A look ahead to Week 2 of the COP30 UN Climate Change negotiations, and to a thriving climate future

The global climate challenge is defined in the 1992 UN Climate Convention: “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Now that we are living with intensifying climate impacts, adaptation and resilience measures are part of the project of climate rescue. 

Due to decades of inaction, the community of nations needs to:

• deliver upgraded, economy-wide national climate-resilient development strategies,
• find ways to activate local economies,
• leverage climate-smart trade and vulnerability-sensitive debt relief, and
• establish a new standard for international cooperation that supports better outcomes for all.

Transparency is increasingly important, as nations work together and in parallel to address the climate challenge at all scales and over short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes. The Enhanced Transparency Framework and Biennial Transparency Reports are critical for building trust, revealing the landscape of action, and informing best-case planning for the future.

The new commitment to Information Integrity agreed in Belém opens a new chapter in the evolution of cooperative climate crisis response. If Information Integrity can be secured and the influence of disinformation and misinformation reduced to near-zero, investment flows, industrial activities, and innovations, can all be optimized to build more value more quickly for people in all societies. 

Increasingly, nations are seeing more clearly the links between climate-related investment and innovation and the wider landscape of human need and economic opportunity that will shape the future their people will suffer or enjoy. The complexity of these interactions involves the whole economy, whether policies are attuned to that fact or not. 

Multilevel governance, with international and national supports for ambitious local action, is essential to the work of mobilizing resources an optimizing strategic implementation. Cooperative de-risking efforts, where both financial and non-financial risks are reduced for a diverse range of stakeholders, are increasingly important, and require reliable evidence, actionable insights, and co-investment mechanisms that ensure no one is left without means to prevent harm. 

Multilevel clean economic development strategies are pointing the way to a future in which: 

• innovation builds value by eliminating pollution;
• finance learns to value and protect nature, ecosystems, watersheds, and public health;
• trade agreements will be designed to ensure more people benefit in ways that do not produce far-reaching preventable harm.

There were increasing calls this week, by both vulnerable and industrialized nations, to recognize judicial advisory opinions on climate from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This is one of the healthy signals of recognition that nations that lead through integrated and holistic national climate crisis response strategies will shape the future, while those that block progress and favor destructive practices will condemn their people to unnecessary hardship and health risks. 

Economy-wide National Climate Action Records (ENCAR) can help to inform multilevel cooperative innovation and investment approaches. ENCAR endeavors can be managed from outside of government, by unbiased, science-oriented, cooperative coalitions, to ensure all of society is invested in the project of strengthening climate crisis response. 

The aim is to ensure climate crisis response strategies (CCRS) are: 

• Operational at national and local scales;
• Informed by local needs and future visions;
• Supported by cooperative de-risking and co-investment initiatives;
• Attuned to the need to achieve climate-resilient development as an everyday, mainstream priority;
• Supporting acceleration of global climate resilience efforts;
• And accountable to stakeholders’ rights, needs, and priorities, at all levels.

ENCAR endeavors can include, among other references, information about: 

1. National subsidies for fossil fuels;
2. Rate of increase or decrease in fossil fuel production and related emissions;
3. National subsidies for clean energy;
4. Rate of increase in clean energy deployment and production;
5. Corporate tax breaks, acting as indirect subsidies;
6. Infrastructure investments, acting as indirect subsidies;
7. Changes in national policy and related impact on the country’s climate disruption footprint;
8. Most recent NDC, with concepts for future improvement and differential grading;
9. Climate-related effects of government operations—energy, infrastructure, transport, land use, and research;
10. State-level climate and decarbonization commitments and actions;
11. City-level climate and decarbonization commitments and actions;
12. Projected effect of permitting reforms—increasing or decreasing polluting vs. non-polluting energy;
13. Agriculture, land use, technology, and infrastructure;
14. Trade-related trends and international effects;
15. Finance-related trends and international effects;
16. International actions providing financial, technology, or disaster relief and recovery support.

This is a preliminary look at how something like an Ecomomy-wide National Climate Action Record might be quantified. This list is by no means comprehensive. It leaves out some key ingredients we would want to see, such as:

1. an assessment of labeling standards and practices, and other measures of transparency and verifiability;
2. a hard-wired assessment of emerging financial instruments and portfolio management approaches, accounting for climate vulnerability, risk, impact, cost, and secondary effects;
3. multidimensional fiscal resilience measures for cities, counties, and states; 
4. leverage for individual consumers, households, and small businesses to onboard new climate-resilience measures and technologies. 

These are harder to measure with data that is already in circulation and will need time to develop to the level of precision needed to provide accurate assessments. What they can tell us, however, is how well a country is doing in comparison to others, by advancing work in these areas. 

It is also necessary to note that a truly useful Economy-wide National Climate Action Record would consider not only decarbonization actions and effects but also a nation’s record on moving to reduce harm through adaptation and resilience measures, impacts on nature and biodiversity, at home and abroad, and the corrosive or uplifting effects of its treatment of other nations.

We repeat here the rough sketch, multi-level future-building strategy from our COP30 Week 1 report Opportunity is Everywhere. Any country might benefit from using this layered approach, in these difficult times: 

• Set clear national standards that prioritize investments in co-benefits that reduce geophysical danger and support enhanced human security. 
• Shift subsidies away from destructive practices toward practices that deliver similar primary benefits (clean energy vs. polluting, for instance) while also delivering a range of value-building co-benefits.
• Incentivize major investment in resilience-focused enterprise and innovation, rather than large, resource-intensive industries that might provide only marginal benefits.
• Support local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide risk reduction and resilience services at community and regional levels.
• Guide commercial banks in providing services that help those resilience-building SMEs grow, serve more people, and improve quality of life at scale.
• Work with international partners to establish fiscal resilience cooperative frameworks, to make it easier to reallocate capital quickly to the resilience economy.

Each of these priority areas of action adds adaptive capacity and holds promise to make capital investment more efficient at overall value creation. That means: more jobs, diversified service and innovation activities, more stability in local economies, and a more secure and prosperous future for the country.

As the COP30 concludes Week 1 and shifts to consolidating consensus around high ambition in Week 2, we note these ENCAR-aligned insights from the 3rd High-Level Ministerial on Climate Finance, which we share without attribution: 

• Transparency and reporting are more than just paperwork; they provide actionable clarity, build trust, and support a system of mutual accountability, beneficial to all. Treat all of Article 9 of the Paris Agreement as a lever for improved chances of international security and prosperity. 
• Mountain landscapes are extremely vulnerable, suffering devastating impacts, and yet marginalized by rules, practices, and prejudice, all of which lead to greater risks of society-wide disruption and fiscal stress. 
• The world is losing more money already, hour by hour, than has ever been committed to climate finance, even in the best-case Baku to Belém vision. 
• Countries that step up domestic action should be recognized as leading voices on the way forward, while Loss and Damage response and resource allocation need to account for the moral imperative of investing for the benefit of the most vulnerable.
• The work of restoring Nature can be an all-of-society endeavor, with multilevel cooperative resource-sharing connecting urban economies to conservation areas in ways that improve outcomes for all, while letting ecosystems recover and thrive.

Week 2 will need to give us real levers for progress toward dynamic multilevel climate action that improves human and planetary health, saves lives, diversifies local economies, and sets us on course for a future of sustainable shared prosperity.