The United Nations climate summit in Dubai promises no shortage of drama in its final days — in part because negotiations over whether or not to phase out global fossil fuel use appear to have collapsed. One major goal of this year’s conference, known as COP28, is a “global stocktake” documenting the world’s climate progress and next steps on climate action. But as of Monday, any reference to ending oil and gas use had disappeared from the draft text, leading to widespread anger among climate advocates. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore declared that the conference was “on the verge of complete failure.”

But the well-publicized debate over fossil fuels threatens to overshadow another major question dogging negotiations as the clock runs out: whether or not world leaders can agree on how to adapt their countries’ infrastructure to withstand global warming. As climate-driven disasters continue to make headlines around the world, the fate of millions in especially vulnerable regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia hinges on this question. 

Though hundreds of international negotiators have spent the past fortnight tangling over a convoluted document that outlines how countries will adapt to climate change, they haven’t yet reached consensus on who exactly will pay for the phenomenally expensive undertaking — or even how to define successful climate adaptation in the first place. As the end of the conference approaches, stakeholders who spoke to Grist described the most recent draft text of the so-called global goal on adaptation as “watered-down,” “vague,” and “confusing.” 

The latest text is “much weakened,” said Pratishtha Singh, a policy analyst at the Canadian chapter of the Climate Action Network, an international advocacy organization. “It’s far from enough in terms of what’s needed by developing countries.” 

The “global goal on adaptation” is a sweeping framework that is supposed to guide how the world prepares for floods, fires, droughts, and other climate disasters. It’s also one of the last and biggest puzzle pieces in the implementation of the landmark Paris Agreement. The 2015 accord had three main pillars: mitigating future climate change by reducing carbon emissions, adapting to future climate disasters, and redressing the loss and damage that can’t be prevented. In the years since it was signed, countries have set goals for cutting carbon emissions and, much more recently, committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a loss-and-damage fund, but they haven’t yet agreed on a framework for climate adaptation.

This year’s COP is the final deadline for putting that framework together, but talks have moved at a snail’s pace in Dubai as negotiators clash over key issues. Despite holding at least eight technical discussions on the adaptation goal earlier this year, negotiators failed to agree on a draft document by the end of the conference’s first week, a sign of dismal progress. A parallel discussion about how vulnerable countries should design their national adaptation plans also broke down, and negotiators have punted that debate to a meeting in Bonn, Germany, next summer.

The reasons for the logjam are multiple. For one, the geopolitics of adaptation finance are highly contentious. In the past, rich countries in Europe and North America have promised to support adaptation in more vulnerable countries, but they have overwhelmingly failed to meet their previous commitments — and even those commitments were hundreds of billions of dollars short of what experts agree is needed. Negotiators from Africa and Southeast Asia entered the adaptation talks at COP28 seeking an acknowledgment that wealthy nations need to do more, plus a mechanism for monitoring international aid, which they say will help ensure that rich countries don’t renege on their funding commitments. Rich countries, however, sought to restrict the final agreement to a discussion of how to develop and implement adaptation policy.

“The main issue is the financial part,” said Idy Niang, a Senegalese negotiator who represents a bloc of the world’s least economically developed countries, during the first week of COP28. “We are not satisfied with the proposal coming from developed countries.”

The most recent draft text includes a lengthy discussion of adaptation finance, including a call for rich countries to pay more and a vague nod to their past failures, but it doesn’t include any clear commitment from wealthy nations. Nor does it outline any mechanism for tracking and monitoring adaptation aid. 

An earlier version included a provision that called for rich countries to provide at least $400 billion in adaptation finance per year by 2030, which would have represented a more than tenfold increase from recent years. But this line disappeared in later talks, as did any reference to equity principles underscoring developed countries’ responsibility to provide adaptation funding. Emilie Beauchamp, a climate policy expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canada-based environmental think tank, said such an agreement was a nonstarter for many nations.

