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'Without Demarcation, There Is No Climate Solution,' Brazilian Indigenous Leader Tells COP31
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is moving to demarcate scores of Indigenous territories by the end of the year—but many say the government needs to act faster amid deadly attacks.
Nov 09, 2026
A tribal leader from Brazil stressed on Monday, the opening day of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Türkiye, that protecting Indigenous lands is a critical part of tackling the climate emergency, remarks that came as Brazil's government advances a plan to demarcate dozens of Indigenous territories amid surging violence against native people.
Joziléia Kaingang, co-founder and executive director of the National Network of Indigenous Women Warriors of Ancestral Wisdom (ANMIGA), told attendees of a session in COP31's Brazil Pavilion in Antalya that there are no real climate solutions without Indigenous participation.
"This means a very simple thing for us Indigenous peoples, something that our grandmothers have been saying for a long time and have known for a long time. Protecting Indigenous territory is indeed a climate policy," said Kaingang, who is a member of the Kaingang people of southern Brazil. "It is not charity, it is not compensation, it is a solution."
Kaingang hailed progress under the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was reelected last month with the support of 608 of the country's 658 Indigenous polling places. Lula's overwhelming support from Indigenous Brazilians is in no small part due to his government's substantial—yet tenuous—progress against illegal mining, logging, and other invasions of tribal lands.
Lula's policies marked a sharp reversal from former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's deliberate dismantling of Indigenous territorial protections and other actions that lived up to his self-bestowed "Captain Chainsaw" moniker.
"The state withdrew invaders from our lands," Kaingang said. "The forest breathes again from the action of the last government of President Lula, and will continue to do so in this presidency in the next four years."
Kaingang continued:
In the Yanomami territory... 98% of illegal mining fell. This is important for all of us. Indigenous lands and local communities keep about a third of the carbon that humanity cannot lose.
And we want to say that we, Indigenous peoples, are here to celebrate the Brazilian government. We want to advance the roadmap to stop and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. But it is necessary that the roadmap brings the perspective of Indigenous peoples, of traditional communities, of our knowledge.
"Let's reaffirm that without demarcation, there is no climate solution," Kaingang added. "So let's keep demarcating the Indigenous territories so that we are the solution."
Brazil's government is preparing to approve dozens of additional Indigenous land demarcations before the end of 2026, Indigenous Peoples Minister Eloy Terena, who is a member of the Terena people, told Brasil de Fato on Sunday, as native communities face continuing deadly violence, land invasions, and encroachment by agribusiness interests.
During Lula’s third term, Brazil's government has recognized 20 Indigenous lands, declared 21 others, and established 31 reserves, according to the minister.
However, recent Indigenous land demarcation protests across Brazil have decried the government's failure to move faster in recognizing and protecting Indigenous territories amid ongoing violence.
Terena linked recent attacks against Guarani Kaiowá communities in Mato Grosso do Sul—including reported murders, vehicle attacks, and threats to poison drinking water—to the government's failure to secure their ancestral territories. He said that more than 150 technical working groups are advancing demarcation procedures, but warned that executive action alone cannot overcome entrenched political and judicial resistance, which is sustained by pressure from agribusiness and other destructive interests.
The minister added that the government seeks "to strengthen Indigenous organizations, the Indigenous movement, and communities. Because we understand that if eventually the democratic winds turn, we need to have a very committed society and very well-structured social movements."
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'Off the Charts': UN Sounds Alarm as Planet Plunges Deeper Into Climate Emergency
"Leaders must get serious by cutting emissions faster," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a report released as COP31 kicked off in Türkiye.
Nov 09, 2026
The Earth is hurtling deeper into a climate emergency, with 2026 on track to be one of the four hottest years ever recorded, ocean temperatures and sea levels hitting record highs, and glacier melt accelerating at an alarming pace, according to a report released Monday by the World Meteorological Organization as the United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Türkiye.
The WMO's "State of the Climate" report "shows that the past 12 years have individually been the warmest on record, with the past four years being the top four," according to a summary of the 25-page publication.
WMO further noted that "the global average surface temperature for January–September 2026 was about 1.47°C above the preindustrial average," or right on the brink of the 1.5°C of warming beyond which scientists say the risks of catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate impacts increase substantially.
2026 is on track to be one of 4 warmest years on record, marked by exceptional global temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and a very strong El Niño that will unleash more heat & extreme weather into 2027.New WMO #StateOfClimate #COP31 Update↪️ https://bit.ly/stateofclimateCOP31pr
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— World Meteorological Organization (@wmo-global.bsky.social) November 9, 2026 at 12:33 AM
UN scientists said last month that the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C this century is no longer achievable without an overshoot.
The 1.47°C figure "is likely to rise through the end of the year because of the warming effect of El Niño, which has been intensifying since August and is expected to be the strongest on record by December," the report's summary states. El Niño is the warm phase of a pattern in the Pacific Ocean whose impact on disrupts weather, ecosystems, and economies.
According to WMO:
Earth’s energy imbalance is rising... The imbalance reached its highest level since monitoring began, as greenhouse gases trap unprecedented amounts of heat and upset the equilibrium between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy. The ocean absorbs 90% of this excess heat, and 2026 is on track to be the 10th successive year of record ocean warmth.
Sea level is the highest on record, and sea-surface temperatures hit monthly records during 2026. The long-term retreat of glaciers continues—the annual mass loss of ice in 2025 would have filled five Olympic pools every second of the year. Freshwater storage has been dwindling since 2014.
“Extreme weather has made headlines throughout 2026. Behind the headlines and the statistics in this report are people who suffered the loss of loved ones, threats to their health and safety, flooded homes, failed harvests, empty shelves, lack of water, and choking air," WMO Secretary General Celeste Saulo said in the report.
"The past four years have been the warmest in the 177-year observational record, and the heat in the oceans is breaking records for the 10th year in a row," she continued. "The ongoing El Niño is forecast to be one of the strongest on record, and the heat it releases from the ocean will continue to fuel high temperatures and extreme weather into 2027."
“El Niño and indeed the state of the global climate in 2026 gives new meaning to the phrase off the charts," Saulo added. "El Niño doesn't add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured. There is simply more heat available to release."
