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data from Global Forest Watch shows that Brazil, DRC and Indonesia were among the top five countries for primary forest loss in 2021, with 11.1m hectares of tree cover lost in the tropics overall last year.

All countries — especially G20 countries — that have submitted “updated” NDCs that were no more ambitious than their previous commitments, and countries that have not yet communicated new or updated NDCs at all, should update their NDCs and long-term strategies in a credible, ambitious manner

developed countries must lead on climate ambition — they are the laggards in living up to their climate promises despite their overwhelming contribution to the climate crisis

After COP26, it was noted “with deep regret” the failure of developed countries to meet the $100 billion goal they originally promised to achieve by 2020, feeding into the credibility gap and hamstringing the ability of developing countries to plan further climate action.

clear finance targets for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage finance

$600 billion in climate finance from 2020-2025

The urgency for enhanced adaptation action is underscored by the IPCC Working Group II report, mentioned previously,  which finds that every tenth of a degree of additional warming will escalate threats to people, species and ecosystems. Yet many communities still lack the resources required to manage today’s climate change impacts, let alone worse impacts in the future.

countries must also prepare their National Adaptation Plans and Adaptation Communications

developed countries need to provide grant-based funding to finance adaptation plans, especially through the Adaptation Fund and other entities of the Financial Mechanism established under the UNFCCC.

despite an urgent plea from climate-vulnerable countries, the proposal for a new loss and damage financing facility was  rejected by developed nations. Instead, at COP26, countries established the Glasgow Dialogue to discuss possible arrangements for loss and damage funding, with the first discussion to be held in June 2022.

even the most effective adaptation measures cannot prevent all losses and damages, which are a present-day reality for vulnerable people in certain regions

Countries also made progress at COP26 on the operationalization and funding of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which aims to provide developing countries with technical assistance on how to address loss and damage in a robust and effective manner. Sufficient financing for the SNLD is crucial to ensure technical support for developing countries and to create a new method in encouraging technical assistance that is country-owned and emphasizes local expertise.

The first Global Stocktake process must be done in a way that is inclusive, raises awareness, ensures the meaningful participation of Global South organizations, and paves the way for a comprehensive outcome that promotes increased NDC ambition and is centered around equity. Additionally, the UN Secretary General should hold countries and non-state actors accountable to develop a robust accountability system for commitments made outside of the UNFCCC process.

Shortly after COP27, we will be more than a quarter of the way through the decisive decade — what will the world have to show for it? Now is the time for solidarity and ambitious, real, on-the-ground action and support that will deliver justice for vulnerable countries and communities. While realizing countries’ differentiated responsibilities and capacities, the world needs to be all in, all together on climate.

Europe’s scramble to buy up the global supply of liquified natural gas to replace Russian gas has left fuel-starved Pakistan and India with little choice but to burn more coal for air conditioning amid a record-breaking heatwave. The same wealthy Europeans who have been promising to remove fossil fuel subsidies since 2009 have shown little compunction about subsidizing oil and gas in 2022.

the U.S. administration is breaking a promise to stop selling leases for new oil and gas drilling on public lands and crossing its fingers in hopes that the Supreme Court does not gut the executive branch’s authority to regulate power plant emissions.

What does an Egyptian diplomat hear when the United States warns about new natural gas capacity “lock[ing] in decades of new emissions”  when the Biden administration cannot prevent its own postal service from spending billions on new fossil-fueled trucks in 2022?

concrete agreements where wealthy democracies pay to help countries like South Africa phase out coal remain rare bright spots in a murky picture.

A perception of Western dishonesty is among the varied economic and historical reasons why forty countries—including large democracies like India, Brazil, and South Africa—declined to condemn Russia’s invasion at the UN

Admittedly, domestic politics and a hard-nosed perception of the national interest are the main drivers of policy everywhere—Global South countries expect the West (and others) to think of itself first and global public goods second. Yet Western claims to uphold the “liberal, rules-based international order” are undermined by repeated failures to protect that order from climate stress.

Gabon, one of the most forested nations and home to more than half of the remaining critically endangered African forest elephants, is holding one of the largest ever sales of carbon credits, generated by protecting its portion of the Congo basin rainforest, the world’s second largest and the last that sucks in more carbon than it releases.

White said his country, which gets about 60% of its state revenue from oil, accepted that the oil economy would go and that greater emphasis needed to be placed on sustainable forestry and timber.

“Over and over again, developed nations have committed and not delivered. They’ve committed to reduce emissions and they’re not delivering sufficiently. They’ve committed to funding and that funding doesn’t ever seem to materialise. We didn’t create the problem and so you would expect a more sincere engagement from developed nations and you would expect them to respect their word and their engagements,”

Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround. The peak will still be expected around 2030. Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming. A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year. That is equivalent to 25 percent of America’s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together. Due to the decentralization of decision-making, Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity

Chinese officials laugh when they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “just transition” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China. It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry.

Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU. The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. climate conference planned for Glasgow in November. Rather than a summit in Leipzig, the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference. The exchanges were surprisingly substantive. The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition. They have given a cautious welcome to Xi’s U.N. statement. They can hardly have expected more.

Now the pressure will be on India, long China’s partner in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonization, to make a similarly bold climate announcement

On the one hand, the Europeans increasingly want to stake out a strong position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea. Europe’s residual attachment to the United States is real. But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy. The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker.