“It’s not possible,” she told Grist. “This is an absolute red line for the developed countries.” She called the outcome on finance “quite disappointing.”

A second sticking point in the talks is the question of how to define successful adaptation. Outlining clear targets for adaptation is highly technical and challenging. Unlike goals for mitigating climate change, which can be pegged to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or global temperature increase, adaptation responses vary depending on local conditions. There’s no universal yardstick that countries can use to compare their progress. Adaptation efforts on a small island, for instance, look very different compared to a large urban city. 

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“Climate finance is messy, but the global goal on adaptation is even messier,” said Katherine Browne, a researcher at the Stockholm Environmental Institute who studies adaptation. “The problems with finance are political, but the problems with the goal are technical, because they’re trying to find a way to measure something that basically everyone agrees can’t be measured.”

The final framework needs to lay out a system for gauging progress on disaster resilience, but the term “adaptation” is so broad that negotiators have struggled to reach consensus on what categories of adaptation to include, or about how to measure the value of any given infrastructure project. The most recent text contains seven targets to meet by 2030, including a group of core themes for adaptation projects. These include food and water security, disaster readiness, universal healthcare, and land conservation. 

But these broad targets lack specificity and include language like “substantially” reducing poverty, “increasing” infrastructure resilience, and “reducing climate impacts on ecosystems.”

“The language is vague,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, an adaptation expert with the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. “Everything is there, but nothing is there.”

Given the unquantifiability inherent in the language, negotiators at COP28 are struggling to come up with a system allowing them to measure progress toward these goals. The best they’ve been able to do is punt the question to future COPs: Negotiators agreed to create a two-year working group that will sift through hundreds of potential adaptation “indicators” and try to create a global standard. These indicators might include the fatality rate for climate disasters, the percent of a population with access to clean water, or the number of acres of forested land in a country. 

The fact that adaptation has stalled out even as other issues move forward is a grim sign for vulnerable countries, said Beauchamp of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

“If you look at the broader COP … you have the loss-and-damage issue, which is zooming,” she said. “Adaptation, there’s nothing. It’s basically saying that the world does not care about the lives and ecosystems of people who are on the front lines of the climate crisis.”

This is ironic, because the question of whether or not rich nations should help less fortunate countries with climate adaptation has never been that contentious on its own, compared to the jostling over emissions reductions and funding for loss and damage. Unlike the latter, which amounts to paying what are essentially climate reparations, adaptation finance is often seen as a natural extension of the sustainable development framework that guides many forms of international aid.

Negotiators have set up several adaptation funds at previous COPs. Some of them, like the “Least Developed Countries Fund” and the “Special Climate Change Fund,” have been around for more than 20 years. A group of developed countries including Canada and Norway agreed to replenish these bank accounts last week with a new contribution of $174 million.

The problem is that the total amount of money in all these funds isn’t even close to what poorer countries need, and spending has plateaued in recent years. Global adaptation needs are outpacing adaptation finance by as much as $366 billion per year, according to the latest U.N. data, and the need is only growing as the world continues to warm. 

At the same time, rich countries such as the United States have failed to follow through on their prior pledges to fund adaptation: A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, found that international adaptation finance declined by around 15 percent between 2020 and 2021 — a time when it was supposed to be skyrocketing. Even global institutions like the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund only give out a few million dollars at a time for resilience projects. That’s enough to restore a small mangrove forest in Guinea-Bissau or build a wastewater treatment plant in Barbados, but not to armor a city against sea-level rise or help a country’s farming sector prepare for droughts. 

Another reason for the lag in funding is that the private sector has little incentive to invest in adaptation projects. Many banks and investors have backed solar farms and carbon capture projects across the developing world, because these initiatives promise future financial returns when people buy electricity or trade carbon credits. The same can’t be said for sea walls, desalination plants, and coastal conservation areas, which is why adaptation makes up only a quarter of all international climate finance.

