2025 and the New Climate Reality

 

Climate change is the most serious challenge that humankind has faced since the cold war. Back then, the threat of a reciprocal nuclear annihilation between the two great superpowers (the USSR and the US) was the nightmare we had to stomach before going to bed every night.

Since the 1980s, however, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nuclear winter predicted by the mutual destruction doctrine is no longer what keeps us awake at night. The new boogie man is climate change.

In the 1960s, climate change was mainly a theory discussed in scientific journals. By the 1980s, it became a recognized planetary threat. It ultimately took shape at the 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development as a formal international agreement.

One of the three major treaties emerging from Rio was extravagantly named “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Its aim was to limit greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the resulting extreme temperatures that would eventually cook the planet, including, inconveniently, humankind. Of course, we (or our descendants), do not need to die from the vulgarity of boiling: there are plenty of alternatives including floods, droughts, sea level rise, hurricanes, and so on.

2025 became a crucial crossroad, with COP 30, recently concluded in the Brazilian Amazonian city of Belém, the beginning of a new reality. These COPs (Conferences of the Parties) are supposed to represent the principal multilateral mechanisms under the Convention to help us avoid catastrophic climate change. And yet, after 30 COPs, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at exactly the same pace: while some countries such as the US, Europe and Japan have introduced economic and industrial efficiencies so that they can continue to grow economically while keeping emissions at bay,  there are always newcomers (China, India, South Africa, and so on) that rapidly become the new culprits: emissions grow unabated.

We cannot keep hoping for emissions to fall solely due to the supernatural powers of the COPs. Until now, the widely accepted goal is based on the ground-breaking Paris Agreement to reach net-zero by 2050 by limiting emissions (voluntarily) to avoid the “catastrophic” warming of 2 degrees Celsius (ideally below 1.5 degrees). Unfortunately, we are far from meeting these goals. What to do? I believe there are four priorities in the new climate reality:

First, we need to recognize that we have breached the 1.5 barrier and thus, and until this “overshoot” can be brought down, it becomes ever more urgent to look at adaptation and resilience matters of urgency. We need to enhance the capacity of countries, cities, and ecosystems to adapt and minimize the impacts of climate change.

Second, understand that politics have shifted. The new winds coming from Washington have empowered climate change deniers. Fortunately, there are still numerous non-state actors, including corporations, cities, civil society, etc., that will continue to push and implement solutions. The multilateral space is still crucial, but we cannot rely solely on it.

Third, recognize that fighting climate change is the same as working for sustainable development. These are two sides of the same coin. For example, it is urgent to provide energy to hundreds of millions of people who go to bed every night without electricity or warm food (let alone food), particularly in Africa. New sources of energy could “leapfrog” all technologies and move directly towards renewables, the same way as cellular phones in many parts of the world leapfrogged landlines.

Finally, regarding the mitigation of greenhouse gases, it is time to go back to basics and look for the solutions that humans have always found when confronted with past crises: innovation. We can keep the Paris dream alive (i.e., net zero), recognizing that we need to urgently find alternative pathways to get there with new technologies, better battery storage, direct carbon capture, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, and so on.

Already, substantial progress has been achieved, for example, regarding electrification of transport. Therefore, solutions are possible, and the time has come to unleash market forces to get us out of this hole. We need to reward the entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their capital so that we can find the solutions to our current predicament. Policies must recognize this so that incentives are aligned. The billionaires of the future need to be the great de-carbonizers of today.

Published in Linkedin December 29th, 2025: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2025-new-climate-reality-gonzalo-castro-de-la-mata-9qrtf/