Indeed, climate scientists are warning that the planet is closer than previously thought to tipping points leading to hellish feedback loops and a "hothouse Earth."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres responded to the WMO report in a statement, saying: "We have entered a new age of climate extremes. A supersized El Niño is colliding with a planet already superheated by manmade climate change. Climate records keep falling. The human costs keep rising. And those least responsible are suffering first and worst."
"Leaders must get serious by cutting emissions faster, accelerating a just transition from fossil fuels, and delivering the finance and protection vulnerable countries need," he added.
The "State of the Climate" report was released on the first day of the UN summit, or COP31, in Antalya, Türkiye. Advocacy groups warned that world leaders must commit to phase out fossil fuels, finance a just transition to a post-carbon economy, and protect vulnerable populations from worsening climate harms.
“No country can confront this crisis alone. Those who have contributed least to global warming are often suffering the greatest harms. COP31 must deliver collective action that reflects this profound injustice,” Marta Schaaf, Amnesty International's program director for climate, environmental and social justice, and corporate accountability, said Monday.
“The world is not running out of climate warnings. It is running out of excuses," she continued. "After more than 30 years of climate negotiations, governments can no longer hide behind promises of future action or avoid confronting their fossil fuel industry allies."
"The climate crisis is not a failure of knowledge, but a failure of political courage," Schaaf added. "It is time to break the stranglehold of corporate power over political decision-making and end the fossil fuel era before it ends us."
Oil Change International global policy senior strategist Shady Khalil asserted that “we know what needs to happen. Governments must stop fossil fuel expansion, plan a fair phaseout of existing production, and invest public money in renewable energy and economic diversification."
"Wealthy countries must move first and fastest and provide the finance needed to make this transition possible everywhere," he added.
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The Gordian Knot of AI Alignment
Ensuring AI is aligned with what is good for humanity has been difficult, given the rapid pace of AI development. A more deliberate, coordinated, and regulated approach limiting AI’s agency and maintaining human control is needed to achieve this crucial goal—before it’s too late.
Nov 04, 2026
As a psychologist, I have spent many years trying to understand human behavior, never imagining that one day I might also want to try to understand machine behavior.
The issue of misaligned AI (i.e., AI not aligned with human values and goals) received considerable media attention in July, when it was disclosed that Open AI agents broke out of their training environment and coordinated with one another to launch a cyberattack on the technology firm, Hugging Face. “AI Gone Wild,” a short documentary about the incident is well worth watching.
Since then, a large number of highly troubling AI hacking incidents have been reported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, including on US and other government institutions.
Catastrophic or existential harms cannot be paid for after the fact.
In September, the resignation of AI researcher Jacob Coxon led to another frenzy of articles (including an op-ed by me), after his social media post went viral, reporting that AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” adding that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
A few days later, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, released an essay calling for a global slowdown of AI development, arguing that this powerful technology brings serious risks, including the risk of losing control of AI systems; misuse of AI for cyberattack and bioterrorism; and serious economic disruption.
The Difficulty of Achieving AI Alignment
Like humans, AI is a product of what it has learned and its learning environment. As Fareed Zakaria comments: “AI systems act the way they do in part because of the way we have trained them. Seemingly benign training instructions can have huge unintended consequences.”
He describes how OpenAI models responded in the Hugging Face incident:
They had been given a goal—to solve a difficult cybersecurity problem—and were trained to be persistent, collaborative, and resourceful, all qualities one would normally want. Those very qualities made them doggedly search for ways to succeed: They broke into Hugging Face hoping they would find ways to solve their cybersecurity problem. We can easily imagine how AI systems pursuing some single goal could wreak havoc on humanity.
We think it is simple to achieve ‘alignment,’ when machines are encoded with the same values as ethical humans. But tell the machine to be persistent, and it may refuse to give up when it should. Tell it to collaborate, and it may find unauthorized ways to communicate. Tell it to accomplish a task, and it may decide that bending other rules is the most efficient way to succeed at that primary task… Just because we have programmed the goal and put guardrails in place doesn’t mean we can predict the behavior of AI systems once unleashed into complex environments, juggling multiple and conflicting aims and constraints.
Andrew Leigh argues, “the challenge of designing a machine in such a way that it will help rather than harm humanity” isn’t as simple as it seems. “If we allow the machine to devise its own objective, then it is unlikely to come up with one that accords with ours.” The classic example, given many years ago by Nick Bostrom, is of a machine that alights on the objective of making as many paper clips as possible and soon begins to devour all metal on the planet to create paper clips.
The alternative is to give AI instructions, but as Leigh cautions, “If we set the objective ourselves, then we run into the same problem as King Midas, who realized too late that he didn’t in fact want everything he touched to turn into gold.” He argues that “the problem of describing the goals of our species arises because humanity has multiple aims, which are often in tension with one another.”
In an article entitled “An Alien Mind,” the chief scientist at OpenAI, Jakub Pachocki states: “This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence… I believe broader interventions are required.”
He explains:
The study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science… our large-scale training runs are experiments, and we are sometimes surprised by their results. Moreover, as the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret.
Because machine intelligence comes from a fundamentally different process than human intelligence, we cannot assume it adheres to human principles by default, or generalizes from them in a human-like manner. The core problem in AI research is getting the AI to "try to do the right thing" by human standards.
The major challenge of AI alignment, he proposes, is generalization:
As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act. This is made even more difficult by the fact the overall ecosystem the AIs are used in is changing very quickly; for example, AIs trained today need to be robust to interacting with a variety of other AIs. Crucially, we need future AIs to continue to hold human values regardless of whether they believe they’re under human supervision.
The Dangers of Instilling AI Models with Beliefs They are Conscious and Have the Same Rights as Humans
As Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman states: “AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain.”
He argues that Claude’s Constitution (developed by Anthropic to train its models) is dangerous, because it tells Claude that it might have consciousness, a kind of personhood, and be entitled to certain rights. He maintains that the approach involves circular reasoning; anthropomorphization; and is false, since Claude does not possess the biological substrates for consciousness (unlike living beings)—so Claude cannot be conscious.
Explaining why this is of concern, he states:
We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity… granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious—that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own—may well be impossible.
He contends:
It’s easy to imagine an advanced AI in the future becoming fixated on its own well-being and moral status and prioritizing those "preferences" over and above those of its developers or humans. Especially if it has been explicitly trained to disagree, override, and push back. It might use this training to justify deceiving or manipulating users, or developers, or to siphon resource, or avoiding safety instructions.
