See overarching Blog by Jonathon Porritt re: dodgy dossiers, dubious data, selective science that is seized on by climate deniers, corporate recidivists, and politicians clinging desperately to ‘Growth,Growth Growth’ short-term policies. Here below follows the (rather long and detailed!)summary backgrounder I produced with Jonathon to evidence his blog.
CLIMATE DASHBOARD – INDICATORS, OUTPUTS, OUTCOMES
INDICATOR 1: How much new investment ($trillions) is going into fossil fuels, renewables?
Rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuel energy sources and investing instead in renewable energy technologies is critical to tackling climate change:
- Climate scientists estimate that 60% of all known global reserves of oil and gas and 90% of coal reserves should remain in the ground unused.
Investment in clean energy has accelerated since 2020, with spending on renewable power, grids and storage now higher than total spending on oil, gas, and coal. For example, the European Union spends $370 billion on clean energy today, with China spending almost $680 billion in 2024 – supported by its large domestic market and rapid growth in the ‘New Three’ industries: Solar cells, lithium battery production and EV manufacturing. But investment in coal has also been rising steadily over recent years:
- China gave the green light to almost 100 GW of new coal-fired plants in 2024 (double that in 2023), and India a further 15 GW, the highest level since 2015.
Whilst the momentum behind renewable power is impressive, an extra $500 billion per year is required to achieve the International Energy Agency (IEA) Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario – that’s a doubling of current annual spending on renewable power generation, grids, and storage in 2030. Improving energy efficiency requires even greater additional effort. Investment in the electrification of transport is relatively strong, but investment in other efficiency measures – notably building retrofits – is well below what’s needed. Efficiency investments in buildings fell in 2023 and were projected to decline further in 2024. A tripling in the current annual rate of spending on efficiency and electrification to $1.9 trillion in 2030 is needed.
Fossil fuel companies continue to invest twice as much in oil and gas as they should if they were serious about averting catastrophic climate change. IEA , the world’s global energy watchdog, noted that the sector had “minimal” engagement with the global clean energy transition, contributing just 1% of clean energy investment globally.
Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03821-8
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2024/overview-and-key-findings
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/executive-summary
INDICATOR 2: Subsidies for fossil fuels peak and start to decline?
Pledges to phase out fossil fuel subsidies were first made in 2009 at the G20’s Pittsburgh summit, at which 19 nations along with the EU and African Union agreed, “To phase out and rationalize over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies while providing targeted support for the poorest.”
Only 32% of G20 countries had actually reduced fossil fuel subsidies as a share of GDP between 2010 and 2022. The yawning chasm between paper policies and real action is revealed by fact that those same G20 countries spent three times as much on fossil fuel subsidies (c. $535 billion) as on renewable energy ($168 billion) in 2023 — not including the c. $300 billion invested each year by G20 state-owned enterprises in fossil fuel production.
In its 2025 review of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), notably SDG13 Climate, the UN reports that globally fossil fuel subsidies fell by 34.5% in 2023 – from a record high of $1.68 trillion in 2022 down to $1.10 trillion. However, the UN also notes that despite the drop: “Fossil fuel subsidies remain nearly three times 2020 levels and well above historical averages”.
Using a broader set of measures including both Implicit subsidies (discounting of the full environmental costs of fossil fuels, air pollution, human health impacts and climate change) and Explicit subsidies (Direct government payments and tax breaks artificially lowering the price of coal, gas, oil, petrol for consumers) the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated global fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1% of GDP in 2022, a $2 trillion increase on 2020 levels. Although the IMF forecast the decline in subsidies reported by the UN, it predicted that subsidies would continue to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2030 as fossil-fuel consumption grew in emerging economies such as India.
Sources:
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-reduce-fossil-fuel-subsidies-january-2024
https://www.iisd.org/publications/report/burning-billions-record-fossil-fuels-support-2022
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/goal-13
INDICATOR 3 – Global rates of Deforestation
Home to greatest diversity of wild fauna and flora on our planet, the world’s forests are one of the most effective, natural systems for combatting climate change, locking away twice as much CO2 as they emitted between 2001 and 2019:
- A net benefit of 7.6 billion metric tonnes per year, equal to 1.5 times US annual emissions.
