The top polluting nations are revising their emissions targets. Is it enough?

Efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions are falling short of what scientists say must be done to avoid catastrophic climate change. Whether countries will commit to more aggressive reductions is a pressing question for the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. 

National governments meeting on Sept 24 are expected to detail their latest plans for hitting emissions targets under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

The backdrop appears bleak. US President Donald Trump is doing everything he can to

reverse US climate action.

And while many governments are accelerating the shift to renewable wind and solar energy, this often serves merely to satisfy growth in demand, rather than displace fossil-fuel based power sources. What’s more, the world’s voracious appetite for plastic – which is often burned rather than recycled – is underpinning bumper demand for crude oil. 

So-called Nationally Determined Contributions specifying countries’ pledges to cut emissions up to 2035 are filed every five years with the UN. Fewer than 40 of the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement had submitted new pledges by mid-September, and the UN has been urging others to do so at the meeting in New York. 

Here’s a look at what major polluting nations have been doing to cut emissions, and where it leaves global efforts to limit Earth’s warming.  

What can another UN climate meeting achieve? 

Governments that signed the Paris Agreement committed to keeping global warming below 2 deg C, and ideally 1.5 deg C. The deal operates under a so-called “ratchet” mechanism, meaning that every five years countries keep coming back to the table with updated pledges to cut emissions and show how they are meeting their obligations. 

Right now, they aren’t: With what they’ve achieved to date, the planet is still on a path to warm by almost 3 deg C this century. 

Following the New York meeting, the UN will produce a report by the end of October analysing all the NDCs to assess just how far off track the world is. A couple of weeks later, negotiators will meet for the COP30 climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belem to decide what must be done to close the gap. 

What’s happening in the top polluting countries? 

The US, which has spewed more emissions than any country in history, is one of the few to have submitted an NDC, yet it did so in the twilight of the Joe Biden administration. His government presented its pledge to cut planet-warming pollution by at least 61 per cent by 2035.

Now Mr Trump is reversing Mr Biden’s climate policies and promising a huge boost in fossil-fuel production. So the US NDC now appears largely redundant. 

China’s emissions stabilised in 2024 near record levels. To meet its climate targets – and growing demand for electricity – China has flooded its grid with renewables and now deploys more solar on an annual basis than the rest of the world combined. 

China blew through a 2030 target to add 1,200 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity almost six years early, and about half of new vehicles sold in the country are electric, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

But coal still generates more than half of China’s electricity, and last year the country embarked on its biggest coal-power building boom in a decade, with nearly 95 gigawatts of new generation starting construction. 

India, the world’s third-largest emitter, has adopted a similar focus on renewables. Non-fossil fuel technologies including solar, nuclear and hydro-electric already account for about half of generation capacity, putting India on course to meet its 2030 clean energy goal. However, as the supply of renewable energy is intermittent, and the country lacks enough batteries to store it, coal still supplies the bulk of the country’s electricity. 

Power demand in China and India is still growing, driven partly by a new wave of energy-intensive artificial intelligence data centres and extra air conditioning to cope with hotter weather.

As part of their answer to meeting this demand is to build new coal and gas-fired power stations, their emissions either aren’t falling (India), or aren’t falling fast enough (China) – even though both countries met the 2030 NDC targets for renewable energy ahead of schedule. 

Neither India nor China has committed to phasing out fossil fuels, or even to absolute emissions reductions. Instead, they’ve been focusing on cutting “carbon intensity” – the carbon released per unit of a specific economic activity.

This leaves the door open to further growth in carbon emissions as their economies are expanding fast. The approach has been criticised by climate campaigners because it allows governments to claim success while avoiding actual emissions reductions. 

“On paper, India will be able to achieve” its 2030 NDC targets, said Nandini Das, a climate and energy economist with the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) research project. “But in reality, none of these targets are able to drive down” absolute emissions. 

What do the top polluting countries need to do? 

To get back on a path that would likely limit the global temperature rise to below 2 deg C, China’s carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector would need to fall 43 per cent by 2035 from 2005 levels, according to BloombergNEF. India would need to limit its emissions rise to roughly 27 per cent over the same period to maintain the pathway. 

One potential bright spot is an improvement in the accountability and transparency of climate reporting.

China’s 2035 NDC is expected for the first time to cover all greenhouse gases, and the country is expected to shift from emissions intensity-based controls to an approach that focuses on absolute emissions.

A more ambitious climate policy potentially benefits China, which has an economic interest in the global shift to renewables: The country manufactures 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels, 60 per cent of its wind turbines and about three-fourths of the world’s electric vehicles, according to CAT. 

What about the most ambitious countries?

The return of Mr Trump to the White House has weakened the alliance of progressive countries that helped to push through big commitments at previous COP meetings, including a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels made at COP28 in Dubai.

Governments in several developed nations have come under pressure to slow the shift to cleaner energy sources after climate-sceptic politicians convinced many voters that net-zero policies were inflating their energy bills. 

“The peer pressure that the Paris deal has long relied on will be undermined by the US’s exit from the pledge, and developing economies’ insistence on using less stringent forms of target-setting,” BloombergNEF analyst Victoria Cuming wrote in a May report. 

Britain has put forward some of the most ambitious carbon reduction goals among developed economies.

The 27 nations of the European Union are struggling to agree on new climate targets, and the bloc will miss the deadline to present its pledge at the UN, coming instead with just a statement of intent to deliver a pledge to cut emissions by between 62.5 per cent and 72.5 per cent.

Much will depend on the outcome of a debate among national leaders at the end of October. The risk is that it fails to reach an agreement, or delivers a low-ball target, taking pressure off China and the rest of the world to step up their own ambitions during COP30 in Brazil.

Is there enough money to fund all these emission cuts?

No. Almost 200 nations agreed at last year’s COP29 in Azerbaijan to triple the amount of money available to developing countries faced with rapidly rising temperatures. 

But the pact fell well short of what’s needed for a transition compatible with the Paris Agreement. Rich countries pledged to provide at least US$300 billion (S$385 billion) annually by 2035 through a wide variety of sources, including public finance as well as bilateral and multilateral deals. The agreement also called upon parties to work toward unleashing a total of US$1.3 trillion a year, with most of it expected to come through private financing. 

The dearth of financing means developing nations might submit less ambitious climate targets, or use future commitments as leverage in negotiations for money needed to retool fossil fuel-based power systems and build infrastructure that can help growing populations adapt to warmer temperatures. 

What are the other obstacles to cutting emissions? 

Grid bottlenecks, for one. The cost of installing and operating renewables has plunged since the Paris Agreement was signed, with the cost of electricity for onshore wind power falling by about two-thirds and fixed-axis solar generation costs slumping by 78 per cent.

That makes them significantly cheaper than combined-cycle gas-fired power stations, according to an analysis by BloombergNEF. But they still need grids that can handle the power they produce. And governments have been slow to pay for costly network improvements. They’ve also been reluctant to place limits on the use of coal and gas, as these industries can be important sources of jobs and government revenue. 

“Engineers have already delivered, and policymakers by-and-large have under-delivered,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The economics are “much more promising than we would have imagined in Paris.” 

So, is there any hope of averting catastrophic climate change? 

If nations fulfil their current 2030 NDC targets, temperatures are still projected to rise by 2.6 deg C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. 

Climate scientists say that would bring intense, frequent heat waves, wildfires and storms, species die-off and much higher sea levels from fast-melting ice sheets. There would be more “compound” extreme weather events, where one segues into another, causing significant damage and disruption. BLOOMBERG