While the most recent draft text obliquely nods to the need for scaled-up private finance, climate advocates who spoke to Grist called this a red herring. Singh, of the Climate Action Network, said such language is “wild and unacceptable,” given both private funding’s insufficiency compared to government-scale financing and the potential for private ventures to saddle developing countries with burdensome debt.

The United States, meanwhile, is championing the private sector as an adaptation savior. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry unveiled a report last week arguing that adaptation is profitable for the private sector, because companies can make money by protecting their supply chains against disasters, for instance, or by investing in government adaptation projects. 

“I think a ton of the incentives already exist, and I think the private sector is just awakening to those in a really significant way,” said Nathanial Matthews, the CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership, the coalition of governments and nonprofits that produced the report. He pointed to investors who issued loans to help build a flood-proof highway tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and made money back through toll revenues.

But vulnerable countries can’t close the adaptation gap without significant public funding from wealthy nations, and that funding has yet to materialize.The next big test will arrive at next year’s COP29, where countries are hoping to ink a major new international funding agreement that will funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to adaptation. 

“We’re debating all these things about adaptation, but there’s absolutely no obligation for countries to implement it and to take it on,” said Beauchamp. “This framework would give a clear signal that the world actually cares about adaptation, but at the moment, we’re putting that signal in the bin.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As UN talks collapse, the world has no plan to adapt to climate change on Dec 11, 2023.

On the very first day of COP28, the United Nations climate conference underway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, nearly 200 countries adopted an unprecedented agreement: They set up an international fund to aid developing countries addressing the loss and damage caused by climate change. Within a few minutes of the announcement, the so-called loss-and-damage fund had received pledges of $100 million each from the governments of the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, and Germany. 

“We have delivered history today — the first time a decision has been adopted on day one of any COP,” said Sultan Al-Jaber, the COP28 president overseeing the conference as well as the head of the UAE’s national oil company. “The COP28 presidency is committed to delivering outcomes for the climate-vulnerable.”

Germany’s large pledge to the fund was unsurprising, given its wealth and historical responsibility for the climate crisis as an early industrializing nation. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, wealthier and larger polluters have a duty to support still-industrializing countries bearing the brunt of climate change. This principle — called “common but differentiated responsibilities” — has often been a major point of contention in U.N. climate negotiations, with lower-income countries charging that wealthy nations are not providing their fair share of finance.   

The UAE’s contribution to the loss-and-damage fund, however, could mark a dramatic shift in how this principle is understood going forward, according to COP observers who spoke to Grist. That’s because the UAE is a newly wealthy country, and one whose emissions only began rising substantially in the 1990s. Under the United Nations classification, it is still a developing country.

“The UAE pledge is significant,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. “You’re starting to see countries say, ‘You know what? We are taking on the responsibilities of a developed country.’” Alex Scott, who leads climate diplomacy for the climate think tank E3G, echoed those comments. The UAE providing money goes to “the heart of the loss-and-damage fund agreement,” which states that “all countries that have the means to do so are invited to contribute to the fund,” she said. 

The timing of the joint pledges from Germany and the UAE — one developed and one developing country — was deliberate. At a press conference a week later, German economic and development state secretary Jochen Flasbarth told reporters that “it was important for us, together with the UAE, that we make a visible statement by having a nontraditional donor, so that the old world of the industrialized nations and the then-developing countries are no longer in the same position.” This “old world” is one in which developed countries are expected to contribute, and all developing countries as defined by the United Nations are solely fund recipients. “We won’t fall back into this old world,” he said.

This bifurcated categorization of countries in the context of climate negotiations originated in 1992, when the UNFCCC treaty was adopted. The framework demarcated countries into two main categories: Annex I and non-Annex I. The former included wealthy industrialized nations such as the United States, Australia, and countries in the European Union, while the latter included countries that fell into the low- and middle-income designations at the time. But the rigid classification provided no room to recognize countries’ economic growth over the next three decades. As South Korea, Singapore, Qatar, and others have prospered, both their emissions and their ability to help poorer countries have risen in tandem.

