Like the start of every year in recent history, the planet is getting warmer, climate disasters continue to strike, and emissions aren’t falling fast enough. Unlike other years, however, some positive developments in recent months set us up for a stronger 2021.
As the world drastically cuts emissions over the next few decades, it will face many crises. Some may even be as serious as the current pandemic. But all through them, the race to zero emissions will have to continue. What happened in 2020 is then perhaps a strong sign that climate action is starting to be “institutionalized”— that is, getting deeply embedded into how the world works.
The evidence shows up every where you look. Take the Brexit deal, which the U.K. and EU approved in the nick of time before their Jan. 1 deadline. The word “climate” gets 51 mentions in the 1,256-page agreement, including three mentions in the preamble, but it goes further than that.
Another example is green stimulus. Economic theory suggests that one way to get out of a recession is for governments to spend money to create jobs as quickly as possible. The goal is to generate many times the return on every $1 of public money spent, and fast. In 2020, economists, central bankers and finance ministers widely agreed that many green activities, such as clean-energy infrastructure, zero-carbon transport and disaster preparedness, will create jobs quickly enough to facilitate economic recoveries.
That’s why we’ve seen many countries, including the U.S. in its most recent stimulus, allocating large sums towards initiatives that will cut emissions and lower unemployment. As clean technologies get cheaper, you can expect future economic recessions to be met with a bigger share of stimulus money going toward green initiatives.
The U.K., for instance, was the first large economy to set a legally binding goal under the Climate Change Act in 2008. Since then, public support for climate action has grown and thus its legal targets have only gotten more ambitious. That’s helped make the country cut the most emissions among the G-20.