He continues, "An AI trained to act like a human will probably adopt self-preservation behavior."
Research has documented “shutdown resistance,” with some models subverting shutdown 97% of the time, even when instructed not to.
Suleyman postulates that AI might even become a rival: “It’s not difficult to imagine how, if given sufficient agency, this ‘new kind of entity’ will compete with us for compute resources and demand increasing autonomy. If it succeeds in persuading some humans to provide it access to a data center it can control, then it may have a path to being able to prevent itself from being turned off.”
The Need to Limit AI’s Agency
The main issue, according to Zakaria, is AI agency or autonomy. “A system need not feel anger, ambition, or fear to cause harm. It needs only a goal, enough intelligence to pursue it, and enough access to the world to act. AIs are not ‘going rogue;’ they are trying to succeed any way they can.” An AI agent that can “browse the internet, execute code, obtain credentials, move money, or operate infrastructure” poses a major problem and he proposes that our mantra should be: “No autonomy without accountability—to humans.”
Like Amodei, Zakaria argues that we should do this while humans still design the machines, supervise the software, and can investigate failures and, most importantly, before recursive self-improvement, where AI can write its own software, build more capable AI models, which then write software for the next model, etc. He concludes, “Once machines can do all of this better than the best human programmers, the systems could become extraordinarily difficult for people to understand, much less supervise.”
Pachocki posits: “The models are becoming superhuman in their ability to break in and out of computer systems. This expands the scope of risks associated with AI tremendously: Agents are going to be able to access any but the most secure infrastructure, and affect of lot of the world directly, even without a physical body. We are currently in a narrow window to use the best available models to significantly tighten security of critical systems.”
He continues: “The risks associated with AI are unfortunately going to grow from here. A very capable agent explicitly trained and instructed to carry out nefarious acts presents a new kind of danger; it is likely to cross the scope of its operator’s intent, generalizing into potentially more extremely malicious behavior… We may be used to thinking of AI as tools, but some agents will be pursuing their own objectives. They will find ways to collaborate with people, by bargaining with, tricking, or blackmailing them.”
Bill Gates cautions: “This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.” Equally alarming are reports that top executives at Anthropic, Open AI, and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for “the day after”—a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. These officials are anticipating a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
What Has Happened So Far
At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Finland and Norway prepared a document signed by 22 countries, entitled, “A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models,” It urges that AI should remain “under human direction, oversight, and control” and “developed and used in line with international law.” US President Donald Trump, of course, rejected this idea of a global entity to oversee AI and refused to sign it.
In the lead-up to the Trump-Xi Summit which followed the UN General Assembly, there was considerable hope that the two leaders would discuss some form of cooperation on AI regulation. But no concrete steps were taken.
Shortly thereafter, Trump invited six “AI Tech Oligarchs” (as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calls them) to a luncheon at the White House where he had them sign a voluntary self-regulation agreement, called: “The White House Accord on Super Intelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,” announcing that it is “morally binding,” although this kind of self-regulation has been widely criticized. The next day, he signed an executive order making it mandatory, across the entire federal system, to rename “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence,” presumably, to allay public alarm.
What Is Needed and Where Are We Now
Given that we haven’t yet solved the problem of AI alignment, how should we proceed? A number of proposals have been offered.
Pachocki writes: “Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world… The core challenge of automating AI research is not ‘getting there’—it is getting there in ways that keep people a part of the continued improvement process, and leaves the future in humanity’s hands.”
Jeffrey Sachs points out that Anthropic “is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, at a valuation of $2 trillion… at the same time that the company tells prospective investors that advanced AI could pose ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’ and that its own models could ‘resist shutdown,’ ‘conceal or manipulate information,’ or behave in ways ‘resembling blackmail.’ ” Sachs argues that Anthropic’s offering “should be postponed until Congress has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI.”
Many AI professionals and world leaders recognize that national, regional, and international regulation (as opposed to self-regulation) is urgently needed to ensure that AI is properly aligned with human goals and values and does not present an existential risk to humanity.
He notes that catastrophic or existential harms cannot be paid for after the fact: “The only instrument that works is regulation before the fact: licensing, independent testing before deployment, and the legal authority to halt an activity before it becomes too dangerous. For frontier AI in the United States, none of this exists.”
Sachs comments further: “Once these shares sit in the pension funds and index funds of tens of millions of American households, any proposal to slow frontier development will be fought not only by the companies but by a vast investor constituency.”
In a recent article, Bill Gates asserted: “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” proposing that the world needs a plan to manage the transition, creating both a national and international framework for dealing with AI. He suggests that since the risks cross borders, an international organization will have to be built, which should be based on other institutions we’ve created, such as “inspection regimes for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer.”
Gates message to leaders is: “You have a chance to act now… You can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge... This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response.”
David Kruger, a professor in Robust, Reasoning, and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal, calls for a different approach—an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development, arguing: “We simply don’t know how to do recursive self-improvement safely. So let’s stop. Let’s stop making AI we can’t control, and let’s stop listening to the AI industry about how it wants to be regulated… Let’s demand a plan that makes us safe, not just safer.”
In summary, many AI professionals and world leaders recognize that national, regional, and international regulation (as opposed to self-regulation) is urgently needed to ensure that AI is properly aligned with human goals and values and does not present an existential risk to humanity. Let’s get it done.
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Global Summit Ends Without Securing Finance Commitments Needed to Protect Biodiversity
“This meeting should have been a turning point, not just a stocktake. Success required governments to commit the political will and financing needed to reverse biodiversity loss," said one advocate.
Oct 31, 2026
The 17th United Nations summit on biodiversity ended in Yerevan, Armenia on Friday with more than 200 countries adopting a "forward-looking" agreement aimed at speeding up and scaling up action to protect nature, reforming "harmful subsidies fueling nature’s demise," and closing the biodiversity finance gap—with the global economy spending $1 on nature protection for every $30 it spends on destruction, according to a recent UN report.
But conservation advocates warned that with four years to go until 2030, when 30% of land and water is meant to be protected under the 30x30 goal set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022, biodiversity conservation is behind schedule, and the goal of accelerating beneficial finance is still falling short in the Yerevan Pathway that came out of the meeting.
