Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva greets UN General-Secretary Antonio Guterres ahead of the G20 summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Nov. 16, 2024.
Trump looms large over G20 Summit
What’s on the menu? Outgoing US President Joe Biden, together withUK PM Keir Starmer, are pushing for additional aid to Ukraine amid Russia’s latest missile barrage and North Korea’s troop deployment in Russia. As for Russian President Vladimir Putin, he made a point of skipping the gathering, sending Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead.
On climate change, with COP29 climate talks deadlocked in Azerbaijan, UN Chief Antonio Guterres called on the G20, responsible for 80% of global emissions, to step up. But the fly in the ointment may be Trump ally and climate skeptic, Argentinian President Javier Milei. French President Emmanuel Macronmet with Milei ahead of the summit in an effort to get Argentina to uphold the Paris Agreement, which the US is expected to exit again under Trump.
A spicy start. Brazil’s first lady, “Janja” Lula da Silva, sparked headlines at a G20 social event Saturdaywhen she quipped, “I’m not afraid of you, f**k you, Elon Musk,” while giving a talk on social media regulation. Brazil suspended Musk’s X platform earlier this year for ignoring court orders to block accounts accused of spreading fake news and hate messages. Musk responded online by predicting that her husband, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, would lose the upcoming Brazilian election.
For more on what’s expected from the G20 summit, check out our Q&A with Eurasia Group expert Julia Thomsonhere.Climate activists project a message onto the Embassy of Azerbaijan ahead of COP29 climate talks, in London, on Nov. 7, 2024.
Viewpoint: Trump to overshadow UN climate conference
Donald Trump’s election victory last week will loom large in the minds of delegates at this year’s UN climate conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The government, corporate, and civil society representatives meeting from Nov. 11-22 will be forced to reckon with the return of the climate skeptic who withdrew the world’s largest economy from the Paris Agreement during his first administration. We asked Eurasia Group expert Herbert Crowther how the prospect of Trump’s return to office will affect COP29 and UN efforts to mitigate climate change more broadly.
What has Trump’s attitude generally been toward climate concerns?
Trump was largely dismissive of climate change as a pertinent economic or political issue during his first administration. Though not prominently on display during the recent US election cycle, his attitude toward the issue has not changed since his first term – which will likely become more evident when he takes office next year. He will almost certainly move to scale back programs to develop new low-carbon technologies championed by President Joe Biden’s administration, including those created by the Inflation Reduction Act. That will put more burden on state and local-level officials, who helped fill the climate policy void during Trump’s first term and kept the US energy transition moving forward.
How will Trump’s election affect the mood at COP29?
Trump’s election will significantly dampen the atmosphere at COP29, both in terms of negotiating priorities and broader sentiment among negotiators. Trump’s election will make it harder to reach a consensus on ambitious new targets, particularly for climate finance. Delegates will not regard any commitments made by the outgoing Biden administration as very credible; consequently, other governments will be more reticent to make ambitious promises of their own. In terms of broader sentiment, many negotiators will already begin turning their attention to where the COP process will go next year when Trump takes office and likely withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement again (Biden’s administration rejoined the agreement). The COP process has been largely focused on advancing the key Paris aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Given this context, what COP29 objectives are likely still feasible?
One area where negotiations can still likely move forward involves the so-called Article 6 rules for the sale and purchase of carbon emissions credits. Talks around Article 6 have resumed this year after their very public breakdown last year at COP28. They will not be dramatically altered by the US election result and are still trending in a positive direction. For the issue of carbon market rules, the US has stuck to a negotiating position that is more aligned with that of emerging markets, meaning it is not a hurdle to reaching a deal in Baku.
What objectives are not?
Negotiations on assistance from developed economies to emerging market economies to finance climate change mitigation efforts is likely an area that will suffer the most at COP29 as a result of Trump’s victory. There was already limited room for consensus on a new umbrella target for global climate finance – the so-called New Collective Quantified Goal, or NCQG. Trump’s election will likely move the conversation even further away from targets like the $1 trillion in annual climate finance deployment that many emerging markets had been pushing for. Another important topic that will be affected by Trump’s election is the next round of country-level climate plans – the so-called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs. By next February, all parties to the Paris Agreement must submit new plans covering their emissions goals until 2035. With Trump’s election and a worsening outlook for agreements at Baku, more of these plans are likely to present cautious targets, which bodes poorly for medium-term efforts to combat climate change.
