Q&A: What is the ‘global stocktake’ and could it accelerate climate action?
As nations gather at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, top of the agenda will be the culmination of a process known as the “global stocktake”. This core component of the Paris Agreement involves an exhaustive appraisal of how far the world has come in tackling climate change and how far it still has to go. Over the past two years, governments, scientists and civil society groups have submitted thousands of documents into this process and spent hundreds of hours debating their contents. The main technical conclusions emerging from the stocktake are not new. Nations are not cutting emissions fast enough, they are not sufficiently prepared for climate hazards and developed countries are not providing enough support to developing countries, But the stocktake is more than just a review of progress. It is a key part of the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, which encourages countries to scale up their climate ambitions over time so as to avoid dangerous warming. Governments have submitted proposals for how the main, political outcome of the stocktake could accelerate climate action. Ideas include phasing out fossil fuels, tripling renewable energy capacity and raising climate finance to the trillions that developing countries need. At COP28, countries will negotiate which elements make it into the final outcome, which will help determine the pace of change in the coming years. However, one expert tells Carbon Brief that, with so much on the table, the global stocktake risks becoming a “dumping ground” for “politically thorny discussions”, which may hamper its ability to drive meaningful change. What is the global stocktake? The global stocktake (GST) is a five-yearly temperature check that is a vital part of the Paris Agreement, housed under Article 14. Nations that signed on to the agreement in 2015 also agreed to monitor, assess and periodically review collective progress towards meeting the Paris long-term temperature goal and to take stock of their climate actions. The GST is meant to help countries collectively assess where they are, where they want to go and how to get there in terms of climate action and to identify gaps to course correct. It is meant to be an assessment of mitigation and adaptation actions so far, as well as climate finance provided and technology transferred from developed to developing countries, “in the light of equity and the best available science”, per the Paris Agreement. The GST is split into three phases: an information collection phase to gather inputs from all parties and non-parties, a technical assessment phase of these inputs and other evidence, and a “consideration of outputs” phase, for countries to decide what to collectively take away from the process. The final, political phase is scheduled to conclude at COP28, to inform the next round of submissions of countries’ climate pledges in 2024-2025 and to “enhanc[e] international cooperation for international climate action”. Back to top What is the scope of the stocktake? The information feeding into the GST comprised more than 170,000 pages of documents from governments, business and civil society groups, supported by over 252 hours of meetings and discussions. These submissions were categorised into three main areas of climate action, which were decided back in 2018 at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Nations agreed to evaluate progress on mitigation – cutting emissions – as well as adaptation to climate hazards and “means of implementation and support”. The latter point refers to how much finance has been raised to help developing countries take climate action. It also covers nations sharing low-carbon technologies and increasing their capacities to deal with the challenges ahead. Parties specified numerous “sources of input”, including greenhouse gas inventories, assessments of national climate plans and analysis of adaptation projects. They also agreed that the stocktake “may take into account, as appropriate” two more major topics. These were the unavoidable loss and damage resulting from climate change and “response measures”, which includes the social and economic consequences of climate action, for example on people working in the fossil-fuel industry. In the final synthesis report that emerged from the technical phase of the stocktake, which will inform political decisions taken at COP28, loss and damage was included as part of the section on adaptation. Response measures were filed under mitigation. However, in the draft GST text that has been prepared ahead of COP28, these issues are separated out under their own subheads. Civil society groups have emphasised the importance of ensuring loss and damage, in particular, is prominent in proceedings. How has the stocktake progressed so far? The GST began after COP26 in 2021, with a period of data collection that continued until March 2023. Prior to this, parties had negotiated the rules of the stocktake process and what kind of “inputs” would feed into it. During this period, country reports, scientific studies and other documents were submitted into the stocktake process for consideration. The second phase – the technical assessment – began in June 2022. This consisted of three “dialogues” that took place at the UN intersessional talks in Bonn in 2022 and 2023, and at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh. These sessions provided time for evidence to be discussed by country representatives, civil society groups and climate experts. The dialogues proceeded relatively smoothly within the UN talks but, as Carbon Brief has reported, familiar issues emerged within them. Examples include disputes between developed and developing countries over historical responsibility for climate change and civil society groups highlighting the role of fossil-fuel lobbyists in the discussions. The outcomes of each technical dialogue were recorded in summary reports released a few months after the close of each session. These were followed by a 46-page synthesis report prepared by the stocktake’s co-facilitators, with the assistance of the UN Climate Change secretariat. This serves as a “comprehensive overview” of all the inputs and discussions. The evidence laid out in this report will serve as the basis for the political part of the GST at COP28. Nations have already submitted documents to the UN outlining how they interpret the synthesis report’s findings and the stocktake-related outcomes they would like to see emerge from the COP28 summit. How could the global stocktake accelerate climate action? The GST synthesis report concludes that there is a “rapidly narrowing window to raise ambition and implement existing commitments in order to limit warming to 1.5C”. Achieving the 1.5C target, or even the “well below 2C” goal, requires nations