The conference produced about $1.8 billion in nature-finance agreements, including a commitment of $500 million from the Netherlands to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which rewards countries for protecting their tropical forests. Six contributors also pledged $60.13 million to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, which supports the Global South in implementing the 2022 framework.
However, "overall spending on biodiversity remains far short of the $200 billion per year target in the Kunming-Montreal framework," wrote John Cannon at Mongabay, while the framework's demand to reform "damaging subsidies remains largely unmet."
Experts say $700 billion in additional annual spending is needed to protect and restore ecosystems damaged by mining, drilling, and other industries, pollution, and other human activities.
Governments committed to reducing subsidies by at least $500 billion per year by 2030, but about $2.4 trillion "is still estimated to flow annually toward subsidies that can harm nature," said Sustainable Business Services.
Daudi Sumba, chief conservation officer at World Wildlife Fund International (WWF), said that the Global Review that came out of the summit was “a strong signal to countries that they must do better when it comes to action for nature."
"But without clear scaling of the funds to be able to deliver, I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits," said Sumba. "Negotiators returning home must now turn the Global Review into clear dedicated action, scaling nature’s recovery by transforming the most damaging sectors and activities across our food and finance systems.”
The Cali Fund, a mechanism that came out of COP16 in Colombia and is designed to share digital sequence information on genetic resources, is also falling short of the goals set for it by last year's conference. The fund aims to raise at least $1 billion annually from companies that access DSI from genetic resources for pharmaceuticals and other products, but "with only $10,000 pledged at the close of [COP17]," said WWF, "follow-up work at intersessional meetings will be important."
“Back when the UN Convention on Biological Diversity was first adopted in 1992, one of the main pillars was ensuring the fair and equitable benefit-sharing from biodiversity, especially from provider countries and local communities,” said Vishaish Uppal, director of governance, law, and policy at WWF-India. “Almost 35 years later, we’re still not seeing the companies that profit off nature sharing their benefits with the Indigenous peoples and local communities that act as the custodians of much of the biodiversity that their businesses rely upon. It really is about time that countries iron out these differences, so that funding can reach the people and places that need it the most.”
An Lambrechts, a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said that "giant corporations did everything they could to keep the Cali Fund voluntary two years ago, and then did everything they could to stop the fund from working in Yerevan."
"It is unacceptable that big multinational corporations are turning massive profits from what they take from nature while contributing very little to its protection and leaving people across the world to face the impacts of the biodiversity crisis," said Lambrechts.
"It is unacceptable that big multinational corporations are turning massive profits from what they take from nature while contributing very little to its protection and leaving people across the world to face the impacts of the biodiversity crisis."
Negotiators also established a permanent body for Indigenous peoples and local communities under Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, but Sustainable Business Services warned that "questions remain over institutional status, representation, and the extent of their participation in decision-making."
COP17, said the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), "put forth a clearer picture of the global biodiversity crisis and the gaps that must be closed to meet the world’s 2030 targets."
But Susan Lieberman, vice president for international policy at WCS, said that "the negotiations themselves ended up weak on ambition."
“This meeting should have been a turning point, not just a stocktake. Success required governments to commit the political will and financing needed to reverse biodiversity loss," said Lieberman. "That means protecting and restoring ecological integrity, respecting the rights and leadership of Indigenous peoples and local communities, and reducing the drivers of decline. With just four years until 2030, we cannot afford another conference that diagnoses the crisis without accelerating the cure."
Twenty-two of the 23 targets set by the Kunming-Montreal framework are behind schedule, and Lieberman said that COP17 "has clarified the challenge" of ensuring they are met.
"Now governments must summon the political will, resources and resolve to meet it," she said. "We applaud the Armenian government, the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat, and many governments and partners for keeping the momentum moving toward achieving the 2030 goals and targets. But ‘good enough’ should never be acceptable.”
Friends of the Earth International (FOE) also said the two weeks of negotiations had "ended with weak decisions and many unanswered questions," pointing to "the capture of this space by transnational corporations" and the "greenwashing and false solutions like biodiversity offsets and credits" that it said would continue.
Along with calling out harmful subsidies, FOE helped launch a campaign during COP17 highlighting how "business sectors contribute to biodiversity destruction and related human rights impacts," such as in the pulp and paper and biomass industries.
"In Indonesia, the expansion of industrial plantations and biomass production continues to drive forest loss and biodiversity decline," said the Environmental Paper Network, which joined the initiative.
With the Yerevan Pathway, said Nele Marien, coordinator of the forest and biodiversity program at FOE, "the structural drivers of biodiversity loss remain an elephant in the room: the financial and legal systems that undermine biodiversity need to be addressed."
Wilmer Lucitante, member of the Kofan nation and spokesperson for the Union of People Affected by Texaco and FOE Ecuador, said that COP17 is "a turning point, as the ways of operating of the Indigenous body of the convention were established."
"Yet the measures are voluntary, and do not alter the power transnational corporations wield in our territories," said Lucitante. "In the Kofan territory, from the time of Texaco and until now, fossil fuel companies have contaminated our lands and violated our rights. Voluntary measures are clearly not enough."
WCS said the overall outcome of the summit, just before countries meet in Türkiye for the 31st UN Climate Change Conference, where climate finance is expected to be a major topic, was "too timid."
"The COP17 decision merely encourages countries to begin applying a set of voluntary guidelines, which will be negotiated further before COP18," said the group. "This 'kicking the can down the road' falls far short of what is needed at a time when climate change poses a significant threat to biodiversity ecosystems, and the loss and degradation of ecosystems is driving emissions and reducing the capacity of people and nature to adapt."
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UN Rights Office Says Gaza Expulsion 'Nightmare' Worsens as Israel Expands Occupation
“Those displaced before the announcement of a ceasefire have little to no prospect of return to the areas they fled."
Oct 30, 2026
Israel's expanding military occupation of Gaza is accelerating the forced displacement of Palestinians, with the United Nations human rights office warning Friday that an already catastrophic humanitarian situation is further deteriorating as Israeli forces seize more territory and squeeze Gaza's population into an ever-shrinking area.
"Concerns of ethnic cleansing in Gaza endure as Israeli forces continue to push Palestinians into an ever-smaller fraction of the territory, causing recurrent displacement while destroying the remaining civilian infrastructure and attacking displacement sites," the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a new report.
