Some climate advocates have grown weary of the seemingly endless stream of splashy announcements at the annual U.N. climate confabs. They’re pushing negotiators at the next summit, which will be held in Dubai this month, to back up their pledges with concrete actions — or risk undermining the legitimacy of the talks.
“There is a bit of a pledging fatigue,” said Carlos Lopes, who chairs the board of the African Climate Foundation, a grant-making organization based in Cape Town, South Africa. “We go into these meetings, and there is another pledge and then another pledge. And people are actually not fulfilling their commitments.”
At the summit in Glasgow in 2021, more than 140 countries, representing over 85 percent of the world’s forests, vowed to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. Signatories of the declaration included large forest nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But other rainforest countries, such as Bolivia and Venezuela, have not yet joined.
The declaration recognized that trees play a critical role in combating climate change by storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches and roots. When trees are cut down or burn in a wildfire, they release this carbon back into the atmosphere.
No industrialized nations made a bold pledge…. Except maybe possibly a few in the EU. For a pledge to be considered “bold” requires the honest intention of following through. We have no evidence most of these nations honestly intended to follow through. Lacking such evidence, most of the pledges must be described with some other adjective and the best one I can think of is “bullsh!t”
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Two years ago, scores of world leaders [promised to take bold action ](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/02/cop26-climate-biden-glasgow/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2)to tackle global warming at a U.N. climate summit in Scotland, vowing to end deforestation over the next decade and slash emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Today, countries are still far from meeting these much-hyped promises, even as the impacts of climate change intensify across the globe. Deforestation remains rampant, pushing the Amazon rainforest toward a [tipping point](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-brazil-tipping-point/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4). Levels of methane in the atmosphere continue to climb to new records. The planet just [endured its hottest 12 months](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/11/09/earth-hottest-months-climate-warming/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4) in the modern era — and probably the hottest in 125,000 years.
Some climate advocates have grown weary of the seemingly endless stream of splashy announcements at the annual U.N. climate confabs. They’re pushing negotiators at the next summit, which will be held in Dubai this month, to back up their pledges with concrete actions — or risk undermining the legitimacy of the talks.
“There is a bit of a pledging fatigue,” said Carlos Lopes, who chairs the board of the African Climate Foundation, a grant-making organization based in Cape Town, South Africa. “We go into these meetings, and there is another pledge and then another pledge. And people are actually not fulfilling their commitments.”
At the summit in Glasgow in 2021, more than 140 countries, representing over 85 percent of the world’s forests, vowed to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. Signatories of the declaration included large forest nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But other rainforest countries, such as Bolivia and Venezuela, have not yet joined.
The declaration recognized that trees play a critical role in combating climate change by storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches and roots. When trees are cut down or burn in a wildfire, they release this carbon back into the atmosphere.
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No industrialized nations made a bold pledge…. Except maybe possibly a few in the EU. For a pledge to be considered “bold” requires the honest intention of following through. We have no evidence most of these nations honestly intended to follow through. Lacking such evidence, most of the pledges must be described with some other adjective and the best one I can think of is “bullsh!t”