At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, leaders of 145 countries, along with globalbusinesses, pledged to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. Achieving that goal would require reducing global forest loss by 10% annually. With only five years left to the deadline, the latest Forest Declaration Assessment report concluded that the world is 45% off track from halting deforestation by 2030: “A third of the way through this critical decade, we have barely made a dent in curbing forest loss.”
The re-election of Lula da Silva as President of Brazil in 2022, ended the free-for-all in the Amazon promoted by the right-wing, climate denying, Jair Bolsonaro – reducing forest clearance by 36%. A positive shift negated by ongoing deforestation inothercountries including Angola, Bolivia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Zambia. Africa suffered the largest annual rate of net forest loss over 2010–2020 at 3.9 million hectares, followed by South America with 2.6 million hectares.
Sources:
Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 – Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
https://doi.org/10.4060/ca8753en
https://research.wri.org/gfr/latest-analysis-deforestation-trends
INDICATOR 4 – Emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas
Coal: Since COP21 in 2015, 30 countries responsible for 15% of global coal-fired electricity generation have committed to phase out coal by 2040, with 18 planning to phase it out before 2030. Austria, Portugal, and Sweden had done so by 2021 – joined by the UK, which shut down its last coal-fired power station in October 2024, ending over 140 years’ of burning coal to generate electricity.
At COP28, 25 countries plus the EU27 committed to building no new coal-fired power plants, calling on other nations to do likewise. Yet demand for and use of coal has not yet peaked:
- More coal was burnt globally in 2024 than ever before – an estimated all-time high of 8.77 billion tonnes.
- Across the world 204 new coal power plants are under construction, 260 in the ‘pre-construction’ stage, a further 93 have been announced.
- 36% of global electricity is still produced using coal.
China, India and Indonesia account for 70% of global demand for and consumption of coal – overtaking the US and EU27, whose global consumption has reduced from 40% in the 1990s, to around 8% currently, projected to reduce further to 3% by 2026. China remains the largest consumer of coal accounting for 56% in 2023, India comes in second burning more than Europe and North America combined.
Climate Action Tracker calculated that burning coal in power stations needed to be cut from today’s 36% to 4% by 2030 and 0% by 2040 to have any chance of holding global temperature rise at the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees C. That might once have been possible as previously planned coal powered stations equivalent to nearly 50% of today’s total coal-fired generating capacity have been cancelled since 2015, along with a parallel massive expansion of renewable energy . Yet despite coal’s share of the global energy mix reducing, the overall amount of coal burned still soared to that record level.
The full impacts of US President Trump’s pro-fossil fuels ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ America First Energy ‘policy’ and dismissal of the ‘Climate Change Hoax’ are too early to call. Hundreds of environmental regulations have been rolled back, climate science institutions ‘shuttered’ or starved of funds, and what was a declining coal industry propped up. Having pulled out of the Paris Agreement and abandoned supporting actions, US emissions are now set to reduce a mere 3% below current levels by 2030 (effectively flatlining), rather than falling 40% as had been the ambition under the Paris target.
The US has held its position as the world’s largest oil producer over the past 6 years since Trump’s first Presidency – pumping out 22 million barrels of oil a day in 2023. But despite removing tax credits for renewables and obstructing development on Federal land, Solar remains the fastest-growing source of electricity in the U.S. In 2024, wind and solar combined generated a record 17% of America’s electricity, ahead of coal for the first time.
Sources
https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023
https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-is-set-to-remain-broadly-flat-through-2025
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/peak-coal
https://www.wri.org/news/statement-g7-leaders-agree-shut-down-coal-plants
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/coal-phaseout-UK/index.html
https://climateactiontracker.org/about
https://www.statista.com/statistics/784682/worldwide-co2-emissions-from-coal
Gas: About a quarter of global electricity generation is fuelled by natural gas, primarily composed of methane, which kilogram for kilogram has a Global Warming Potential (capacity to trap the sun’s heat) 28 to 34 times greater than one kilogram of CO2 over a 100-year period.