Where does the COP process go from here?
A second Trump administration will almost certainly withdraw from the Paris Agreement again. Though the COP process already survived one US absence during Trump’s first term, the global climate policy environment faces greater challenges today. The timeframe to meet targets is shorter, and tensions have intensified between industrialized and emerging markets over who bears the most blame for climate change and should pay for mitigation efforts. Many US states, corporations, and financial institutions will remain relevant players at COP and will continue to push the US energy transition forward, but they will not be able to compensate fully for the lack of federal policies. Meanwhile, the US absence will place greater pressure on China and the EU to assume more of a leadership role in COP and shoulder greater financing commitments. This year’s conference will provide some early signals about that, but 2025 — especially the buildup to COP30 — will be the real litmus test.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor, Eurasia Group
At a joint press conference in front of the Constitutional Court in Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, on August 29, 2024, youth climate litigants and citizen groups involved in climate lawsuits chant slogans emphasizing that the court ruling marks not the end, but the beginning of climate action. The Constitutional Court rules that the failure to set carbon emission reduction targets for the period from 2031 to 2049 is unconstitutional and orders the government to enact alternative legislation by February 2026.
South Korea’s climate verdict: A catalyst for worldwide legal action
South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that the country’s climate change measures are insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations. On Thursday, it ordered the government to go back to the drawing board to set more ambitious — and legally binding — carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond.
The ruling was based on a case involving 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers — upset by the absence of legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets. The court agreed with them and said the lack of targets beyond 2030 shifted an undue burden onto future generations.
“Environmental litigation is becoming a global phenomenon. A key catalyst is the UN’s 2022 resolution, which established a universal right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment,” says Franck Gbaguidi, director of global sustainability at Eurasia Group. “It has given more power to existing climate laws and made it easier to take legal action against environmental harm without necessarily needing to prove specific harm to health, life, or property.”
This ruling is the first of its kind in Asia, but it is “expected to trigger a domino effect across Asia, where many similar cases are in the works,” says Gbaguidi. It comes on the heels of similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland, India, and Montana that governments have a constitutional responsibility to their citizens, current and future, to combat climate change.
“We’re now entering an era of intense legal scrutiny on environmental policies, making it more likely for these cases to succeed,” says Gbaguidi. “This means we’ll see more strategic and sophisticated lawsuits against governments and companies, with courtrooms becoming key battlegrounds for climate change action.”Floodwaters cover a parking lot on the Yantic River after heavy rains in Norwichtown, Connecticut, U.S., January 10, 2024.
The rising costs of “once-in-a-thousand-years” floods
Last weekend, rainfall in the northeast caused heavy flooding in parts of the United States and Canada as the region experienced yet another wave of unprecedented flooding.
On Monday, the governor of Connecticutdeclared a state of emergency as officials began cleanup efforts. The flooding killed two residents and hundreds were evacuated. The floods also affected parts of New York and grounded flights at JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia.
Just outside Toronto, the city of Mississauga set a rainfallrecord with 5 inches of rain falling and flooding streets.
The cost of the flooding is still being tallied, but it’s going to be expensive. In July, a flood in Toronto that saw four inches fall led to insureddamages of more than CA$1 billion. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, severe weather events last year cost insurers over $3 billion, with year-over-year costs trending up, with billions more ininfrastructure damage.
In the US, the costs are even higher. The Joint Economic Committeeestimates that floods alone cost the country between $180 and $496 billion each year, including infrastructure costs to keep up with floods, which run into the tens of billions yearly on the low end.
Climate change is set to continue to drive up costs as extreme weather events become more frequent and damaging, putting stress on insurance rates, public coffers, and the accuracy of calling these increasingly common events “uncommon.”
