The climate policy mirage

O​​​​​​​​​​​​​ur planet is overheating. And yet, most governments continue to rely on climate policies designed for a bygone era, seemingly secure in the belief that a few more decades of emission reduction efforts combined with new seawalls and a gradual conversion to renewable energy will be enough to maintain the climate status quo. In the meantime, both the pace of climate change and our consumption of fossil fuels continues to accelerate, which led the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to conclude late last year that there are no longer any credible routes to limiting global warming that do not also involve hugely significant emission reductions and removals.

Where is the disconnect? Why haven’t government policies kept pace with our rapidly changing climate reality?

The policy mirage

Part of the problem is that government policies are often prematurely celebrated as actual solutions. In the case of climate change, three decades of COP meetings, IGO initiatives, official reports, and international treaties have created a mirage of hope and progress, but this illusion runs counter to the reality that over this entire period, carbon dioxide emissions have continually increased and global warming has accelerated rather than slowed. And because climate change has been such a slowly unfolding disaster, the global climate policy community hasn’t acknowledged these failures yet, or charted a new course more likely to succeed at solving the climate crisis. Instead, governments are still largely doubling down on the same flawed models and assumptions that haven’t worked for the past generation. A more realistic assessment of the evidence — which one hopes will happen sooner rather than later — will reveal that:

• The Paris framework has failed. The Paris Agreement has not produced the coordinated global response it envisioned. Many countries have not updated their NDCs to the latest targets, and the vast majority of countries, including all major emitters, have submitted new targets that are incompatible with a 1.5C pathway, or their plans rely on accounting assumptions — existing forests, land-use baselines, or ocean uptake — that inflate ambition without delivering real reductions. The central premise of Paris — that voluntary national commitments would collectively bend the curve — has simply not materialized.
• The voluntary carbon market has failed. Despite years of optimism, the voluntary carbon market has not delivered meaningful impact so far on slowing global warming. A single buyer — Microsoft — has accounted for roughly 80 percent of the entire historical market volume for durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) since 2020. And the actual delivery of purchased CO2 has lagged far behind purchases: For every 100 tons of CO2 sold, only four have been delivered (for a total of only one million tons of CO2 delivered to-date). Meanwhile, we continue to emit around 40 gigatons of CO2 annually into the Earth’s atmosphere, and need to be removing around 10 gigatons annually by 2050 or quite likely sooner. So while the world certainly owes Microsoft a debt of gratitude for its years of leadership, what the CDR community celebrates as progress is, in reality, a thin layer of activity masking a profound shortfall. We need orders of magnitude more removal, and more capacity for removal. (This is where the Vancouver Declaration was designed to help — by enlisting governments to help scale both demand and capacity with a speed and intensity that the voluntary market is incapable of achieving.)

  

• Not enough serious discussion is happening yet about mandatory markets. The idea of mandatory carbon markets is beginning to take shape, but it remains tentative and incomplete. Existing compliance systems like the EU Emissions Trading System, and the California/Washington Cap-and-Trade Program already require emitters to participate, establishing carbon as a regulated liability rather than a voluntary concern. Governments are also experimenting with advance procurement, contracts for difference, and other mechanisms to guarantee long-term demand and stabilize prices. These efforts reflect a growing recognition that existing market forces alone are unlikely to scale carbon removal to climate-relevant levels. But even taken together, these approaches stop short of a more fundamental shift. They still treat carbon as something to be priced, traded, or incrementally constrained, rather than as a waste product that must be systematically managed. The next logical step — one that has yet to be fully articulated in policy — is to treat carbon dioxide removal as a public responsibility. Electricity systems offer a useful analogy here. In most countries, demand for electricity is forecast by public authorities or regulated utilities, which then plan and build the infrastructure needed to meet demand — generation, transmission, and distribution — often financed through bonds or long-term capital investment. Regulators approve rates designed to recover these costs over time, including a reasonable return, ensuring the system remains financially viable while meeting a non-negotiable public need. Prices are therefore not discovered through discretionary purchasing decisions, but are set at the level required to deliver reliable service. Consumers have limited ability to opt out of the system, and the central question is not whether electricity will be provided, but how it will be delivered at an acceptable cost. As carbon removal becomes a required public function rather than a voluntary activity, it will be necessary to adopt a similar logic: demand determined by policy, infrastructure built to meet need, and pricing structured to ensure delivery rather than test willingness to pay.
• We’re far from believing in the need for CDR. Our carbon removal targets are still unacceptably low in most cases, even when these target exist at all (and they still don’t for most countries): Portugal has capped CDR limits in law (at 10%) to ensure they don’t displace direct emission cuts; the UK has a legally binding target of 5Mt per year by 2030; and France plans to remove 10Mt per year by 2050. Only Australia’s roadmap for 330Mt per year by 2050 is in line with what governments should be trying to accomplish. We’re also barely investing in CDR. Global spending on carbon dioxide removal remains trivial compared to the scale of the challenge. Large cities like New York spend more on routine road maintenance in a single budget period than the entire world has spent to-date scaling durable CDR. And going forward, as the table below shows, global infrastructure investment is projected to exceed $100 trillion by 2040, while spending on durable carbon removal remains measured in the low billions. This is not simply a funding gap — it reflects a failure to treat climate stabilization as a core public priority. Building CDR capacity will require investment on the scale of energy systems or national defense, sustained over decades. We are nowhere close to this type of recognition and commitment.

