Go back three months, and there seemed little happening on the climate breakdown front, despite the approaching COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey. With that conference now underway, it may appear that progress is being made, particularly given hopeful signs of action following two elections in recent weeks.
First, Brazil’s progressive incumbent president, Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva was re-elected for a record fourth term and is expected to continue his policy of curbing the loss of one of the world’s main carbon sinks, the Amazonian rainforest.
Then, in the United States, Republican candidates were trounced as the Democrats took overall control of both the House and the Senate. It was a grim verdict on Donald Trump’s first two years in office and good news on the climate issue. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” view on fossil fuels was knocked back along with his status, sparking an immediate burst of investor support for the renewable energy market.
Some further glimmers of hope came this week at COP31 itself, not least the news that carbon emissions for this year are forecast to flatline – partly due to China, the world’s biggest emitter, continuing its strong state-supported move away from fossil carbon.
But for experienced climate analysts, the overall picture still looks bleak.
While flat-lining emissions represent progress, they must fall by as much as 10% a year in the immediate future if climate breakdown is to be avoided. This seems unlikely while the transition to renewables remains dangerously slow due to a formidably well-resourced fossil carbon lobby.
What’s more, COP31 has also delivered bad news: 2026 will likely be the second year (after 2024) in which global temperatures exceed the recommended maximum rise of 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels.
As the UN head, António Guterres, put it on the second day of the conference: “It is long past time to stop treating the transition away from fossil fuels as taboo or intractable. Now, here at COP31, we must move from discussing the transition to organising it, financing it, and delivering it.”
What are the chances of that happening? For now, they are low, despite the expansion in renewables, but there is one element that gets too little attention: devastating climate events, which tell us what to expect as the world heats up. Two in particular from recent years stand out.
One came just weeks ago, when a climate-linked catastrophe caused a huge loss of life in southern Tibet and Nepal at the end of August. Survivors told the UN that, following a massive glacier collapse, a “wall of water more than 100 metres high, travelling at 180 kilometres per hour, which devastated 60 kilometres of valley”. More than 1,500 people were killed, 5,600 missing, and more than 100 bridges, 20 hydropower dams and 23 schools destroyed.
It was a tangible expression of climate injustice, said senior UN official Jorge Moreira da Silva. Nepal emits just 0.08% of global greenhouse gas emissions yet is disproportionately affected by climate disasters.
For a few days after the tragedy, while it was still making headlines, some people made the link with climate breakdown. Then the climate narrative drifted away in the face of other global threats and COP31 looked unlikely to make much difference.
The other climate disaster came years earlier, in September 2023. Storm Daniel dumped the equivalent of half a year’s rainfall in a single day over the upland catchment that feeds into the Wadi Derna river running through the heart of the city of Derna, on the coast of northern Libya.
A massive surge of floodwater overwhelmed the Bu Mansour Dam 12 kilometres from the city. This, in turn, caused floodwater to hit the Al-Bilad Dam, just over a kilometre outside Derna, which also collapsed. The result was a huge wall of water hitting the city with little or no warning. Many thousands of people were killed in a matter of minutes, washed out to sea, their bodies lost. In the immediate aftermath, the city’s mayor put the death toll at 20,000, but later estimates ranged from 11,000 to 24,000.
The disaster was compounded by more than 15 years of insecurity and neglect across Libya in the wake of one of the several failed Western wars of the post 9/11 era. This was the Anglo-French military operation to terminate the Gaddafi regime in 2011, from which Libya has still not recovered despite its wealth of resources.
In different ways, the Nepal and Derna disasters were pointers to the near-term future, with similar disasters and worse well-nigh certain. Most so far have been in the Global South, and the wider impact of climate breakdown will certainly be far worse for poorer communities right across the world.
While parts of Europe and North America have experienced devastating wildfires and floods in recent years, none so far has had a loss of life on the scale seen in Derna or Nepal. It may take a catastrophe – or even several catastrophes – of the same magnitude hitting a major Western city, such as an intense heat dome or super-hurricane in New York or Los Angeles, to finally wake people up to the reality of climate breakdown and trigger structural policy change.
What all this adds up to is two trends working in parallel but, in a sense, in opposite directions. One is climate breakdown getting steadily worse and leading to multiple catastrophes; the other is a world slowly moving to a decarbonised economy to prevent it.
The positive news is that the huge and very welcome developments in renewable energy systems make that second trend possible. The bad news is that it may take numerous disasters to make that happen, so the more we do to prevent them the better, from citizen and community action through to global summits.
