intense negotiations, the message rings clear from the rooms in Belém: We are in the hard part of this Conference of Parties (COP).

The opening rhetoric has faded, and the task now is to structure a response commensurate with the climate crisis unfolding outside these halls. The grim drumbeat of climate impacts provides the only true scorecard: Landslides from relentless rain have killed dozens in Indonesia and Vietnam; a powerful tornado has struck Portugal; and a new study in Nature reveals that in Mumbai, rain causes over 8 percent of the deaths during the monsoon, with the burden falling overwhelmingly on the vulnerable. The first half this year alone saw weather catastrophes cause over $100 billion in damage. This is not future risk; this is the brutal arithmetic of a changing climate now translating into a haemorrhaging balance sheet.

‘The Paris Agreement’s (in 2015) framework of blending top-down ambition with bottom-up action helped steer the world from a catastrophic 3-3.5 degrees Celsius trajectory a decade ago to 2.3-2.6 degrees Celsius now. But a decade on, we have rewarded makers of promises over keepers of promises. The process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) risks becoming a ledger of broken commitments. It is time to transform it into a “bank of actions”. For this to happen, the final days in Belém must deliver on three non-negotiables,