Fraught G20 meeting on new climate targets highlights divisions
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G20 environment ministers pledged to adopt new climate targets within the next three months, after a hard-fought summit in Naples which at times appeared to be on the brink of disintegrating.
In a communiqué, parts of which were seen by the FT on Friday evening, ministers said they would boost their climate targets, known as “nationally determined contributions”, ahead of the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.
However the ministers failed to reach agreement on either phasing out coal or removing subsidies for fossil fuels, because of opposition from Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia.
In a sign of how fraught the talks were, meetings in Naples ran through the night on Thursday evening, leaving many delegates exhausted.
“It was a marathon,” said Italian minister Roberto Cingolani, the host of the summit, in a delayed Friday evening press conference. “As you see from my shirt, I have been sweating and it was not particularly easy.”
The final communiqué text, already agreed in principle, is expected to be published this weekend.
The G20’s diverse membership — which includes blocs with ambitious climate targets, such as the EU, as well as those that have resisted cutting emissions, such as Russia — rarely sees eye-to-eye on climate issues.
The Naples meeting was the first time so many environment ministers had gathered in person since the beginning of the pandemic and was seen as a litmus test for the Glasgow summit.
Cingolani hailed the agreement as “radical” and “unprecedented”, saying it would “pave the way to COP26.”
Alden Meyer, senior associate at E3G, a climate advocacy group, said the deal represented “progress on some fronts — but based on where they started, which was in pretty deep division.”
The promise to submit new climate plans before COP26 will “put a number of countries on the hook,” he added.
“We intend to update or communicate ambitious NDCs by COP26, and we welcome those who have already done so,” a draft of the communiqué text said, seen by the FT on Friday evening.
All signatories of the 2015 Paris climate accord, including all of the G20 countries, are in theory required to submit new targets ahead of the COP summit, but many have not done so.
Countries that have not yet submitted these plans include India, South Africa, Turkey and South Korea.
Even for countries that have submitted their targets, the plans fall far short of what would be needed to meet the goals of the Paris pact, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2C since pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5C, according to a UN report card earlier this year.
In a sign that the G20 group of economies was starting to take climate policies more seriously, its finance ministers this month endorsed carbon pricing for the first time. Leaders of the G20 will next convene in October.
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