United Nations Expresses ‘Deep Concern’ Over Climate Progress, Repeats Previous Promises

The United Nations approved a new “Pact for the Future” on Sunday in New York, the culmination of a decades-long process to agree on… a lot of the same things they already agreed on in other documents?

“The Pact covers a broad range of issues including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, and the transformation of global governance,” a U.N. press release reported. It is ostensibly a document meant to update the specifics and logistics involved in a wide range of global goals and agreements, and perhaps centralize them in a way that makes it a bit harder for member nations to distance themselves from individual pieces.

The document contains a total of 56 “actions” across that spectrum of topics. Action 9 begins with a bit of a reprimand: “We are deeply concerned at the current slow pace of progress in addressing climate change.”

It goes on to outline what needs to happen to alleviate that concern, including reaffirming the Paris Agreement temperature goals of 1.5 or at worst 2.0 degrees Celsius of warming. The specifics involved are taken verbatim from the Dubai Consensus, the supposedly landmark agreement out of COP28 last year that for the first time included the need for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”

Only, the very same loopholes are also still here, most notably in the “recognition” that “transitional fuels” — meaning, fossil gas — “can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.”

This isn’t fundamentally a problem, and having the world’s government reaffirm a goal that took almost three decades to arrive at alongside a litany of other critical global targets seems fine. As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Sunday, the Pact is about “turbocharging the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement,” and updating global governance to better reflect modernity. The agreement “will help to make its institutions more representative of today’s world, capable of mounting a stronger response to today’s challenges,” he said.

But there is a risk of greenwashing at the highest international levels here — a vote on something already approved a year ago earns headlines from outlets like NPR that signal some new breakthrough that does not, in reality, exist: “In U.N. vote, countries show willingness to move away from fossil fuels.”

That’s not to say there’s zero movement here; a U.N. that is “deeply concerned” about the lack of climate progress is one that might, in theory, play some role in nudging that particular needle. COP29 begins in November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and while prospects on international climate finance and any further movement on fossil fuel transitions seem “bleak” at the moment, that’s not to say more progress is impossible. At some point, though, these loophole-ridden multilateral statements will have to start resembling more a brick wall than Swiss cheese, if that deep concern is to mean anything.