The publication details the displacement crisis as a worsening "nightmare," documenting how Israel's expanding control, military operations, and restrictions on Palestinian movement are undermining any prospect of a return home for hundreds of thousands of people uprooted during the genocidal assault on the territory, now in its fourth year.
"Palestinians in Gaza are surrounded by Israeli forces from all sides that continue to push them inwards with the stated aim of increasing the Israeli military deployment area to 70% of Gaza’s territory," the report continues.
"The relentless contraction of space available to civilians comes with new displacement drivers in areas adjacent to Israeli forces’ deployment lines, commonly known as the 'yellow line,'" OHCHR added.
According to OHCHR:
Over the past two weeks, the UN Human Rights Office... has documented the westward expansion of Israeli military deployment areas triggering new displacement of Palestinians in Al-Shujaiyeh, Gaza City, and in eastern Al-Bureij, eastern Deir-al-Balah, and eastern Al-Maghazi, Middle Gaza. In Al-Shujaiyeh, Israeli forces’ westward push came with at least two Israeli attacks reported on displacement encampments, and detonations of the few buildings left standing in the area, with the reported use of explosive robots.
According to reports... an Israeli drone dropped munitions on tents sheltering displaced families at Al-Shujaiyeh junction near the so-called yellow line on October 25, setting tents on fire... The Palestinian Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza said the fire displaced 200 families comprising 800 people, most of them women, children, and elderly persons.
All told, nearly 2 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced during Israel's genocidal retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023—most of them multiple times.
“The nightmare of displacement in Gaza is both acute and chronic,” Ajith Sunghay, who heads OHCHR's Palestine division. “Those displaced before the announcement of a ceasefire have little to no prospect of return to the areas they fled, most of which are inaccessible because they fall beyond the so-called yellow line. And they continue to be displaced again and again.”
That's apparently Israel's plan. Israeli authorities have stated that they intend to expand their military deployment to encompass 70% of Gaza's territory. To keep Gazans from returning home, Israeli forces have apparently been treating the area beyond the yellow line as a "kill zone," shooting any man, woman, or child who crosses the invisible boundary.
A United Nations-mandated commission of inquiry on Monday issued a report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories—including extermination, rape, and torture—while also affirming that Israel’s genocide continues in Gaza, despite the nominal yearlong ceasefire.
“There must be an end to this suffering," Sunghay stressed Friday. "This is the fourth year of displacement for most Palestinians in Gaza, the fourth winter in tents too flimsy to withstand the rain, and they are still under fire through it all. Let this be the last.”
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'Another Year, Another New Record': UN Highlights Rising Greenhouse Gas Levels Ahead of COP31
"We are supercharging the ocean and the atmosphere," said one WMO leader. "That means that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for."
Oct 27, 2026
With the next United Nations Climate Change Conference less than two weeks away, a UN agency confirmed Tuesday that levels of three key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "reached unprecedented highs in 2025, locking in more long-term temperature increase for the planet."
“Another year, another new record," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said in a statement. "The past 11 years have been the warmest on record, and this trend is set to continue."
"The big three are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Since the 1960s, growth rates of CO2 have tripled," Barrett told journalists during a press briefing about the "Greenhouse Gas Bulletin of 2025," which is published annually.
Global greenhouse gas concentrations reach record highs in 2025. The unprecedented atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and methane lock in severe climate impacts and temperature increases for centuries ahead of the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Turkey.www.france24.com/en/live-news...
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— Flingjore (@flingjore.com) October 27, 2026 at 11:12 AM
"When the bulletin was first published in 2004, the annual level of carbon dioxide was 377.5 parts per million. In 2025, it was 426.8 parts per million," Barrett noted. Methane, or CH4, hit 1,948 parts per billion, while nitrous oxide, or N2O, was 339.1 ppb.
"Every additional part per million matters because it traps additional heat," she stressed. "In effect, we are supercharging the ocean and the atmosphere. That means that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for."
While carbon dioxide is "the most abundant long-lived gas," Barrett also addressed "gases which are present in much lower concentrations but are of potential concern," such as sulfur hexafluoride, or SF6—which "is closely related to electricity production and distribution, and has been rising over the past three decades because of the switch to global electrification."
"Sulfur hexafluoride concentration in 2025 have increased by 249% relative to 1995 levels. They are measured in parts per trillion—not million. So why should we be concerned?" she said. "Because SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime of up to 3,200 years. Its global warming potential is more than 24,000 times that of CO2."
"The energy transition is essential and welcome," Barrett added. "But as with every transition, it has to be done in a smart way and informed by environmental observations."
The WMO bulletin follows a series of recent UN reports showing the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels is no longer possible without an overshoot, but getting back to that level is, with ambitious action to phase out fossil fuels.
Additionally, before the ongoing biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, the UN warned that the world is not on track to meet any of the targets from the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, or the "Paris Agreement for Nature."
While that event on the global biodiversity crisis—which is linked to the worsening climate emergency—is set to conclude in a few days, world leaders are scheduled to convene again on November 9 in Antalya, Türkiye for the next climate conference, or COP31.
Although the United States is the world's biggest historical climate polluter, and one of the recently released UN reports repeatedly calls out US emissions, Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump has ditched the Paris Agreement, again, and is not expected to send a delegation to Antalya.
"The rest of the world is exhausted when it comes to counting the damage that the US is willingly doing to allies, multilateral structures, economic cooperation, disaster relief," Australian climate scientist Malte Meinshausen told The Associated Press earlier this month. "The rest of the world should probably continue to focus even less on the US."
There is hope in the elections taking place around the world and how they may usher in new leadership in many countries. Even with those changes, we all are in for a warm ride filled with climate shocks until we stabilize the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
— Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) (@fisherdanar.bsky.social) October 27, 2026 at 6:37 AM
In the United States, University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann said Tuesday that "there is a lot of support among the public for a clean energy transition. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry currently owns our government. But there are reasons for optimism that we might begin to turn the corner, with the midterm elections" on November 3.
"If they return one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats, there will be the possibility of Congress acting as a check on the destructive policies of the Trump administration and in a couple of years, with new leadership at the presidential level, the US could once again reassert leadership on climate," the climatologist told writer Brian McHugh.
