London Climate Action Week 2024: Road to Climate Ambition at COP 30

Nick Mabey, Co-CEO and Founder, E3G, explores each of the #LCAW2024 themes in a series of posts highlighting the climate action context and related events from across the week. London Climate Action Week takes place 22-30 June 2024.

In 2025 the Paris Climate Agreement faces its most critical test which will in large part determine whether the world can get track to keep climate change below safe levels.

A decade ago in Paris, countries agreed to progressively tighten their national climate targets every five years in order to keep within the agreed 1.5C limit. In 2021, COP 26 in Glasgow saw some big increases in ambition, in terms of new net zero targets and commitments in areas such as stopping coal power, but even if delivered these would only limit warming to 2.5C.

All countries have to put forward their next ten-year targets in 2025 in advance of COP 30 in Brazil, and realistically this is the last chance for the world to commit a credible 1.5C pathway. ?

LCAW 2024 aims to kick start the cooperation, politics and diplomacy needed to deliver ambitious climate targets in 2025 backed up by credible plans and institutions for delivery. LCAW will host delegations from the COP Presidencies of UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil who will lay out their plans as the COP “troika” for delivering accelerated action.

The inaugural State of Climate Politics Forum will host a range of international high-level speakers examining the politics and geopolitics of delivering ambition in 2025, and how to sustain it through the next turbulent decade. The practical diplomacy of delivering ambition will be discussed at Countdown to COP 29 hosted by the EU Mission and Mission 2025 a new global multistakeholder campaign for climate ambition will be launched during LCAW.

Accelerating the global energy transition is central to delivering real ambition and will be the focus of the Powering Past Coal Alliance High-Level Dialogue at the iconic Battersea Power Station and the [IEA Energy Forum]. The next generation of energy technologies will be the focus of the Breakthrough Energy Summit which visits London on its first trip outside Seattle, and the Ashden Awards will celebrate new energy solutions from around the world.

The voices of those most impacted by the failure to deliver on countries’ Paris promises will also be loud at LCAW 2024. Events will examine the latest climate litigation action to drive ambition, the need for greater resilience and will be amplifying voices from the most climate vulnerable countries including through the release of the latest Global Resilience Poll.

Finally, the history of climate negotiations will be explored through Kyoto a new play by the Royal Shakespeare Company dramatising the dark arts of oil industry lobbying at COP 3 in 1997.

Time is short to build the diplomatic, political and public moment for transformational climate ambition in 2025 but LCAW 2024 will act as global mobilisation moment to help make this happen.

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