As a result, industrialized nations like the United States and those in the European Union have urged newly wealthy countries to provide funding to climate-vulnerable countries — even though the U.S. and EU are still responsible for the lion’s share of historical emissions. Such calls have generated tension, with some developing countries interpreting the ask as a way for wealthy nations to abdicate their financial responsibilities to the rest of the world and pit developing countries against each other. Looming over these discussions is the fact that wealthy nations blew past a 2020 deadline to provide $100 billion in climate finance to developing countries. The broken promise eroded trust between developed and developing countries. 

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Nevertheless, the UAE’s pledge has been welcomed by at least some other developing countries.

“It’s a good thing,” said Senegalese negotiator Idy Niang, who advocates on behalf of a bloc of the least-developed nations. “Those who can [contribute] should.” 

The 2015 Paris Agreement belatedly recognized that countries might graduate from non-Annex I to Annex I. The agreement references “developed country parties” and “developing country parties,” but it doesn’t define which countries belong in each category. “It’s never explicitly spelled out anywhere,” said Thwaites. 

Though its contribution was in some ways the most significant, the UAE isn’t the first developing country to contribute to a United Nations climate fund. At least 10 other countries, including South Korea, Mongolia, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Qatar, have contributed to the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund, which were set up to provide support to developing countries. Most of these contributions amounted to a few million dollars apiece. South Korea, however, which has one of the largest economies in the world, provided $100 million in 2014 and followed up with $200 million in 2019 and $300 million earlier this year. 

“South Korea doesn’t get enough credit for that, because they’ve been quietly increasing over the years,” said Thwaites. “They do it without fanfare, and they do it without making a big deal about it.” 

It’s unclear if South Korea will pledge to the loss-and-damage fund. A South Korean negotiator told Grist that he hadn’t heard from senior officials in the government about how much the country would pledge. 

Niang, the Senegalese negotiator, said that while contributions from wealthy developing countries are welcome, the responsibility to provide funding as underscored in the UNFCCC still lies with the developed countries who have emitted the most carbon over their histories. “We need to reaffirm in the decision text that the historical responsibility and the common but differentiated responsibility is there,” he said. “We need to go back to the convention. The convention does not recognize that Korea or UAE are responsible.”

Still, the UAE pledge has become the most prominent example of a wealthy developing nation providing climate aid. It’s also the first Gulf state to provide substantial funding; while Qatar pledged to the adaptation fund in 2021, its $500,000 contribution was largely symbolic. Thwaites said that the UAE pledge will put pressure on Saudi Arabia to step up. 

“They have typically been the big holdouts here, but when their neighbor and peer and quite close ally is willing to step up with not just a small token amount but the joint second-biggest pledge to this new fund, that’s really significant,” said Thwaites. “The Saudis are going to be feeling the pressure.” (Saudi officials did not respond to Grist’s questions, and UAE officials declined to comment about the pledge.)

One big question is whether any pressure will be felt by China, which is by far the largest national emitter of carbon dioxide in the world at present. Wealthy countries have long been pressuring China to contribute to international climate aid. In the 1990s, when the United Nations classification was established, China was much, much poorer and its emissions were low. But its rapid economic growth, unprecedented in world history, took off around that time; as a result, its emissions surpassed those of the U.S. by the mid-2000s. The country has provided some climate aid outside of United Nations funds and also contributed nearly $130 million to the Green Environment Facility, which has a broader mandate than just tackling climate change. But it hasn’t met calls for more substantial funding, and last year Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said it wouldn’t contribute to the loss-and-damage fund.

“China does want to position itself as a supporter of Global South nations,” said Alex Wang, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studies Chinese environmental governance. “Right now there is a sort of geopolitical competition among the West and in China to win the favor of Global South countries.”