The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States. If you are serious about the issue, how could you? If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety, that will, of course, be welcome. But in light of America’s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement, even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments, what would that amount to? So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion, so long as the rearguard of the fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is, so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue, America’s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments.

Trump’s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because Obama never put the Paris agreement to Congress. Indeed, after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009, the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal, the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change. Instead, it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda, anchored on ending coal.

If there are affordable and high-quality technological options, the switch to green will happen. Due to the advances in solar and wind power, we are rapidly approaching that point. Whatever Trump’s bluster, coal is on its way out in the United States, too.

There are no doubt positive synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up. Solar and wind have already given examples of that. But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus, it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China. Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China.

For the United States, everything hangs in the balance. For the rest of the world, that is not the case. As Xi made clear on Sept. 22, as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned, the major players are no longer waiting. If the United States joins the decarbonization train, that will be all well and good. A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome. But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed. China and Europe are decoupling.

59 percent of the gap stems from how countries account for emissions from land, a unique sector in that it can both help and harm the climate. Land can draw in carbon as plants grow and soils store it away — or it can all go back up into the atmosphere as forests are logged or burn and as peat-rich bogs are drained and start to emit large amounts of carbon dioxide

methane emissions comprise a second major portion of the missing greenhouse gases in the U.N. database. Independent scientific data sets show between 57 million and 76 million tons more of human-caused methane emissions hitting the atmosphere than U.N. country reports do. That converts to between 1.6 billion and 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions

countries are undercounting methane of all kinds: in the oil and gas sector, where it leaks from pipelines and other sources; in agriculture, where it wafts upward from the burps and waste of cows and other ruminant animals; and in human waste, where landfills are a major source

Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) lists Russia as the world’s top oil and gas methane emitter, but that’s not what Russia reports to the United Nations. Its official numbers fall millions of tons shy of what independent scientific analyses show, a Post investigation found. Many oil and gas producers in the Persian Gulf region, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, also report very small levels of oil and gas methane emission that don’t line up with other scientific data sets.

fluorinated gases, which are exclusively human-made, also are underreported significantly. Known as “F-gases,” they are used in air conditioning, refrigeration and the electricity industry. But The Post found that dozens of countries don’t report these emissions at all — a major shortcoming since some of these potent greenhouse gases are a growing part of the world’s climate problem.

Vietnamese officials said more recent reports assume fluorinated gases do not escape from air conditioning and refrigeration systems. But they do: U.S. supermarkets lose an average of 25 percent of their fluorinated refrigerants each year.

Some countries with lagging data have significant carbon footprints: Iran, one of the top 10 largest emitters, has not filed an inventory since 2010; Qatar, a large natural gas producer, last revealed its emissions in 2007; and Algeria, a major oil and gas producer, in 2000.

more than 1 billion tons of emissions from international air travel and shipping, for which no country takes responsibility.

emission reports are so unwieldy that the United Nations does not have a complete database to track country emissions. Some 45 countries have not reported any new greenhouse gas numbers since 2009

While the Paris agreement calls for a more transparent system by the end of 2024, it could take until 2030 to get to robust reporting — an eternity compared with the tight time frame the world needs to get it right. The world has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels, leaving a very narrow path to avoid crossing the dangerous warming thresholds of 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.

In one of the most striking cases, Ciais’s study found that methane leakage from fossil fuel operations in the oil states of the Persian Gulf could be as much as seven times more than what they officially report.

On the one hand, the Earth is working harder to mitigate carbon pollution than we may realize. On the other hand, droughts, wildfires and other major disturbances tied to climate change quickly can release much of this carbon again.

The bulk of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels, which can be tallied with reasonable precision. But more than a third are not easily tracked, including the emissions that arise when forests are chopped down or lost to fire, peatlands are drained, or excess fertilizer is spread on agricultural fields.

the U.N. reporting guidelines don’t currently require any atmospheric or satellite measurements, known as a “top-down” approach. Rather, the guidelines ask scientific bookkeepers in each country to quantify levels of a particular activity. This includes the number of cows, whose burps makes up 4 percent of total greenhouse gases, the amount of fertilizer used or how much peatland was converted to cropland in a given year. Then, countries multiply those units by an “emissions factor” — an estimate of how much gas each activity produces — to determine a total for everything from belching cows to tailpipe emissions.

“garbage in, garbage out.”

Malaysia’s skewed data vividly illustrates the high stakes countries face as they confront the growing pressure to reduce emissions while managing the very real economic consequences that process triggers.In the past decade, some in the Southeast Asian nation have gone to great lengths to counter the scientific conclusion that its oil palm industry is releasing huge amounts of carbon

across Sarawak and other regions of Malaysia, 4,000 square miles of these forests — close to the size of Connecticut — have been drained in recent decades. Much of this land is sown with plantations for palm oil, commonly used in products ranging from biofuels to processed foods, soaps and makeup

When peatland is drained, it releases a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. Emissions then continue for decades, until all the peat is gone.

Malaysia’s government has downplayed the palm oil industry’s climate impact across several categories in its U.N. reports.In 2016, Malaysia claimed that it had not converted a single acre to cropland.“This is patently untrue,”

“When you walk over peatlands, your feet sink down into thousands of years of carbon,” said Hurowitz, the Mighty Earth chief executive. “Sarawak has sent its peatland destruction advocates to scientific, government and corporate events for years to present a wildly distorted picture of destroying these ultrarich carbon ecosystems.”