World leaders defy Trump on climate and set new goals to curb emissions

World leaders at the UN have announced new targets to cut planet-heating pollution in an attempt to spur fresh impetus to the beleaguered climate effort a day after Donald Trump called the crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world”.

- Oliver Milman

A total of 120 countries and the EU presented new goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in New York yesterday. The pledges most notably include one from China, the world’s leading emitter.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, convened the special summit for the goals and urged countries, most of which are badly lagging in efforts to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits, to enact cuts that go “much further, much faster”.

"Your new plans can take us a significant step forward,” Guterres told government leaders. “We are in the dawn of a new energy era. We must seize this moment of opportunity.”

Guterres, who admitted this week that the international goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C was at risk of collapsing, said the forthcoming UN climate talks in Brazil, known as Cop30, must produce “a credible global response plan to get us on track”.