The commitments to the loss-and-damage fund over the last week came as a relief to many. Negotiators and climate advocates feared that they would spend precious time and energy at COP28 debating details of the fund’s operations and that wealthy countries wouldn’t pledge money. The World Bank, which is expected to host the fund for the first four years, had announced that it needed $200 million to just set up the fund. The Germany and UAE pledges alone ensured the fund would have the capital it needed to get started. So far, roughly $725 million in pledges — including those of the German and Emirati governments — have poured in.

“It was very important that loss-and-damage finance is not a bargaining chip,” Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy, told Grist. “There is a saying in German: ‘A heavy stone has fallen from your heart.’ It describes well what negotiators said they felt. Many are relieved. Now there is more space to discuss other issues.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How two $100 million pledges shook an ‘old world’ order at COP28 on Dec 11, 2023.

In the summer of 2022, one of the worst monsoons on record turned swaths of Bangladesh, a low-lying country in South Asia, into huge, muddy lakes. When the brunt of the flooding finally eased, at least 141 people had died and millions of others throughout the region had been injured, impoverished, or displaced. The sheer scale of the destruction made 2022 an outlier year, but data from the past few decades signals that the historic monsoon was part of a larger trend: Climate change is making South Asia’s rainy season more intense and inconsistent. Unusually fierce floods have plagued the region earlier in the year and more often than they used to — a pattern that research shows will continue, and worsen, as the planet warms in the years ahead. 

A study published last week shows Bangladesh’s intensifying monsoons come with a staggering death toll, both in the immediate aftermath of the flooding itself and, more significantly, in the months that follow. The true scale of the toll has not been fully captured by local officials, aid organizations, or the international research community. 

The same is likely true for other parts of the world that experience recurrent climate disasters. “In the climate and health field, we often evaluate the health effects of specific acute events, because it’s easier to account for all the other potential factors that could be confounding the association,” said Lara Schwarz, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. But a focus on the short-term obscures the larger picture. “Most climate events don’t occur only once and are likely to harm vulnerable populations over and over, through years, decades, and generations,” she said. 

In the new study, researchers from the University of California in San Diego and in San Francisco found that flooding contributed to the deaths of 152,753 infants — defined as children 11 months and younger — in Bangladesh in the three decades between 1988 and 2017. The researchers used health surveys conducted by the United States Agency for International Development to collect data on more than 150,000 births over the course of the 30 years. They compared that data against high-resolution maps of major floods over that time span and found a stark difference in mortality risk: There were 5.3 more infant deaths per 1,000 births in flood-prone areas than in non-flood-prone areas. The authors extrapolated from this finding to estimate how many infant deaths, overall, were attributable to flooding in Bangladesh over the time period they studied. 

Infants are an especially vulnerable subset of the population, and changes in infant health can reflect the prevalence of health issues in the wider population. “Death is the most severe health outcome,” said Schwarz. “The increased risk of infant mortality suggests that populations living in a flood-prone region may also be at higher risk of other adverse health problems such as improper nutrition, water-borne diseases, and poor mental health.”

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The majority of the deaths were likely linked to three flooding-related conditions. The first, diarrheal disease, often spreads when flooding overwhelms local sanitation infrastructure and causes drinking-water supplies to be contaminated. Cholera, one of the most common and deadliest water-borne bacterial diseases, is a particular concern in poor countries where sanitation infrastructure is underdeveloped. Flooding also contributes to outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, because standing water creates ample breeding ground for mosquitoes. Finally, flooding turns agricultural fields into bogs and can lead to massive crop losses, which contribute to existing food insecurity in Bangladesh. Babies are extremely vulnerable to hunger. The Lancet, a leading medical journal that publishes an annual analysis of the impacts of climate change on human health around the world, has identified bacterial and vector-borne diseases and malnutrition as top areas of concern. 

Drownings and other injuries from the flooding also led to a small percentage of the deaths, the study’s authors told Grist. All of the health-related risks posed by flooding, from the first drowning to the last case of dengue, were exacerbated by socioeconomic factors like food security, family income, vaccination history, access to medical care, and the condition of local infrastructure such as sewage systems and drinking-water treatment facilities.

