Climate Action Coalition Aims to Reinvigorate Push to 1.5°C
The freshly launched initiative wants to link business and finance, NGOs, academics and governments to accelerate climate action.
The world’s 2030 climate goals are still within reach, but time is running out and solutions must be sought with renewed vigour over the next five years.
That was the central message from Britain’s former Conservative energy minister, Chris Skidmore, during the online launch of a new initiative aimed at turbocharging efforts to keep global temperature rises below 1.5°C.
The Climate Action Coalition, conceived by Skidmore and Climate Action and officially launched on Friday, describes itself as “a global community focused on the urgent delivery of our 2030 climate goals”. Plans for the initiative were first unveiled in June by John Kerry, former US special presidential envoy for climate change, at an event in London.
The turn of the decade is the decisive milestone for global action against climate change, and between now and then acceleration of climate action is key to keeping the 1.5°C pathway in sight, Skidmore said.
“The next 60 months will determine the fate of the planet for the following 60 years and beyond,” he said. “If we don’t act now and halve our global emissions by 2030, we simply won’t reach net zero emissions by 2050 – it’s as simple as that.”
Over the next five-and-a-half years, the CAC aims to help stakeholders focus attention on decarbonisation technologies and policies that can be “delivered at scale and speed”. It will do so initially by forming five taskforces looking at central areas of decarbonisation: clean power; finance and investment; the built environment; manufacturing; and food and agriculture. Other taskforces may be formed later.
Each will be co-chaired by Skidmore and five other individuals yet to be named, chosen for their expertise on the particular focus of each taskforce. They will each produce annual reports.
The CAC will seek members across a range of institutions, from business to academia, with the aim of forming “new powerful partnerships” across sectors and geographies.
“There is a need for a platform to help engage and work with businesses and organisations, no matter what their size, who want to be part of the solution,” said Skidmore, who authored the UK-government commissioned Review of Net Zero in 2022.
“I recognise, as we all do, that [this] challenge is hard,” he added. “But as John F. Kennedy once said, ‘We do these things because they are hard, not because they are easy.’ And it’s a challenge I hope we can all work together to meet for the sake of all our futures.”
1.5°C gets more distant
The scientific rationale for keeping global temperatures below 1.5°C was set out in detail back in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Authored by some of the world’s top climate scientists and scholars, the report found the impacts of climate change would be significantly more treacherous to human life if that threshold was breached.
The 1.5°C goal has been embraced by many governments around the world, and informed the UK government’s decision in 2019 to legislate a 2050 net-zero target – which Skidmore signed into law as energy minister in former Conservative prime minister Theresa May’s cabinet.
Skidmore subsequently resigned as a Conservative MP in early 2024 in protest over then-prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to re-open the North Sea to new oil and gas production.
In the six years since the publication of the IPCC report, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise – and at current levels the 1.5°C carbon budget will be exhausted in less than five years, according to the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change.
Many argue the goal is now beyond reach. In its most recent New Energy Outlook report, published in May, BloombergNEF estimated the world was on course to reach a catastrophic 2.6°C of warming. Even if every government in the world doubled down on emissions reduction – which they are currently not – the most optimistic result would be closer to 1.75°C, it said.
Persistence is key
Speaking at the launch on Friday, Germany’s Special Envoy for International Climate Action Jennifer Morgan urged countries not to give up on the 1.5°C goal – insisting, however, that time was short.
“We need to be honest,” she said. “Because of planning, permitting and infrastructure investments and timelines, the decisions to double down need to largely be taken in the next two years.” Mobilising private capital would be essential, she said.
“We’re not going to get climate-neutral and resilient economies without serious private investments,” Morgan added. “The key challenges here are shifting financial flows geographically – we have 90% of investments in industrialised countries and China – as well as aligning the non-climate trillions with resilience and 1.5°C. We can’t afford investment in fossil fuel-based infrastructure any longer.”
The special envoy also cautioned against over-reliance on what she called “niche solutions” – such as carbon offsets and carbon capture and storage (CCS), which are often used to excuse business-as-usual behaviours.
“While these would have a role in decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors, they would be the last mile solution and not the game plan for the whole marathon,” she said, adding community needs and a just transition should be central to all decarbonisation planning.
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