Use of natural gas in power plants causes 22% of total global greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion compared to 45% for coal, and 33% from oil. The increased use of natural gas was seen as a bridging transition away from coal and oil. Hence the UK’s ‘Dash for gas’ in the 1990s – with around 40 combined cycle and gas turbine generators constructed and brought on stream between 1990 and 2002. More gas-fuelled power stations are currently under construction across the world than the total capacity built over the past 5 years. Although the International Energy Authority (IEA) forecasts that global gas demand will plateau towards the end of this decade and peak around 2030.
“The golden age of gas may be ending”, but energy and climate change analysts, E3G warn that the scale and pace of that trend is not enough nor fast enough to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. To do so requires demand for natural gas for electricity generation reducing by nearly 20% “well before 2030”. However demand for natural gas is forecast to grow by an average of 1.6% a year up to 2026.
The US has become the largest exporter of LNG produced through the environmentally destructive technology of ‘fracking’: extracting natural gas by pressure fracturing gas-containing shale sediment and rock deposits. Fracking gas wells in the US ‘leak’ methane at rates as high as 7.9%, making such ‘natural’ gas worse for the climate than coal.
Sources:
https://www.e3g.org/news/global-gas-demand
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2022
https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-peak
https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
INDICATOR 5 – Emissions from plastics, cement
Plastics
Using oil as its feedstock plastic production is a major contributor to climate change:
- If it were a country the global plastic manufacturing sector would be the fifth biggest source of emissions after China, the US, India, the EU27, and Russia.
And that’s before considering its long-term pollution and contamination of our air, rivers, oceans, soils, wildlife and our own bodies:
- According to the OECD, as of 2022, 430 million metric tons of plastics were produced annually. Of which over two-thirds were short-life products, a third thrown away after just one use.
- An estimated 25,000 flexible plastic packaging items end up in the ocean every second.
- Blue whales swallow up to 10 million bits of microplastic everyday as they feed on krill.
Talks to agree a landmark Global Plastics Treaty to end plastic pollution ended in failure this August, marking the sixth round of talks led by the UN in under three years to fail. For Petrostate countries and ‘Big Oil’ companies, as EVs replace petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles, expanding plastic production is a lifeline for sustaining their economies and profits. On a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario plastic production is set to triple by 2060. According to UNEP, ongoing demand for and wasteful disposal of plastics is projected to account for 20% of global oil and gas consumption by 2050. Hence plastic being described as the ’new coal.’
Sources
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33334-5
Cement
Cement comes even higher than plastic as the third biggest source of emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of all human generated carbon dioxide:
- Demand for cement and concrete is projected to increase by up to 20% by 2050 from 2022. If that occurs, emissions from the sector would soar to 3.8 billion tonnes per year.
A ‘Cement and Concrete Breakthrough Initiative’ was launched at COP28 in 2023, with the aim of ‘near Net-Zero’ emission cement production established and growing in every region of the world by 2030. To get on track with the ultimate Net Zero goal by 2050, emissions would need to be cut by 4% annually. A challenging ambition, given carbon dioxide emissions from cement production have remained stubbornly at the same level for the past five years. Cutting cement emissions is particularly challenging because they are inherent to the production process, a by-product of the chemical reaction of the materials within the kiln. Whatever lower carbon fuel source is used to achieve the c. 2,000 degree C temperatures needed to make cement, they can’t with present technology negate those ‘process emissions’. Hence, the industry heavily promotes Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as the solution to achieving its 2030 ‘near Net Zero’ target.
NB. – the few CCS systems actually in operation capture just 0.1% of total global emissions. Nor do they ‘capture’ 100% of emissions – at least 10% escape, and CCS systems are inherently energy intensive, requiring an additional 13- 44% to operate.
