The itinerary set by the United Nations and signed in the Paris Climate Agreements in 2015 to achieve the Sustainable Development Goalsand that respond to the 17 green criteria, closely interconnected with each other in what is known as Agenda 2030, is experiencing high geopolitical risk. Because, if the studies and recommendations of the international scientific community are scrupulously attended to, the fight against the climate catastrophe It is the main global threat that devastates humanity as a whole. No other danger should be as significant as global warming, which would inexorably lead to the extinction of many species; also of the human.
In fact, the roadmaps reveal that the indecision of governments and companies -although also a certain social apathy- do not travel at the appropriate speed or direction. This is confirmed Victory Barronhead of the Sustainability Office (CSO) of the investment arm of the British bank Gulf International Bank (GIB) and co-president of Ascor, an investment and data management firm that claims to seek alignment between climate actions and sovereign bonds to reconcile the interests and instruments to achieve net zero CO2 emissions throughout the planet at the halfway point of the century.
Barron and his Ascor team reveal the limited progress in the fight against climate. And it does so by pointing the finger especially at the industrialized powers. None of the 70 that are considered upper-middle income have brought their economies – and, therefore, their production systems – back on track to the requirements to which their international commitments so that their contributions to the reduction of global warming are fulfilled 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And more than 80% of them, furthermore, have not contributed their proportional share of 100 billion dollars annual Background International of the Climate to finance the fight against inclement weather, resources focused on defraying the immense bill that the climate is going to pass on to developing nations; by far, the most affected by the immense variety of climate catastrophes.
As if that were not enough, the conclusions of their predictive data instruments, reflected in a study called Assessing Sovereign Climate related Opportunities and Risks Projectreveal that less than 20% of countries have committed to stopping the extraction of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – and that more than 80% lack protocols “transparent and reliable” of their energy transition initiatives; that is, of reports that regulate and audit their gradual abandonment of fossil subsidies.
Financing for the fight against the climate crisis is also facing a long and tortuous delay. The study emphasizes its pessimism that, at the end of the first five years of a momentous decade like this one in the fight against global warming, countries are going to assume a bill that at the recent Baku summit, COP29has tripled, until reaching 300 billion dollarsthe total contributions to cover the cost of proclaiming energy neutrality. Not only because of the negligence of rich nations in disbursing their resources, but because of the imminent landing in the White House of another Trump Administration.
Government setting back the climate clock
“The overwhelming global trend” is that high-income countries “could do a much better job” in combating the climate crisis and that investors in green portfolios and sovereign bondswhich play an essential role in the direction that international capital takes, “need to know the robustness of national actions in favor of sustainability and the roadmap of their energy policies” to make their decisions, explains Barron.
In his opinion, “there is a consensus“within the investment atmosphere, that climate risks”They are not completely certified in the pricing of the assets“, so analysts have engaged in a race to evaluate what they call the vicious circle of sovereign climate debt, which should lead them to establish the potential costs of each nation due to the meteorological threats that hang over them. The 70 Rich nations are immersed in these revisions in the indices of the three preferential indicators of bond issues.
Ascor’s warning comes at a time when countries have seen an increase in the number of legal complaints due to lack of protection for their citizens in courts such as the Court International of Justice which has several hearings called to decide whether to take action against any of them this December. And when the US Republican leader prepares to collect the keys to the Oval Office from the hands of Joe Biden.
Trump declares himself a self-confessed climate denier and threatens to once again pull Washington out of any international agreement on sustainability worth its salt. Including, again, the departure of the Agreements of Paris. The report also recalls his electoral promise to promote fossil fuels and that he has put at the head of the Department of Energy Chris Wrighta Colorado oil company executive who practices fracking who denies that “the planet faces a climate crisis.”
Meanwhile, in Europe, large business sectors are beginning to question the excessive administrative costs of the ambitious Fit 55, the Union’s sustainability agendawhich advances intermediate and final compliance until energy neutrality is achieved by several years.
From 2025, with the change of government in the US, geopolitical discrepancies and transatlantic regulatory gaps will worsen and ESG investments will be called into question, which will have much more exhaustive regulatory requirements and audit controls in the internal market. At a crucial stage in their development, after a three-year period (2022-24) in which they have come to an almost sudden standstill, around the 30 billion dollars worldwidewhich makes it impossible to reach 50 billion in 2030, a key year as a transcendental flying goal in the fight against the climate crisis and in the trajectory of these environmental, social and good corporate governance capitals.
Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) however predicts that the EU – with its rules of the game and more rigorous audit reports regarding the reliability of sustainable projects than those required by the rest of the industrialized powers – will be more attractive to investors this year. Despite this legislative turn, branded by neoliberal doctrine as bureaucratic and regulatory excess.
According to its experts, the credibility that European laws were beginning to instill in the markets was aimed at monopolizing “more than 25% of the portfolios” with ESG values until absorbing, already in 2030, more than 18 trillion dollars in portfolios with a sustainable seal.
Ascor was created three years ago to help investors monitor and compare different official and corporate responses to the climate emergency and its experts only place Costa Rica and Angola as nations close to meeting the 1.5 degree temperature increase that they establish. the Paris Agreements by 2050. And its academic partner in this study, the Transition Pathway Initiative Centre, has examined the pathways of countries that emit more than 85% of greenhouse gases and that monopolize 90% of the Global GDP.
ESG criteria and green technology: the threatened binomial
Adeline DiabDirector of Global Research at BI, reflects this eloquently: “ESG criteria have resisted all types of inclemency these years, but even so they have entered a phase of consolidation in the markets, they have gained maturity and are preparing to take privileged positions to take advantage of the opportunities that the markets will surely reveal. Diab admits that the predictions of his BI ESG Market Navigator have been reduced from 70% at the end of the last decade to 3.5% of the dynamic potential of his capital until 2030, but “Its appeal is almost unblemished, with 85% of managers planning more ESG-sensitive portfolios“, perspectives that he attributes to regulatory harmonization in almost all latitudes of the planet.
Meanwhile, COP29 left, in injury time, a minimum agreement to continue with the green roadmap in the next twelve months. Without, on the other hand, meeting the challenges included in its official agenda. Even so, the statement issued from the Azerbaijani capital confirmed the “enormous diplomatic efforts” within a “uncertain and divided geopolitical panorama“.
Something that for environmental organizations did not prevent the summit from being a failure, in one of the most dynamic petro-States in the world and under the presence of more than 1,700 lobbies from the fossil industrybut that the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterreshe preferred to interpret it as the bottle half full. Almost solely because the financial agreement makes it possible to give impetus to the Baku Financial Objective of setting 1.3 billion dollars a check which must be mobilized until 2035.
Although for the Global South the Baku meeting “demonstrates that the first world wants to evade its responsibilities in terms of climate financing towards vulnerable countries”, as stated Rohey John-Manjang, head of Environment, Climate Change and Natural Resources of The Gambia, to the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC). and for The Economist This setback came at a time when the energy transition, paradoxically, was beginning to show signs of a substantial reduction in the cost of its reconversion towards clean sources, due to the “overestimated energy demand“global and the “undervalued technological advances” that are rapidly approaching a feasible end to polluting emissions and “are ready.”
Even with the technical and digital innovation tools already in use – or available for it – that could put industries, productive segments and companies in the fray and with which they would reduce in a “more than substantial” way the three and 12 billion dollars annually in which the annual check to effectively combat the climate crisis is encrypted until global warming reaches 1.5 degrees in 2050.
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