The authors of the study told Grist that their results indicate that the risks of environmental health hazards are shifting as climate change worsens. Government health agencies and researchers often collect information on the immediate public health impacts of a single extreme weather event. But, because a warmer world also means a world plagued by more frequent and intense disasters, communities are being affected by extreme weather repeatedly. The long-term, cumulative health consequences of events that occur on a yearly or sometimes even more frequent basis are not well understood by the scientific community. And as such, the world has a flawed understanding of the true human cost of extreme weather.

“We need to understand this kind of long-term impact in the context of climate change, because communities are going to be repeatedly and systematically exposed to these hazards,” said Tarik Benmahria, an environmental health researcher at University of California, San Diego, and one of three authors of the Bangladesh study. “These types of issues used to be exceptional by definition,” he added. “They’re not anymore.”

The method used by the researchers to determine the burden of flooding on communities in Bangladesh over multiple years, Schwarz said, “has the potential to be applied to evaluate the long-term effects of other climate exposures.” Extreme heat, hurricanes, and drought, to name a few of the environmental disasters being exacerbated by climate change, can also have compounding health effects that occur weeks, months, even years after the event takes place. If future research pinpoints how and when these effects occur, it could potentially save lives. “The approach is very relevant to other areas of the world that are vulnerable to recurrent climate hazards,” Schwarz said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden death toll of flooding in Bangladesh sends a grim signal about climate and health on Dec 11, 2023.

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, presented with great fanfare the so-called “Green Deal.” The package consisted of new laws and directives, goals, and multi-billion-euro funding opportunities designed to transform the continent into a sustainability powerhouse and a model for the rest of the world. The initiative aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and to net zero by 2050. Additional goals were added, like making farming more sustainable, rewilding large swaths of Europe’s natural areas, and halving pesticide use in agriculture, among others.

But four years later, progress on green policies in Europe is stalling or, worse, going backward. Instead of moving ahead with bold actions to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, many efforts are currently under attack, have been watered down, or are even being reversed in individual member states and at the EU level. Rattled by Russia’s war against Ukraine and global instability, EU countries are scrambling to secure alternative sources for fossil fuels instead of accelerating renewable energy use, and they are wary of imposing new emissions-reduction rules on the auto industry. Faced with a string of electoral victories of right-wing populist parties in Italy, Finland, Sweden, and Hungary — often with strong support from farming communities — issues like protecting biodiversity have moved from a hard-won central position to the fringe. Europe’s role as a green frontrunner has been fundamentally called into question as it faces strong political forces in many capitals.

Germany, the EU’s most populous state and its largest economy, exemplifies the recent shift. When Steffi Lemke, the German cabinet minister in charge of the environment, spoke at the country’s most prestigious environmental awards ceremony in late October, she laid out the issue bluntly. “As ecologists and environmentalists, we underestimated how great the resistance would be when we started to bring the goals of the Paris climate agreement and the Montreal biodiversity agreement to life,” the Green Party member said. “But now we face the wall of those who want to prevent this and who don’t want to move forward.”

Only a few days later, Christian Lindner, the leader of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, which shares power with the left-leaning Greens and the center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany’s coalition government, proved Lemke’s point. Citing energy insecurity due to the Ukraine war, Lindner, who is also Germany’s finance minister, withdrew his party’s support for a crucial agreement between the governing parties to phase out the nation’s coal-burning power plants by 2030. “Until it is clear that energy is available and affordable, we should end dreams of phasing out coal-fired power” by that year, he said. The goal of the phaseout was to create additional pressure for utilities to expand wind and solar farms as fast a possible. Without the 2030 deadline, that pressure is much reduced.