The world is an inkblot
In 1921, a Swiss psychologist spent months carefully crafting a series of seemingly random blots of ink. When he was done, he arranged them in a set of 10 for publication.
He had discovered that different people saw different things in the inkblots and that this could tell him a lot about their mental state, their concerns, and their worldview.
I thought of Dr. Rorschach and his now-famous inkblots this week as I leafed through a massive new study of what people in a dozen of the world’s most powerful countries – the G7 industrialized democracies, plus Brazil, China, India, and South Africa – are worried about when it comes to their security.
The survey, done by the Munich Security Conference, an annual confab of world leaders happening this week (shameless plug for our coverage of it here), indexes respondents’ levels of concern, from 1-100, about dozens of threats.
They cover everything from terrorism to technology, climate to coronavirus. Mass migration, racism, trade wars, and organized crime are all in there too, as are questions about the threats posed by specific countries: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the US, and the EU.
There is obviously no shortage of stimuli for the anxious these days. Major wars rage in Europe and the Middle East. Artificial intelligence warps our experiences of both work and the web more and more each day. Conflict, poverty, and climate extremes have driven the highest numbers of refugees ever from their homes. And of course, the world is slowly cooking itself while its two leading economies – and carbon emitters – warily circle each other on technology, trade, and Taiwan.
All of that, everywhere, all at once, yes.
But when people in different countries look at our little blue and brown inkblot of a world, they see very different threats and risks.
South Africans, for example, are acutely worried about energy and food shortages. Ukraine, unsurprisingly, is concerned about Russia. The climate is Brazil and India’s top concern, while Germans now wring their hands over migration and terrorism.
Those are the finer lines of the study, but what can we see in the broader blot of responses?
First, in aggregate, the things that worry most of the world most right now have to do with two things: climate change and cybersecurity, both of which are significant cross-border issues that cannot be solved by countries working alone.
Second, the roughly two billion people of India and China are surprisingly chill these days. Not a single one of the risks rises above 50 on the index for either country, with the sole exception of “climate change” notching a blasé 54 in India. In all other countries, people are far more on edge, with most risks ranging between the 50s and 70s.
Third, Russia isn’t as scary anymore. The world – but especially Europeans and Americans – is less concerned about Russia than it was in 2022. Nearly two years on from Putin’s invasion, the dreaded “Ukraine fatigue” has set in — there’s a reason Volodymyr Zelensky has been struggling to secure more aid from his two biggest backers – the US and EU.
Fourth, what moves the “Global South” is different from what concerns Europe and the US. Climate and cybersecurity figure at or near the top for both groups, but while “Russia,” “Islamic terrorism,” and “mass migration” are keeping folks up at night on both sides of the Atlantic, these concerns hardly appear at all for China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, where economic upheavals and income inequality are more pressing.
And lastly, the most powerful country on earth is a little out of touch at the moment. While Americans’ primary security concern with cyberattacks echoes broader trends, the remainder of the US top five — “political polarization,” “China,” “Russia,” and “disinformation campaigns” — are not key concerns for most other countries, particularly in the Global South. Climate change – a major issue for the rest of the world – limps in at a lowly 21st spot for the US.
To be clear, there’s nothing surprising or abnormal about different countries seeing the world in vastly different ways. In fact, it would be terrifying if 9 billion people all saw the world identically.
The problem is that so many of these key challenges — climate change, cybersecurity, migration, technology regulation — require common cause and cooperation at a time when the world’s major powers seem to be pulling away from each other.
In other words, it’s great to see different things in a given inkblot, but the inability to get on the same page about solutions is, Dr Rorschach might agree, a more dangerous pathology entirely.
Al Gore on US elections & climate change
Ian reports from the 54th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the theme this year is “Rebuilding Trust in a Fractured World.” And for sure, confidence in major institutions like governments, churches, and the media is at historic lows. Add to that equation a year that will test democracy like none we’ve seen—as many as 70 elections will take place around the world in 2024. None will be more watched—whether in Davos or Des Moines—than the US presidential election.