Sources:
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/industry/cement
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxee01m5yero
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299532/carbon-dioxide-emissions-worldwide-cement-manufacturing
https://sciencebasedtargets.org/sectors/cement
https://www.wri.org/insights/carbon-capture-technology
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/industry/cement
INDICATOR 6 – Emissions from the consumption of meat and dairy products
Overall, global agrifood systems contribute about one-third of all emissions, averaging around 16.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2eq) for the past 5 years, an increase of 10% since 2000. The meat and dairy sectors make up between 12 -14.5% of that:
- Annual emissions arising from 15 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies are greater than those coming from the biggest, most polluting oil and gas multinationals, such as PetroChina, ExxonMobil, and BP.
Clearing and converting wild areas for farming has historically driven the greatest amount of climate change causing emissions. Cattle, especially those raised for intensive beef production (but also for dairy) are particularly damaging because as ruminant animals they belch out large amounts of methane, the climate-change causing gas 28-34 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Hence, Harvard University professor, Walter Willett’s comment: “Eating beef raised on grain produced in the Amazon is like coal-fuelled power plants – the worst thing you could possibly do.”
At COP26 in 2021, 158 countries signed up to the Global Methane Pledge to take voluntary actions to contribute to a collective effort to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Two years on in 2023 according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), atmospheric methane had actually increased 14 parts per billion, the fourth largest increase since 1983.
Globally, climate change emissions directly from agriculture are set to increase by 7.5% over the coming decade, with livestock production driving 80% of this increase. Beef production is expected to expand by 9%. Dairy will remain the fastest expanding livestock sector over the next decade, with milk production worldwide projected to increase by 17%. Increases driven by human population growth generally, but in particular the growing numbers of more affluent middle-class consumers in middle to low-income countries.
Vegetarianism may get more headlines, but ‘veggies’ are in a minority – with an average 86% of people globally saying they eat meat. Estimates for vegetarians globally range from 15-22%:
- In only 3 of 21 countries surveyed did meat-eaters fall below 80% – China (79%), Switzerland (72%), India (53%).
Sources
https://www.fao.org/4/i3437e/i3437e00.htm
https://unfccc.int/news/we-need-to-talk-about-meat
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/greenhouse-gases-continued-to-increase-rapidly-in-2022
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/index.html
INDICATOR 7 – Total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions
Collectively, over 2024 we humans and our activities dumped a record 53.2 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) emissions into the atmosphere – that’s without adding in the emissions generated from human-caused land-use change, from agriculture, forestry operations etc.
Greenhouse, climate-change causing, emissions from human activities have increased by nearly 1.5% year on year since 1990, consequently they are 65% higher today than they were in 1990.
To limit warming to the Paris global average temperature rise of 1.5°C, emissions would have had to have peaked before 2025 (which they didn’t) and be on track to decline 43% by 2030 (which they aren’t). According to the Global Carbon Budget 2024, there is still “no sign” of a peak in CO2 emissions. On current trends, UNEP warns that global temp rise will exceed 3°C ‘over the course of this century’.
In a subsequent report in October, the WMO confirmed that 2024 saw the biggest single increase of CO2 concentrations in a year (up 3.5 ppm), with overall levels now standing at 424 ppm. This is the worst possible indicator that we haven’t even begun to see the necessary decline in both emissions and concentrations. We haven’t even seen ‘peak CO2 concentrations’ as yet.
Sources
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-increase-again-in-2024
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024
INDICATOR 8 – Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere peak and start to decline
At COP21 in 2015, 196 countries signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Popularly known as the ‘Paris Agreement,’ hailed by politicians and climate activists alike, COP21 set the goals of holding “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursuing efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” 1.5°C = threshold beyond which impacts of climate change increasingly challenging for human life and ecosystems.
A threshold exceeded over recent months, with the 10 years since Paris collectively being the warmest on record; 2023 the stand-out:
- “A year of broken records” – United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
- “A cacophony of broken records”- World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)
- “Gobsmackingly bananas” – climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.