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Earlier in the year, the Free Democrats weakened the Greens’ most important piece of legislation, which aimed to replace heating systems that run on oil and gas with heat pumps and renewable energy sources. In addition, the Free Democrats, who are responsible for the government’s transport policy, have blocked all attempts to reduce car traffic or impose a national speed limit on autobahns. The country’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, from the Social Democratic Party, has largely given the Free Democrats a free hand in their anti-environment course.

Scholz fears that ever-stricter rules on heating and car use will further increase support for hard-right parties, who promise to abandon environment targets altogether. Populist sentiments have run high in Germany since the summer, when the influential Bild tabloid — which is co-owned by KKR, one of the largest investment firms serving the U.S. fossil fuel industry — launched a months-long campaign against an alleged “Heiz-Hammer,” or heating hammer, that was seen as forcing sudden changes upon ordinary people. Neoliberals and conservatives “have made the Greens public enemy No. 1,” Sudha David-Wilp, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, a research institute, told the New York Times. Conservative state governors, who only a few years ago hugged trees in election campaigns and promised to save dwindling insect populations, are now ridiculing or fiercely attacking environment policies, warning of a looming “Verbotstaat,” a term for government overreach.

Brigitte Knopf, deputy chair of the scientific body in charge of monitoring Germany’s progress toward its climate goals, is deeply concerned. The nation has committed to shrinking its CO2 emissions to 65 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Yet the decrease is not fully supported by concrete measures. In order to comply with its year-to-year goals, Germany would need to prevent cumulative emissions of about 1 billion tons of CO2 until 2030. But “even after the government passed its most important CO₂ reduction package this summer, there is [an emissions] gap of 200 million tons” — a 20 percent shortfall — mainly in the areas of heating and transport, she warned.

Knopf, a physicist who also serves as secretary general of the Berlin-based think tank Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, is worried that the German government will set a bad example in the EU and neglect its obligations under the Paris climate accord. “We urgently need a signal to Europe that Germany will take further steps,” she said. “But right now, the climate gap is simply accepted.”

Since the EU’s Green Deal was launched in 2019, some progress has been made across the 27 nations. Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 31 percent compared to 1990, according to new data from the European Environment Agency. The EU has created a powerful emissions trading system that puts a price on CO₂ and reduces available allowances year by year. By 2028, this system is planned to include 75 percent of all energy-related emissions.

But there’s still a long way to go. CO₂ emissions have to decrease sharply, mainly in areas like heavy manufacturing and steelmaking, which are difficult to decarbonize, and emissions from vehicles with combustion engines, which means cutting into people’s routines. At 23 percent, the share of renewable energy is far below the 2030 target of 42.5 percent.

Meanwhile, biodiversity in Europe continues to dwindle. Populations of formerly common birds inhabiting farmland have shrunk by more than one-third since 1990. Protected areas of land and sea cover far less than the 30 percent target, and a new study has just revealed that nearly one-fifth of all European plant and animal species are threatened by regional extinction, a much higher share than recent Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services assumptions. Last week, a tentative agreement was reached in Brussels on what’s been called the “world’s first nature restoration law,” which aims to put in place measures to restore 20 percent of the EU’s terrestrial and marine ecosystems to good condition by 2030, and to restore all degraded ecosystems by 2050. But it came with so many caveats and concessions that environmental organizations were not in a mood to celebrate.

In many smaller EU countries, environmental progress has spawned a full-blown backlash. In Slovakia, the newly elected populist prime minister, Robert Fico, wanted to appoint an infamous climate-change denialist and anti-environment provocateur as environment minister, mimicking Hungary. Slovakia’s president, who is not part of the government, took the unusual step of rejecting the candidate for failing to support the scientific consensus on climate change. Fico, whose government includes left- and right-wing populist parties, then brought in a substitute who presents as more moderate but has a history of weakening laws to protect Slovakia’s nature, according to environmentalists who cite his opposition to stricter protection for the country’s national parks.

