‘Tide has turned for climate action’, says UN Climate chief

The executive secretary of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, has told the UN June Climate Meetings that the “tide has turned for climate action”, calling for pragmatism and “unity of purpose” to ensure climate targets are met.

At the opening plenary of the event, formally called the 62nd session of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), which is taking place in Bonn, Germany, Stiell highlighted the progress that has been recently achieved through climate multilateralism.

Global warming

He credited recent COP meetings for helping reduce the projected trajectory of global warming from 5°C to around 3°C, adding that more ambition is needed to achieve the 1.5°C target.

“It’s a measure of how far we’ve come, and how far to go,” he commented. “A reminder that 1.5, and protecting all people, continue to be both achievable over the course of time, and utterly essential.”

Stiell outlined five priorities for the Bonn sessions, including finalising the adaptation indicators for the forthcoming COP30, under the Global Goal on Adaptation, and advancing implementation of the Just Transition Work Programme, so it goes from being a “necessary concept to a lived reality, across economies and societies”.

Other priorities highlighted include operationalising the $1.3 trillion Baku-to-Belém climate finance roadmap with actionable financing steps, building momentum under the mitigation work programme, and defining a shared path forward, in other words, “what it means to deliver on all the commitments we’ve collectively made to the planet and each other”, including in the first Global Stocktake.

“The world is watching closely, as climate impacts get rapidly worse in every country,” Stiell added. “We must show climate cooperation can keep delivering real progress, and can drive the acceleration demanded by science, to protect people and prosperity.”

Key topics

Elsewhere, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has outlined a number of key topics to keep an eye on during the Climate Meetings, which conclude on 26 June, including the narrowing down of a draft list of 490 indicators for tracking progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA); discussions on how to accelerate the implementation of the Global Stocktake; and discussions on how to encourage more countries to publish their NDCs.

According to the WRI, just 22 countries have submitted NDCs to date. Read more here.

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