to fill the extensive “implementation gaps” between their climate strategies and real-world action. It would also require them to come forward with new strategies that are Paris Agreement-aligned. According to the synthesis report, existing pledges would result in warming of 2.4-2.6C, with the possibility of cutting this to 1.7-2.1C if long-term net-zero targets are fully implemented. As part of the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, the stocktake is explicitly intended to encourage such raising of ambition. There are several ways in which governments and civil society groups are proposing it could achieve this. Much of the focus is on signalling to countries what they should submit in their new, enhanced climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Nations are obliged to submit NDCs every five years and the next round is due in 2025. The synthesis report notes that “more ambitious mitigation targets in NDCs are needed to reduce emissions more rapidly”. Greater ambition could involve new targets for both 2030 and 2035, and NDCs that cover emissions from entire national economies, not just parts of them. It could also involve NDCs based on absolute emissions reductions rather than cuts in emissions intensity. (Many nations have targets based on reducing emissions per unit of GDP, even as their overall emissions increase.) Article 4.4 of the Paris text says that developed countries should “tak[e] the lead” with “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets”, whereas developing countries were “encouraged” to move towards “economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets”. As it stands, many developing countries with high emissions, including China, India and Saudi Arabia, have less comprehensive NDCs, as Tom Evans, a policy advisor on climate diplomacy at E3G, tells Carbon Brief: “There [was] this agreement that developed countries would set economy-wide targets from the get go, and the developing countries would move towards setting them over time… Many of the developed countries – the EU and the US – [say] ‘over time’ is now.” At COP26, nations were “requested” to come forward with more ambitious plans in 2022, but this was largely ignored. The 2025 deadline for new NDCs, on the other hand, is part of the original Paris Agreement and is therefore widely accepted. In their suggestions for the GST outcome, some have made a point of emphasising that new NDCs should be submitted as early as possible – either “well ahead of” or up to a year before COP30, at the end of 2025. Perhaps the most high-profile elements being considered for inclusion in the final stocktake outcome are sector-specific proposals, including targets for phasing out fossil fuels, tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency around the world. (For more on these ideas, and others, see: What are countries and blocs expecting from the stocktake?) Another priority for some is ensuring that, beyond simply committing to global goals, countries use their new NDCs to explain how exactly they would contribute to such targets. Evans tells Carbon Brief that while there is a lot of focus on “flashy” topics such as fossil fuel phaseout, NDCs remain the main mechanism for making the Paris Agreement work. “The NDCs are what you can actually hold everyone accountable to. It’s the agreed terrain,” he says. Alongside measures to cut emissions, developing nations in particular would like to see the GST usher in greater ambition around climate adaptation. The synthesis report concludes that progress on both adaptation and loss and damage “must undergo a step change in fulfilling the ambition set out in the Paris Agreement”. Negotiations over a “global goal on adaptation” (GGA) will still be on-going at COP28. As a result, this component in the international effort to make countries more resilient to climate change will not feed into the stocktake. However, Sandeep Chamling Rai, a global advisor on adaptation policy at WWF, tells Carbon Brief that the stocktake could still work to inform and reinforce the GGA: “For this first round of the GST, parties might create a concrete link with the GGA and might have more concrete links established for the second global stocktake cycle.” A key element of adaptation and mitigation efforts for many developing countries will be assurances that adequate climate finance is provided after the first stocktake. Groups such as the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) have made it clear that, from their perspective, any scaling up of mitigation ambition needs to go hand-in-hand with scaling up climate finance. Avantika Goswami, a climate policy researcher at the Centre for Science and Environment in India, tells Carbon Brief: “Without dedicated efforts to ramp up finance, you’re not going to achieve the triple [renewable] energy target, so that’s definitely something that needs to be reckoned with in the global stocktake outcome.” The synthesis report concludes that “accelerated action is required to scale up climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds”. More broadly, the report also says it is “essential to unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars to meet global investment needs” and make global financial flows consistent with Paris Agreement goals. Countries must finalise a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for developing country climate finance in 2024. Developing countries want to see a goal that is more ambitious and based on an assessment of their needs – rather than picked arbitrarily, as with the previous “$100bn by 2020” target. Many have stated they want to see the analysis from the stocktake inform this new goal. Alongside finance, developing countries have also pushed for the GST outcome to include language that encourages developed countries to share their climate technologies and provide more support for capacity building in developing countries. Back to top What are countries and blocs expecting from the stocktake? From “keeping 1.5C alive” and fossil fuel phase-down language, to addressing unkept climate finance promises, countries’ expectations from the GST are varied. Submissions made this year against the backdrop of increasing climate impacts reveal growing divergence between developed and developing countries. “Without dedicated efforts to ramp up finance, you’re not going to achieve the triple [renewable] energy target, so that’s definitely something that needs to be reckoned with in the global stocktake outcome.” The synthesis report concludes that “accelerated action is required to scale up climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds”. More broadly, the report also says it is “essential to unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars to meet global investment needs” and make global financial flows consistent with Paris Agreement goals.
