The State of Climate Action 2022 provides a comprehensive assessment of the global gap in climate action across the world’s highest-emitting systems, highlighting where recent progress made in reducing GHG emissions, scaling up carbon removal, and increasing climate finance must accelerate over the next decade to keep the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5°C within reach.

Although claims about climate/conflict links remain contested, concerns that climate change will affect peace and security have gained traction in academic, activist, and policy circles. One set of pressures for responsive action has centered on the UN Security Council, which has held several often-contentious debates on the topic. Whether the Council should address climate change is a highly politicized question, tied to controversies about the Council’s mandate, membership reform, and the appropriate division of labor in the UN system. Lost in this political debate has been a more fundamental question—what exactly could the Council do? We examine six specific proposals for Council action culled from the academic and policy literature and the public positions of member states. These include incorporating climate risks into peacekeeping operations, developing an early-warning system, managing the threat to small-island states, engaging in preventive diplomacy, addressing climate refugees, and embracing a climate-related analogy to the norm of a responsibility to protect. For each proposal, our analysis—which is based on interviews conducted at the UN, archival research, and case histories of past instances of adapting the Council’s focus to new challenges—examines what it would mean and require for the Council to act. We also identify a series of measures that constitute a “pragmatic transformative” agenda. These steps recognize the poor fit between the climate challenge and the Council as it is currently constituted, but also the potential to use climate as part of a larger transformation toward the better Council the world needs.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires far-reaching transformations across power generation, buildings, industry, transport, land use, coastal zone management, and agriculture, as well as the immediate scale-up of technological carbon removal and climate finance. This report translates these transitions into 40 targets for 2030 and 2050, with measurable indicators. Transformations, particularly those driven by new technology adoption, often unfold slowly before accelerating after crossing a tipping point. Nearly a quarter of indicators assessed new technology adoption, with some already growing exponentially. This report considers such nonlinear change in its methodology. The transitions required to avoid the worst climate impacts are not happening fast enough. Of the 40 indicators assessed, none are on track to reach 2030 targets. Change is heading in the right direction at a promising but insufficient speed for 8 and in the right direction but well below the required pace for 17. Progress has stagnated for 3, while change for another 3 is heading in the wrong direction entirely. Data are insufficient to evaluate the remaining 9. This report also identifies underlying conditions that enable change—supportive policies, innovations, strong institutions, leadership, and shifts in social norms. Finance for climate action, for example, must increase nearly 13-fold to meet the estimated need in 2030.

This issue brief reviews ways to make the GST most effective within the confines of the structure already negotiated. It builds on publications under the Independent Global Stocktake (iGST)—a collaborative effort by climate modelers, analysts, campaigners, and advocates that aims to support the GST process. It was prepared on the basis of a multiyear research effort by multiple organizations under the iGST’s “Designing a Robust Stocktake” discussion series, which analyzes the GST from a variety of angles, such as mitigation, adaptation, finance, and equity. The publications in this series were produced through targeted interviews, webinars, written feedback, and direct inputs.

In 2009, as part of the Copenhagen Accord, developed countries committed to collectively mobilizing $100 billion annually in climate finance by 2020 to support developing countries in reducing emissions and adapting to climate change. This commitment is foundational to the “grand bargain” behind the Paris Agreement: that all countries would commit to more ambitious climate action but developing countries would require enhanced support from developed countries to do so. The $100 billion is a collective commitment by developed countries, and meeting it will require them all to do their part. Over the past decade, there have been several assessments of aggregate progress towards the goal, but until now, no data set has attempted to comprehensively break down each country’s full public financial contribution. This technical note aims to fill this gap, increasing transparency and accountability around progress towards the $100 billion commitment by breaking down how much each developed country has contributed in public climate finance between 2013 and 2018, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available. The individual breakdowns are then used to assess how countries’ efforts compare using a variety of metrics. The methodology for breaking down and analyzing individual country contributions can be applied to future climate finance data. To improve accountability of countries’ contributions towards the $100 billion commitment, this technical note identified several methodological barriers that need to be addressed in future climate finance reporting efforts.