Business leaders, investors and mayors have teamed up on an initiative designed to encourage governments to produce ambitious climate plans ahead of a crucial U.N. deadline early next year.
The Mission 2025 initiative, launched this morning, is urging governments to align the next raft of national climate action plans with the Paris Agreement's more stretching goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Governments are required to submit new climate plans — known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the U.N. jargon for the period from 2025 to 2035 by February next year, ahead of the COP30 Climate Summit in Brazil in the autumn.
A statement from the new group, which is supported by Ikea, Iberdrola, Unilever, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the We Mean Business Coalition, said more ambitious plans could "unlock trillions in private investment to protect our nature, scale cheap renewable energy, support industries to complete in a low carbon economy, and safeguard living standards equitably for our people."
"We urge you to seize this decade-defining opportunity to secure the long-term success of our national economies, our people and our nature," it said. "Help us unlock the momentum needed for this transition to happen at the speed and scale required, and with the equity deserved."
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell has described the next round of NDCs as the "most important climate documents produced so far this century," arguing they will determine whether the global economy can get on to a decarbonization trajectory that would prevent the worst climate impacts. In addition to urging governments to produce high ambition national climate action plans, he has urged governments to update their 2030 emissions targets so as to rapidly accelerate decarbonization efforts this decade.
But the U.N. Bonn Climate Summit earlier this month saw countries give little indication of their commitment to delivering high-ambition climate action plans that incorporate their COP28 promise to "transition away from fossil fuels."
The host countries for the COP28, COP29 and COP30 talks — the UAE, Azerbaijan, and Brazil —recently promised to submit new NDCs "as soon as possible, to set an example," revealing around 10 countries are planning to publish NDCs around the time of COP29 Climate Summit in Baku this November.
But few other countries have provided details on when their NDCs will be released, nor what they will contain. Meanwhile, fears are growing that the result of the U.S. election in November could drastically reduce the diplomatic pressure on governments to produce more ambitious plans.
The Mission 2025 initiative said governments should be emboldened by the private sector's growing embrace of a 1.5C-aligned economy, pointing to data from the ECIU think tank that sug
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