The battle to beat the heat

‘We must exit this road to ruin,’ UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said this week as 2024 was announced as the hottest year on record. This was not hyperbole — the last 10 years being the 10 hottest in the logs of annual global temperature does make for a ruinous route. With India and China recording 2024 as their hottest years as well, over a third of humanity dealt with unprecedented heat last year. The question now is whether exiting the road to ruin is possible at all, and if it is possible, what needs to be done?

There are portents of a critical setback in the battle against the climate crisis. The average temperature in January-November 2024 was higher than the pre-industrial normal by 1.5°C. This number has long represented hope for the planet; much before the Paris Agreement formally adopted it as the ambition for climate action, scientists had linked this cap to avoiding catastrophic effects of warming. Now, the year is likely to have ended with this cap breached. Some experts have called the 1.5°C goal “deader than a doornail”, suggesting the climate-fight morale is at an all-time low. But others say it shouldn’t let climate despondency impede action, and that the world must not lose sight of the long-term goal of keeping warming well below 2°C by 2100, with an aim to limit it to 1.5°C.

Turning a corner needs much more, at a much faster pace, and in a more climate-just manner. Though a few stray years of breach need not be cause for despair, the global community can’t afford to ignore exhortations on urgent mitigation and adaptation any further. To ensure this, developed nations must be held to account. Their intransigence on historical responsibility guiding climate action, especially financing mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing and least developed nations, led to insipid outcomes at COP29. Now, the rise of Donald Trump further threatens global efforts, given the US’s historical and current emissions burden.

Against such a backdrop, legal liability for climate action by developed nations seems the only recourse. It is a difficult fight — developed nations have pushed many COP editions to avoid encoding this into outcome documents, and a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on their climate responsibility, expected later this year, won’t be binding. But if the ICJ’s ruling puts governments in the dock, it could be fashioned as a precursor for domestic litigation to push developed nations into action. Time is running out.

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