“We’ve seen a lot of backsliding on climate commitments”

“I think it’s an important meeting but I don’t expect this meeting to solve all the remaining climate problems. I think that’s unrealistic. What I’m hoping for is the process to survive. And some progress to be made,” says Charles Parker.

He has been researching climate policy for almost 20 years and has therefore closely followed the UN climate conferences. He was present at the Paris conference in 2015 and argues there are several reasons why that particular conference was such a success.

“The geopolitical situation was much more favourable, and I believe that contributed to the agreement being reached. As I have shown in my research, the EU, China and the US were all united in their desire to reach an agreement and demonstrated leadership in getting it in place. If the Paris Agreement had been on the table today, I don’t think we would have been able to agree on it. It was a great achievement to succeed in doing so,” says Charles Parker.

Countries find it harder to agree

The climate conferences held since then have focused on how to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. How should greenhouse gas emissions be limited? How should this be funded? How can we adapt our societies to the effects of a warmer climate? Charles Parker has observed that countries are finding it increasingly difficult to agree on these issues. He believes that we are in a period that some refer to as the Age of Disagreement.

“There are a lot of economic headwinds right now. Worries over economic growth. So these are things that traditionally work against ambitious environmental goals in general and climate goals in particular,” he says.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, economic recession, customs and trade wars have caused many political leaders to focus on other issues that they perceive as more urgent than global warming. But there are also leaders who do not see the climate threat as an important issue.

“You have countries like the United States, which have made it very clear that they think that climate change is a, in Donald Trump’s words, a scam, the green scam, and he’s withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. The US won’t completely be out by this time. That will take until early next year in 2026. They’re still a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. It would’ve been a more drastic move had he withdrawn the US from that. But if the US is not committed to making Paris work, maybe it’s actually better that they’re out,” argues Charles Parker.

Unclear which world leaders will attend

The US president is not currently expected to attend the climate conference in Brazil in person, and it is still unclear whether the United States will send an official delegation. At the same time, there are still uncertainties as to which other world leaders will be present. But if the world’s major leaders do not move in the same direction, it will be difficult to achieve truly ambitious results, according to Charles Parker’s research.

One challenge, he says, is that politicians find it difficult to tackle issues for which the results will not be seen until many years later, long after their terms of office have ended.

“So if you think about democracies, we’ve seen a lot of backsliding on climate commitments particularly. So I would say the US is the worst case scenario, but we see the rise of right-wing parties that tend to be sceptical about environmental goals and climate change in particular. And we’ve seen that in France. We’ve seen that in the Netherlands. We see that in Sweden. So if you look at the Swedish Climate Policy Council and their annual reports, we see that Sweden is also backsliding a bit on its climate promises,” says Charles Parker.

Climate issue crucial for EU citizens

The average person still seems to regard climate change as a matter of concern.

“The latest Euro Barometer pool showed that over 85% of EU citizens think that climate change is an important problem that needs to be addressed. If you look at some of the trend lines since I've been following this, there are glimmers of hope. And these are that climate change is much more considered a top tier political issue than it used to be,” says Charles Parker.

The Paris Agreement has had an impact on climate work and the political decisions that have been made. In his research, he has studied, inter alia, the EU, which has set ambitious targets to be climate neutral by 2050. Between 1990 and 2023, they reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent while GDP increased by 68 percent. However, some Member States have found it more difficult to live up to their promises.

Major investments in renewable energy

Another thing that Charles Parker is hopeful about is the major investments in renewable energy being made, not least in China.

“Before Paris, we were heading towards a world where the temperature would rise by up to four or five degrees, depending on which estimates you look at. Now I would say that there is evidence that we will be able to bend the curve downwards. If everyone does what they have promised, we will probably see a temperature increase of between 2.5 and 2.8 degrees. That is still far too much, but it is better than the forecast has been. If, for example, all countries actually fulfil their zero-emission promises, which I would not bet on yet, the temperature increase would be around 1.9 degrees. So we have prospects of making some progress and avoiding the worst-case scenarios,” says Charles Parker.

He says he is cautiously optimistic that the climate conference in Brazil will result in some kind of agreement. His guess is that it will happen in overtime and that the pledges will not be ambitious enough to meet the Paris targets. But he still thinks it is valuable to keep the process alive.

Åsa Malmberg