Last week, business leaders, investors and climate advocates gathered in New York for Climate Week. As with its sister conference in June, London Climate Action Week, the proceedings unfolded against an increasingly grim backdrop. Innumerable meetings and closed-door sessions on buzzy terms like ‘resilience’ and ‘mobilizing capital’ took place just weeks after UNEP reported that exceeding 1.5ºC of warming is all but unavoidable. We’re now living in the Age of Overshoot, which will hardly come as a surprise to anyone in Europe this past summer where, during just two weeks in June, an estimated 14,000 people died from heat-related deaths. News reports in both the US and Europe about the ‘hottest temperatures on record’ – and the droughts, crop losses and wildfires that come with them – are now so common as to become almost ritual.
Particularly notable at Climate Week was the number of sessions on adaptation and resilience. This, combined with the glacial pace of emissions reductions, gives the sense that key players are more interested in surviving what’s coming, rather than stopping it. But as UNEP hammered home, mitigation is still critical. Every fraction of a degree of warming avoided matters. But this is nothing that hasn’t been stressed for decades at this point. So, given the unflinching urgency of the report, we must be equally unflinching about the reality that nobody, no industry, no country, wants to mitigate their emissions, because mitigation is really costly.