Al Gore is no stranger to contested elections, and shares his take on the current state of American politics and some positive news about the progress of climate action. The conversation touches on the most pressing topics at Davos: artificial intelligence, climate change, and deep concerns about the 2024 US election and American democracy.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Participants enter the Dubai Exhibition Centre during the COP28, UN Climate Change Conference.
Can climate activism and AI coexist?
AI is on the lips of climate-policy negotiators gathered for the United Nation’s COP28 conference in Dubai, and for good reason — it presents a high-risk but potentially high-reward scenario.
The upside: AI has the potential to supercharge efforts to find real climate solutions. For example, scientists can send AI-powered robots to collect data in the Arctic and other challenging environs, and the technology can also be used to improve forecasting for extreme weather and climate-related disasters. On an even more basic level, it can be used to maximize the efficiency of all kinds of systems and reduce their carbon footprint.
But there’s a big catch: AI is an energy-guzzler. One analysis found that AI systems worldwide could consume 85 to 134 terawatt-hours per year — equivalent to the electricity diet of Argentina or the Netherlands. That’d be good for half a percent of the world’s energy consumption. (This analysis is based on the sale of popular servers from US chipmaker NVIDIA, used by much of the AI market.)
At COP28, government and industry leaders made bold announcements. Boston Consulting Group said AI could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 5-10% by 2023. Meanwhile, the UN announced a deal with Microsoft to use AI to track countries' carbon-reduction promises.
Is the risk worth the reward? “Whether you like it or not,” says Shari Friedman, managing director for climate and sustainability at Eurasia Group, “AI is here to stay, so the job of humans will be to use it for the best purpose possible and maximize clean energy on the back end.”
In this photo illustration, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 UAE logo is seen on a smartphone screen.
COP28’s challenge: growing problems, shrinking credibility
As 60,000 delegates gather today in Dubai for the opening of COP28, scant progress on longstanding climate goals and an emerging scandal over the fossil fuel industry’s influence over the UN climate conference is undermining COP’s credibility.
On the eve of the summit, leaked documents suggested that the UAE, a major oil producer which is hosting the summit, has been using the occasion to press for oil deals. Talk about foxes in the hen house ...
What’s more, the heads of the world’s two largest and most polluting economies won’t even be there: US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are skipping the event altogether.
So what’s on the agenda? One major aim is finding money for the so-called “loss and damages fund” that delegates agreed to create last year.
By 2030, the fund is meant to disburse $100 billion to help developing countries recover from climate-related disasters and adapt to a worsening trend of climate change that they themselves played almost no role in bringing about.
But so far the fund has been hamstrung by disagreements about how much major polluters like the US, EU, India, and China should have to contribute – the Chinese and Indians don’t want to put up nearly as much money as other major polluters. There’s also no agreement about how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. The US and EU want to move more quickly on those phaseouts than many emerging market countries in Asia and Latin America are comfortable with.
But it’s not all bad COP, there’s some good COP too. All the major players appear ready to commit to tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide by 2030, for example. An agreement to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050 also appears promising, though some EU member states, like Germany, are likely to object.
And some important topics are new to the agenda, including addressing growing water scarcity and finding ways to balance the needs of food production with emissions reduction (also the focus of this week’s GZERO Live event “High and Dry: Tackling Global Water Stress”). That’s good news according to Shari Friedman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for climate and sustainability.
“If you approach climate separate from water, separate from agriculture, separate from biodiversity,” she warns. “You end up creating problems that then you have to fix later.”
Still, the biggest challenge for COP28 is about something bigger than any one policy area: More than a quarter of a century after the first COP was held in Berlin, does the UN-backed climate agenda still have credibility?
The world is making agonizingly slow progress on carbon emission reductions, and its targets to reach net zero emissions by 2050 will require changes so large as to be unrealistic.
For more on what to expect from COP28, don’t miss our interview with Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who was a part of Canada’s delegation when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in 2015.
- Water crisis: Preserving fresh water sources is crucial to survival - GZERO Media ›
- What will it take for the world to get serious about water? - GZERO Media ›
- Why businesses are leapfrogging governments on water issues - GZERO Media ›
- What will it take for the world to get serious about water? - GZERO Media ›