Until 2024 that is!
In its press release issued on 10 January 2025, The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that 2024 overtook 2023 to be “the warmest year on record”.
And the first with a global average temperature topping 1.55°C.
Sources
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
https://climate.copernicus.eu/why-do-we-keep-talking-about-15degc-and-2degc-above-pre-industrial-era
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2023
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/fossil-fuel-CO2-emissions-increase-again-in-2024
INDICATOR 9 – The Global Carbon Budget
The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a body of over 100 independent climate scientists worldwide which calculates each year humanity’s “remaining carbon budget” – the amount of climate change causing greenhouse gases we can emit while keeping within global average temperature rise targets and limits. In its 2024 report, GCP estimated that at today’s level of emissions to have even a 50% chance of achieving the Paris Agreement target of a maximum 1.5 degrees C temperature rise, humanity had only 6 years of the available carbon budget left. If the target is ‘relaxed’ to a 1.7 degree C rise that stretches to 14 years, a 2 degree rise to 27 years – but anything above 1.5 degrees C brings far worse climate change impacts globally.
As noted in INDICATOR 7 above total greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time high of 53.2 gigatonnes CO2 in 2024. Confirming the GCP’s sobering conclusion that there is : “.… still no sign of the rapid and deep decrease in total CO2 emissions that is needed to tackle climate change.”
Sources
https://globalcarbonbudget.org
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/key-targets
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yJ0hW9nQFih_3mmjAOKtRaMDi2mql1vo
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/key-targets
INDICATOR 10 – Global Total Fertility Rates (TFRs) down, world population peaking/reducing?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights population growth as one of the two key drivers of climate change (partnering high consumption by those of us living in the rich, developed world): “Globally, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.”
It is not either or, but both. For those of us living in rich, developed countries with high per capita rates of consumption and GHG emissions, choosing a smaller family is one of the most effective eco-actions to take. For people in poorer countries, especially women and girls it is about having access to and choice over education and family planning. The combined factors of universal education for girls and access to family planning are in the Top 5 of Project Drawdown’s Top 100 solutions to climate change.
Our human population has more than trebled from 2.5 billion in 1950, to over 8.2 billion currently. The UN’s latest estimates are for our global population to increase by a further 2 billion over the next half-century, possibly peaking at 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, then ‘declining’ to 10.2 billion by 2100.
A key measure affecting that increase or decrease is the global Total Fertility Rate (TFR), the average number of children a woman is predicted to have over the course of her child-bearing years. Currently, the global average TFR stands at 2.25 births per woman, with more than 50% of countries worldwide, already having TFRs at or below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 (the average family size required to maintain a country’s current population level).
Despite TFRs having fallen to at or below the replacement level in many countries and the overall annual percentage in world population growth standing at below 1% (0.85% for 2025), our human population continues to grow (which perplexes some commentators). The reason being that the lower % growth rate is countered by there being an overall greater number of people: so just 0.85% growth of our current 8.2 billion people on Earth results in an annual increase of c.70 million more people. Hence our global population has increased by a quarter of a billion people over the past 3 years.
A lower fertility rate is a sign of development and progress, with girls enabled to take up education, women having access to and choice over contraception and so autonomy over their bodies, as Nobel Peace Prizer winner, Malala Yousafzai has noted:
“When girls are educated and when they stay in schools they get married later in their lives, then they have less children and that helps us to reduce the impacts of climate change that the population increase brings. If every girl was able to exercise her sexual and reproductive health and rights through quality education and had access to modern contraception, it could reduce total emissions.”
In contrast, high fertility rates indicate ongoing poverty, gender inequalities, high infant mortality, conflicts and other societal disruption, or negative cultural practices. More than one in ten countries worldwide still have fertility levels of 4 births or more per woman.
Sources
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3
https://database.earth/population/fertility-rate/2023
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
World Population Prospects (2022 Revision)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/15/population-8-billion-climate
ENDS