After right-wing populists led by Giorgia Meloni came to power in Italy in fall 2022, they swiftly retracted environmental commitments made by the previous government. “No one in this government really cares about climate change,” says Giuliana Biagioli, an economic and environmental historian who is president of Leonardo-IRTA, a sustainability research institute associated with the University of Pisa. Funds originally destined for the transition to a greener economy have been redirected “to make Italy a gas hub” in response to supply problems from Russia, Biagioli says. In her assessment, “the urgent need to find other ways to energy provisioning has pushed commitments to decarbonization into the background.” She thinks it will be almost impossible for Italy to help the EU reach its emissions goals.

Similar developments are underway in the continent’s far North. Scandinavia’s reputation as a champion of green progress took a big hit after coalitions that include right-wing populist parties were recently elected. The new government in Stockholm cut funding for climate measures and reduced taxes on petrol in one of its first acts. Mattias Goldmann from Sweden’s 2030-secretariat, a watchdog NGO, called the cuts a “gasoline-soaked budget fuse.”

In Finland, the newly elected right-wing government cut taxes meant to further reduce CO₂ emissions, stopped projects that would have improved the capacity of Finland’s extensive bogs to sequester carbon, and has failed to take steps to protect old-growth forests from logging for energy production, says Liisa Rohweder, CEO of WWF Finland.

The backlash in many EU countries mirrors developments in the U.K., where the conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reversing climate-friendly policies and planning to “max out” oil production.

Frans Timmermans, who acted as vice president of the EU commission until August and is considered the architect of the bloc’s Green Deal, now sounds the alarm that Europe could fall behind on its goals. Timmermans left his Brussels post to run for prime minister of the Netherlands in elections scheduled for November 22. He is now pursuing a “Dutch Green Deal” to save his legacy, at least in his home country. “The rest of the world doesn’t stand still” in the green economic transition, he warned at a recent campaign event, citing the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act, which focuses on green technologies and infrastructure, and China’s “renewable energy revolution.”

Environmentalists also worry about Poland, even though the right-wing populist, anti-environment coalition recently lost its majority. Green campaigners fear that the new coalition, which has yet to form, will not live up to its pledges to increase renewable energy and protect old-growth forests in the Carpathian Mountains. Says Marek Józefiak, of Greenpeace Poland, “What worries us is that for now, environmental issues are not listed among their priorities.”

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Nor do they seem to be priorities in Brussels anymore. EU commission president von der Leyen finds herself in a balancing act between implementing the Green Deal and rallying support from her conservative European People’s Party (EPP) for a second term starting in 2024. While von der Leyen has stayed personally committed to climate and biodiversity action, the EPP has recently become increasingly fierce in its resistance to new environmental measures. It has even employed disinformation strategies, claiming in social media posts that rewilding wetlands will lead to the abandonment of whole villages.

Emboldened by electoral victories in member states, the EPP successfully weakened the “Nature Restoration Law” in negotiations, softened goals on wetlands restoration, and limited the law’s scope. When key players carved out a final agreement earlier this month, upon which the European Parliament will vote in February, they gave up on obliging member states to reach ambitious nature restoration goals by certain dates, settling instead on prescribing lofty “efforts.”

“It is clearly noticeable that countries are vacating positions that they helped to decide on just two years ago,” says Jutta Paulus, a member of parliament from the Green Party who has been involved in several high-level negotiations. “In some areas we still see progress, but in many others, we are regressing.”

Back in 2019, Greens performed very well in European elections, which raised the profile of environmental topics. Paulus now shares the fears of many NGOs and scientists across Europe that climate and biodiversity policies are increasingly being pushed to the sidelines: “Many parties are currently afraid to talk about the environment at all, because the argument immediately comes up that we have completely different crises now, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, and we have to stop with the [so-called] ‘flowery stuff.’”

But Greenpeace Poland’s Marek Józefiak pushes back on this view of environmentalists’ concerns: “We want what our lives depend on” — a healthy planet — “to be taken seriously and urgently.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Shifting political winds threaten progress on Europe’s green goals on Dec 10, 2023.