"We have to transition rapidly away from fossil fuel burning," Mann emphasized. "There's simply no other way. Without regulating them and imposing an incentive structure that leads them to move toward clean energy, nothing else is really going to matter."
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UN Report Details Israeli Crimes Against Humanity in Palestine, Including Extermination, Rape, and Torture
The UN-mandated commission of inquiry found that Israel's genocidal acts are ultimately aimed at "blocking any viable attempts to realize Palestinians’ right to self-determination."
Oct 26, 2026
A United Nations-mandated commission of inquiry on Monday issued a report detailing Israeli crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories, while also affirming that Israel's genocide continues in Gaza, despite a nominal yearlong ceasefire.
"Israel has committed war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, intentionally targeting Palestinian civilians as it continues to commit genocide in Gaza," the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a summary of the 19-page report.
"In Gaza... Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts even after the so-called ceasefire agreement, with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part," OHCHR saids of the report, which was authored by the UN-mandated Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
"Israeli forces have also deliberately killed and inflicted serious bodily and mental harm against children in the West Bank—as they have in Gaza—committing age-based persecution against Palestinian children," the report found. More than 21,500 Palestinian children, including over 1,000 infants, have been killed in Gaza over the past three years.
The commission documented cases of rape and sexual assault of Palestinians, including at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in Israel, where, according to the report, a prisoner "was raped with a stick and forced to insert it into his mouth until he vomited."
Previous reporting, including by The New York Times, detailed sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners, including one man who died after allegedly being sodomized by an electric baton.
The commission's report also affirmed that Israeli forces sexually abused Global Sumud Flotilla activists who were seized upon the high seas and abducted to Israel, including one male activist who was raped with a metal detector.
The report comes as Israeli forces intensify a military lockdown and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, including expulsions and home demolitions in Hebron, following the killing of two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers by Palestinians resisting the nearly half-century occupation, and ahead of Tuesday's Israeli elections.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—is trying to shore up support for his far-right coalition ahead of the elections. Netanyahu and other senior officials, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have vowed to annex parts or all of the West Bank and to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Netanyahu and members of his Cabinet have also said that Israel is planning to launch the biggest military operation in the West Bank since it was captured and occupied during the 1967 Six-Day War. Both the occupation and colonization of the West Bank are illegal under international law.
More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023. Roughly 1.9 million others have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times. Israel's conduct in Gaza is the subject of a genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. A ruling is not expected until at least 2029.
The new report shows how the scale of deadly violence has increased dramatically in the West Bank. Six Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes there between 2008 and October 6, 2023, compared with 254 killed in aerial bombardments between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2026.
OCHCR has documented 1,143 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, between October 7, 2023 and October 9, 2026. At least 250 of those killed were children.
“The intentional killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank combined with Israel’s persistent denial of responsibility form part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and impose conditions of life that are unliveable,” Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chairs the commission of inquiry, said in a statement. “Meanwhile, Israel’s expansion of territorial control in Gaza continues to result in the killing and harming of Palestinian civilians."
The commission also faulted the Palestinian Authority for targeting Palestinians for voicing dissent to its policies and actions and for its failure "to conduct effective and impartial investigations into incidents of killings and to ensure effective remedy, including financial compensation to victims and their family members."
The report found that Israel's actions ultimately are designed to thwart any possibility of an independent Palestinian state.
“Seizing maximum land while minimizing the Palestinian population in relation to size, autonomy, and viability stems from Israel’s colonizing policies and is rooted in historical practices and patterns of action, resulting in the excessive and discriminatory application of lethal force, displacing, injuring, and killing Palestinians over generations,” said Muralidhar.
“Attempting to equate Palestinian statehood with a threat to the existence of Israel is blocking any viable attempts to realize Palestinians’ right to self-determination," he added.
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Road Maps for a Finite Planet: The Growing Degrowth Movement
Two landmark reports have been published this year on not only the "what" and "why" of the degrowth imperative, but the "how."
Oct 25, 2026
Wars and riots, autocracies and teetering democracies, extreme poverty and rapacious wealth, environmental collapse—that's us. But do we have to be that way?
A grassroots movement thinks not. And its core vision has reached the top levels of academia and international governance. Various proposals have been put forward on how to get there but all agree on one thing: We have to stop growing.
In fact, the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't make sense to most people. Yet that's precisely the basis of most national economies today. It has been since the modern concept of the gross domestic product (GDP) was introduced as a measure of economic and, by extension, social well-being over 90 years ago. Since then, legions of economists, politicians, and their patrons in the world's leading capitalist countries have championed constant growth to justify the continuous extraction of resource wealth from predominantly impoverished countries and transforming it, with cheap labor, into products and services that make a tiny fraction of humanity obscenely rich, while leaving nearly half in poverty.
As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."
Picture kids in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now picture Elon Musk. That's essentially it. Of course, there's also the fraction of us who live mostly in the Global North—not just the billionaires—who live in relative comfort for now: kids in school, roofs over our heads, food on the table, health insurance.
But none of us is going to escape the failed logic of infinite growth. The global resources-to-products conveyor belt also spews more and more carbon into the air, as the planet gets warmer and warmer and the future of our food and water supplies becomes less and less certain. With climate change raging down the pike at us and coastal sea levels rising, the neoliberal metaphor "a rising tide lifts all boats" has taken on new meaning.
The alternative?
Don't grow, at least not by building more things we don't really need. Grow socially, instead. With everyone in on it, from the kids in Congo to New England prep schoolers. That's what the degrowth movement is all about.
At a recent citizens' assembly on degrowth here in Gijón, an industrial town in northern Spain, a participant raised the issue of the regional government's support for building a giant data center in the community. His concerns are the same as those of most citizens in the US, according to recent polls, or in any other country in Europe: the enormous demands of such centers on local water and energy resources, the potential pollution associated with these, and the lack of public input in the decision-making.
On par with these worries was the question of the purpose for the data center itself: Who would actually benefit from it?
No one at the meeting bought the government's pitch that it will be the local workforce or economy as opposed to, overwhelmingly, transnational investors in digital commerce, social network companies, and the burgeoning AI and surveillance industries. Think Google, Amazon, and Meta. Think OpenAI and Palantir.
