Are we on track working towards the targets outlined in past COP meetings?

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the largest annual meeting of the United Nations, focusing on limiting climate change. Governments assess and develop global efforts to advance protocols laid out in the convention, such as the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement. The focus in recent years has been around the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As we move into 2025, a year which many targets from early COP meetings were set relative to, it raises the question: are we on track to do reach this goal?

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One of the key aims of COP29 was to agree on what finances each nation should set aside for climate funding. Since 2009, discussions have been ongoing, with an initial goal of providing $100 billion USD to developing countries by 2020, as built into the Paris Agreement. The intended effect of this was to lessen the burden on poorer nations, who typically have to pay the most in losses and damages from climate-driven extreme weather events. It also provides these countries with the resources necessary to adapt to other climate policies. In response to requests made during COP24, many called for flexibility in the rules to avoid being overwhelmed by regulations that they lack the capacity to implement.

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Analysis by the London School of Economics showed these nations to still have low investment levels, as of 2024, despite their projected contributions to over 50% of global emissions by 2030. It also revealed the $100 billion to be insufficient to meet this need, even if it had already been fully invested. Any shortfalls in investment could cause a steeper, and potentially more expensive, path to climate stability. Despite this, the investment was delivered two years later than the 2020 goal. COP29 promised amore ambitious and impactful target of $1.3 trillion a year by 2035, with $300billion invested each year as the goal for 2025. This appears to be a more promising figure in terms of the impact it would have in progressing infrastructure and advancements in developing countries. However, the policy outlines the goal as reaching “at least” $300 billion a year - a less concrete approximation which may allow room for delays and retroactive adjustments like what has been seen in previous years.

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With these delays in policy implementation, it has been necessary to adjust certain climate projections to fit observations in recent years, with less conservative estimates suggesting key global temperature limits may be hit within the next five years. The main benchmark of an increase of 1.5°C has a 40% chance of being reached within this timescale according to are port published by the World Meteorological Organisation. This is an increase from previous analyses when the benchmark was first proposed, which suggested a 20% probability. The average global temperature for 2025 is forecast to be in the top three warmest years on record (since 1850), even despite a wane in the El Niño weather pattern which usually corresponds to cooler climates.

While the pattern with these goals does not present a positive track record for the successful and timely reaching of COP targets, the Paris Agreement has some leniency regarding critical points of no return, as long as future regulations are followed. For example, the 1.5°C temperature limit came with the corresponding statement of climates needing to remain “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. Therefore, even if over the next five years the lower boundary is exceeded, targets can still be set to constrain temperature changes below 2°C. To effectively limit global warming to any meaningful level, our greenhouse gas emissions must peak now in 2025, and then begin to decline, a challenge at the forefront of COP29 and COP30 discussions.