Countries Made Bold Climate Promises Last Year. How Are They Doing?

A year ago, at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, heads of state and business leaders made a lot of promises.

Many countries and companies have stopped making progress toward the goals they set for themselves, like increasing the amount of climate aid to poorer nations. Climate concerns have been overshadowed by war, energy shortages and inflation in some cases.

The focus of this year's talks will be figuring out how nations can fulfill their pledges. Guilanpour said that there are no big treaty-related negotiations left. The hard work of actually implementing promises is what we are facing.

Last year in Glasgow, there were five promises made and progress has been slow.

At Glasgow, world leaders agreed that countries weren't cutting greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming and urged governments to "revisit and strengthen" their climate plans. Only 24 countries have done that since then.

According to experts, all the national plans submitted to date would put the world on a path to heat up by 2.5 degrees Celsius. It is a slight improvement over last year, but it is much higher than the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to minimize the risk of deadly heat waves, sea-level rise, and other calamities.

The executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said that nations have made some progress this year. We are not close to the scale and pace of emission reductions needed. It was disappointing that few countries strengthened their plans.

Australia and Indonesia have submitted more ambitious goals. The United States was not expected to update its target of cutting emissions 50 percent below 2005 levels, but it did approve $370 billion in new clean energy spending in order to get most of the way to that goal. China isn't saying whether it will update its goal.

In Glasgow, countries agreed to speed up the deployment of clean energy and to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels.

Some of the results have been positive.

According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of electricity generated by low-carbon sources increased by more than 10% this year. Investment in renewable energy is expected to surpass that of oil and gas drilling for the first time in history.

Coal use is at a record high this year due to the spike in natural gas prices. Coal power plants have been reopened. 26 of the 104 coal plants it planned to build overseas have been stopped by China. Global coal use will decline this decade, but that hasn't happened yet.

Fossil fuel subsidies are on the increase. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that in the year 2021, nations spent nearly $700 billion to encourage oil and gas drilling or to lower the price of fuels. Governments are spending billions of dollars to protect their citizens from rising energy prices.

In 2009, the world's wealthiest nations pledged $100 billion per year in climate finance to help poorer countries shift to cleaner energy sources. At Glasgow, wealthy countries acknowledged they were not there yet, but promised to get there by the year 2023. They promised to double the amount of aid going towards climate adaptation.

It's not clear if rich countries will meet their targets.

The United States, European Union, World Bank and other wealthy institutions collectively provided $83 billion in climate finance in 2020. Some groups argue that some of the aid may not be going towards climate change projects and is hard to track.

Canada and Germany both detailed steps they were taking to increase climate aid in a recent progress report. Senate Democrats sought $3.1 billion in additional climate finance last year but only got $1 billion.

More than 100 countries signed a pledge to reduce methane emissions. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas produced from oil and natural gas operations, livestock and landfills.

Most nations are still in the beginning stages. The EPA has proposed new regulations to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas operations, while Congress gave $4.7 billion to plug old, leaking wells. In the summer of 2015, the United States and European Union announced a new partnership with countries like Canada, Japan, Nigeria, and Mexico to put money into efforts to plug methane leaks and monitor emissions with satellites.

According to a recent analysis by the World Resources Institute, many of the countries that signed the pledge have not provided details on how they intend to tackle methane.

A new agreement between the US and China to work together to curb methane emissions was one of the major developments in Glasgow. Shortly after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China stopped all climate cooperation with the other country.

In Glasgow, more than 130 countries pledged to stop the destruction of the planet by the year 2030. Most of the world's tropical forests can be found in Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic ofCongo.

The world is not on course for that goal. According to a recent report by the Forest Declaration Platform, there was a decline in the amount of global depredation between 2020 and 2011. The bad news is that. The good news is that it would take 10 percent a year to bring down the rate of destruction.

A number of countries made progress in protecting their forests. Indonesia has put in place tougher regulations on its palm oil industry, while corporations have faced pressure to reduce their impact on the environment.

The government auctioned off large swaths of the rain forest for oil drilling in the country. International donors pledged $500 million to help the country. With crude oil prices going up, the country shifted its focus to provide economic growth.

There is still a wild card in Brazil. After Mr. Bolsonaro took office, he encouraged logging and mining in the Amazon. The country's newly elected president, Luiz Incio da Silva, oversaw a decline in deforestation the last time he was in office, from 2003 to 2010, and has promised to do so again, though analysts say it won't be easy