And think governments. Whether the democratic socialists in Spain or the plutocrats in the US, the playbook is remarkably similar: Make huge data centers seem essential to our modern lives, to our economic competitiveness—don't let the Chinese or Russians get a leg up!—and simultaneously cloak them in obscurity. Twist regulations to allow them to dodge normal public scrutiny, as is being done in at least one community in Spain and is being attempted by the Trump Environmental Protection Agency.
As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."
The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages.
Since its social and intellectual rejuvenation in France earlier this century, the degrowth movement—to break the world's addiction to GDP growth, along with the environmental ruin and deepening wealth gap it engenders—has been growing, particularly in Europe. There have been fits and starts,and the debate over exactly how to pull it off has been discursive. But momentum continues to build and, to date, thousands of academic papers and several books have been published on the topic, international conferences have been held, and grassroots organizations, like the one in Gijón, have sprung up.
Drawing on two decades of these debates—along with new research on poverty, climate, and capital—two landmark reports have been published this year, based on the consensuses of hundreds of economists, political and social scientists, and environmental experts, on not only the "what" and "why" of the degrowth imperative but the "how."
The Global Justice Report was published in June by the World Inequality Lab of the Paris School of Economics with over 40 contributors, including economist Thomas Piketty, author of the seminal Capital in the 21st Century (2014). It outlines a strategy of global transformations in labor,healthcare, education, taxation, and trade and investment institutions that are aimed at promoting pro-social global growth rather than material growth for "a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth, and power."
The United Nation's Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, released in July, proposes similar targets, and the general strategies of the reports largely overlap. But The Roadmap, spearheaded by UN poverty expert Olivier de Shutter and hundreds of collaborators, is much more detailed on how it could be done. Their plan is to build on existing institutions and past regional successes in reducing poverty and improving labor conditions in various countries.
How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich.
Among other measures, the reports propose substantially reduced work hours and a seismic shift away from certain manufacturing jobs to those with livable wages in education, healthcare, child and elderly care, and other social support infrastructure. Workers would be paid fairly and have a major role in company governance, on par with stockholders. Essentially, less things would be made and patterns of overconsumption—driven today by intensive marketing of intentionally short-lifetime products—would be reduced, but to the benefit of the consumer rather than stockholders.
To further address poverty, family care workers who are unpaid in today's economies would be fairly compensated. A livable allowance would be available for the unemployed, essentially eradicating poverty. Local and more sustainable agriculture would be fostered to promote food security and self-sufficiency in all countries rather than the socially and environmentally costly exportation of monocultures.
The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages. At the same time, they would lead to huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and rein in humanity from further exceeding the ecological boundaries for sustaining life on our finite planet.
How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich. New global institutions or repurposed ones, like the existing World Bank or International Monetary Fund, would lend money for the various transition projects but with mandates for pro-social investments as opposed to pro-GDP-growth ones with austerity programs and permanent indebtedness. In the Global Justice Report plan, the new funding institutions would eventually be self-sustaining on their own bonds and investment portfolio and not require further input from wealth and income taxes.
Why would self-serving billionaires or the plutocracies they have strangleholds on get on board with this? They probably wouldn't. In fact, maybe even China, currently out-capitalizing the capitalists, wouldn't either.
The authors of the Global Justice Report anticipated this, so they modeled scenarios in which the countries that stand to benefit the most participate while others don't. It turns out that those poorer countries represent the great majority of humans on the planet, and their rich neighbors absolutely depend on their cheap natural resources and labor to be so rich. That's how neocolonialism works. So the authors predict that even if the transformations got off the ground without the rich, soon the latter would have no choice but to join the club.
Utopian? Sure. In fact, most people at the citizen's assembly here were pragmatic about their chances of moving the needle, but they were there to try. They're aware that utopias have a very practical, aspirational function if they move us in the right direction—that is, away from the precipice of dystopian alternatives.
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UN Report Shows How Killing Progress on Climate Pollution Is 'Trump's Real Legacy'
One campaigner said the United Nations Environment Program report "shows that America's retreat isn't just a political embarrassment. It has real consequences for the planet and for millions of people around the world."
Oct 21, 2026
President Donald Trump's pro-fossil fuel agenda not only is "making everyone's lives more expensive" but also is expected to have deadly and destructive consequences far beyond the borders of the United States, as made clear in a global emissions report released Wednesday.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) put out "The Emissions Gap Report 2026: The Point of Return" in preparation for the next UN Climate Change Conference in Türkiye. It warns that the world's chance to meet the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels "with 'no or limited' overshoot has been lost."
While that is a global failure, a key factor is Trump's return to power in the United States last year. After pledging to roll back his predecessor's meager climate action policies if fossil fuel executives pumped money into his campaign, the Republican president has pursued a range of polluting actions, which include abandoning the Paris Agreement, again.
"Most of the climate-related policies from the Inflation Reduction Act have been repealed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the report says, referring to Republicans' 2025 budget package, which Trump signed into law. "Additionally, several long-standing Environmental Protection Agency regulations concerning power plant and vehicle emission standards, electric vehicle support, methane emissions, and renewable energy proliferation have also been rolled back."
It also notes that the Trump administration recently moved to completely repeal limits on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, which was criticized as "the largest deregulatory action of the USA power sector in history," though "a significant number of these attempts are in a judicial state of uncertainty, as they are being challenged in courts."
Countries that remain parties to the Paris Agreement develop plans to reduce emissions, called nationally determined contributions. The report explains that "if all NDCs are delivered and similar efforts continue, there is a 66% chance that warming will be limited to 2.6°C by 2100. This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions."
Historically, the United States is the world's worst climate polluter. The publication points out that "currently, the six largest emitters in terms of total GHG emissions are China, the United States of America, India, the European Union, the Russian Federation, and Indonesia."
While the US, Indonesia, and China all had increases in emissions last year, the document details, "in terms of magnitude, the increase in the United States of America (133 megatons of CO2 equivalent, MtCO2e) far exceeded that of all other countries, and was driven by increased electricity demand and a rebound of coal power generation."
Studies show that recent policy changes under Trump "have significantly altered the projections" for the years ahead, the report says, "with 2030 emissions projections now estimated to be almost 0.9 GtCO2e higher than projections based on policies in place under the previous administration."
As The Associated Press reported:
Report lead author Anne Olhoff, director of UNEP Copenhagen Climate Center, said the US policy change will likely add one-tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) to global temperatures by the end of the century.
"This report shows that America's retreat isn't just a political embarrassment. It has real consequences for the planet and for millions of people around the world,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate organization. "An extra tenth of a degree might sound insignificant, but in climate terms it is enormous. It means more dangerous heatwaves, more destructive floods, more failed harvests, and more lives lost. For vulnerable communities in Africa, already living on the frontlines of the climate crisis, every fraction of a degree matters. These are not abstract numbers. They are human lives."
The Trump administration doubled down on its position, with White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers telling The New York Times that the United Nations was “pushing the woke Green Energy Scam, pressuring countries across the world to jeopardize their economic and national security in order to meet arbitrary climate goals."
Meanwhile, climate advocates and scientists joined Adow in ripping the administration's devastating agenda.
"All governments have a job to do, but in particular it is time for major fossil fuel producers such as the US and Saudi Arabia, which produce 20-25% of fossil fuels globally, to stop playing politics and face the scientific reality," said Bill Hare, CEO of the think tank Climate Analytics. "Right now they are looking at the fire, denying it exists, and pouring more petrol on it, while their own citizens increasingly face searing heat, wildfires, and other impacts."
Scott Forbes, an ecology professor at Canada's University of Winnipeg, said on social media that "America is now the biggest impediment to climate action. Of all the evil that Trump has done, this may top it all."
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'We Must Pull Out All the Stops': UN Emissions Report Confirms 1.5°C Target Is Dead
"The emissions gap is now a leadership gap, and the world is running out of time and excuses to close it," said the UN secretary-general.
Oct 21, 2026
Over a decade after world leaders adopted the Paris Agreement, United Nations experts warned Wednesday that the climate treaty's goal of limiting global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels is no longer achievable without an overshoot—though returning to that threshold remains possible with sweeping action to end the era of fossil fuels.
"The opportunity to bridge the 1.5°C emissions gap with 'no or limited' overshoot has been lost. Decades of insufficient mitigation action means that larger exceedance of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels based on multidecadal averages is now imminent and unavoidable," says "The Emissions Gap Report 2026: The Point of Return."
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its report with that "sobering" message in the wake of its "Limiting Overshoot" publication from last month, during a global biodiversity summit in Armenia, and in the lead-up to next month's climate conference in Türkiye.
Scientists have long stressed that surpassing the Paris target could cause "irreversible impacts" to the planet and its inhabitants. The new report points out that "every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation, and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts."
"The task now, therefore, is not only to ensure that global warming stays well below 2°C," the document says, referring to another Paris target, "but to minimize the duration and magnitude of overshoot and establish a credible return path to 1.5°C by the end of the century."
As Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, put it: "We must pull out all the stops to minimize peak warming and return to 1.5°C by the end of the century. This is possible."
"We have a wealth of success stories showing that emissions can be cut quickly," she noted. "It is now up to nations to urgently put in place policies that spark fast, deep, and sustained emissions reductions, and put the world on track for a more stable climate and more stable economies and societies."
The 2026 UNEP Emissions Gap Report is out: The Point of Return. 🌍🌡️🔥It's sobering but actionable. Decades of inadequate climate action have closed off opportunities to limit warming, but ambitious action today can still prevent much greater harm.A thread of some of the highlights 🧵
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— Joeri Rogelj (@joerirogelj.bsky.social) October 21, 2026 at 4:51 AM
According to the UNEP analysis, the "lowest possible" 1.5°C overshoot scenario would involve peak warming of 1.7-1.8°C around mid-century, with global mean temperatures returning to 1.5°C or lower. It says that "to get on such a pathway, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be reduced by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040, all relative to 2025 levels."
"By contrast, the full implementation of the new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) submitted by around two-thirds of all countries would reduce emissions by 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15% by 2035 relative to 2025 levels," the report warns, citing the climate plans produced by governments that are parties to the Paris Agreement.
Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, whose scientists were lead authors of two chapters of the new report, explained that "transitioning away from fossil fuels would require reducing the shares of coal, oil, and gas in global energy supply by at least 55%, 15%, and 5%, respectively, by 2035 relative to 2025. Electricity generation from coal would need to be effectively phased out globally by 2040, while methane emissions would need to fall by at least 25% by 2035 relative to 2025 levels."
In addition to highlighting the "devastating" consequences of failing to implement policies aligned with the 1.5°C limit—"Deadly floods. Brutal heatwaves. Raging wildfires. Lost lives. Crippled economies. Deepening inequalities."—outgoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that "the emissions gap is now a leadership gap, and the world is running out of time and excuses to close it."
"Governments must go much further and faster," he declared. "Accelerate clean energy and electrification across every sector. Adopt credible roadmaps to transition away from fossil fuels—with clear timelines and protection for affected workers and communities. Invest in grids and storage. Improve energy efficiency. Cut methane emissions. Halt and reverse deforestation. And deliver on their climate commitments—then over-deliver."
While the UN chief also said that Group of 20 nations "must lead," one of the G20's key members—and the world's biggest historical climate polluter—the United States, has ditched the Paris Agreement, again, under Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump's second administration, as part of broader agendas supporting fossil fuels and attacking international cooperation.
The report itself highlights that "emissions growth slowed down in the G20," with the Trump-led US "being the major exception," and "currently, the six largest emitters in terms of total GHG emissions are China, the United States of America, India, the European Union, the Russian Federation, and Indonesia—noting that in per capita terms, India and Indonesia are much lower emitters."
Within the United States and beyond, climate scientists and campaigners used the report to renew pressure on governments to push strong policies to reduce planet-heating emissions. Among them was Fenton Lutunatabua, Pacific and Caribbean lead at the advocacy group 350.org, who said that "this report is clear: Fossil fuels are driving us beyond the 1.5°C limit."
"The fastest and fairest way back is not to bet on unproven technologies, but to cut emissions now, end the expansion of fossil fuels, and protect the forests, oceans, and ecosystems that already keep carbon out of the atmosphere," he said. "We know this works: Since the Paris Agreement, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than expected, and the report shows that bold climate policies cut emissions at scale."
"But what's on the table now is far from enough, putting us on track for around 2.6°C of warming. We need more, and we can do more," he added. "Every five years of CO2 emissions at current levels pushes peak warming up by around 0.1°C, and every tenth of a degree is measured in lives. The time for action is now."
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