• We are still focusing on the wrong problem. Climate policy remains overwhelmingly centered on reducing future emissions, with far less attention given to removing past emissions. But even if we aggressively cut emissions starting today, the legacy CO2 already in our atmosphere will continue to drive warming for generations. Mitigation alone cannot stabilize our climate in time to avoid severe impacts. Until global climate policy reflects this reality, our reduction-only efforts to keep temperatures in check will fail.
• We aren’t looking ahead even 50 years. The road ahead is studded with flashing warning signs we should be able to clearly see, but haven’t yet. For example, as warming accelerates, more permafrost is being exposed, raising the risk that methane could shift from a secondary contributor to a primary driver of warming within decades. And because methane has a much stronger short-term warming effect than CO2, even moderate releases could rapidly amplify climate impacts, yet our ability to remove methane is even more primitive than our CO2 removal ability. There’s also the small matter of adaptation costs. At higher levels of warming, thse costs will rise into the trillions of dollars annually, while global economic output is expected to decline at the same time. Wealthier nations may be able to buffer these impacts, but poorer nations will not. The result will be massive inequities, compounding already existing massive inequities, from food insecurity to drought to political turmoil, loss of cultural heritage, and in some cases even the disappearance of entire nations due to mass migration. This is not just a climate issue. The sheer scale of potential losses ahead, within our lifetimes no less, rivals the most tragic episodes in human history, driven this time not by conquest or disease but by our collective unwillingness to act.

Our failure to communicate

Another explanation for government inaction to-date is rooted in our failure to communicate. This failure falls into several categories:

• Chicken Little. For more than a generation already, environmental leaders have been shouting that our earth is on fire. But the impacts of climate change have been so gradual that politicians have had little difficulty justifying a slow, even skeptical response. Now that the evidence of imminent harm is becoming more apparent, this incremental mindset is proving difficult to change. We are trying to respond to a rapidly intensifying problem with institutions and narratives built for a slower one.
• Phaseout or bust. The persistent bias in climate advocacy language has been that fossil fuel emissions need to stop, period. The climate crisis has not been portrayed as an accumulation of excess carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere, but the fact that we’re polluting, and polluting is bad. There has been little focus on removing legacy pollution, or acknowledgement that phaseout alone won’t stop temperatures from rising (indeed, carbon dioxide removal is typically relegated to the margins, to be used only for hard-to-abate industries or only after we reach net zero), and no consideration of what to do if our emission-elimination efforts fail. This single-minded pursuit has politicized what might otherwise be a common cause problem, positioning phaseout as the enemy of economic growth and justice. Still, the general idea is right. Reducing emissions is a necessary step in combatting global warming, but its only part of the equation, and probably won’t get us to net zero on its own, and definitely not beyond zero to net negative (noting that our renewable energy and efficiency gains to-date have been largely offset by rising demand; globally, fossil fuels still supply roughly 80 percent of energy needs — a share that has remained mostly stable for decades).
• Policy infighting. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of policy infighting play out. In his 2023 book Foreign Bodies, historian Simon Schama explains how the spread of vaccines in the mid-1800s fractured the medical community, with the majority of the medical establishment very reluctant to embrace the work of Waldemar Haffkine, whose pioneering work was saving millions of lives despite being ridiculed by the establishment. Modern governments have also been very slow to respond to evidence about the link between tobacco and cancer, between pollution and environmental harm, and more (to say nothing of millennia of older examples, from Copernicus to Darwin) — doing something about the link between social media and social harm may be the next frontier. It takes time for expert opinions to shift, even within science, and certainly within governments and institutions.
• Jibberish. There is also the question of how we have communicated the technical dimensions of climate change—not advocacy, but the science itself. For over a hundred years already, thousands of researchers around the world have built an extensive body of measurements and peer reviewed climate research, much of it synthesized in national and international reports. But the scientific authority most commonly relied on by governments to communicate this knowledge has been the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Established by the United Nations in 1988 to inform international climate negotiations and policy, the IPCC was explicitly designed to be policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive — to allow its findings and recommendations to be vetted by a long line of diplomats, many with conflicts of interest regarding recommended action on fossil fuels. This design, intended to strengthen the consensus of IPCC reports, has also severely weakened how its findings are communicated. IPCC reports are rigorous, but they are also obtuse, employing calibrated and cautious language that limits comprehension, reduces perceived urgency, and allows skeptics and critics to misrepresent risks and justify weak climate policies based on a selective reading of the evidence. The end result is that virtually all governments can align themselves with some recommendation in these reports, and thereby still assure citizens they are implementing climate policies that can help keep the world below 1.5C when in fact this clearly isn’t the case. Their confident posture is typically a mix of sounding concerned, but not alarmed lest they face public ridicule; of appearing active but not to the point of dedicating significant resources to climate work, or adopting policies that will get ahead of public opinion; and of being supportive of the international status quo, which holds that reducing our fossil fuel use must continue to be the main pillar of global climate policy. Being confident does not involve adopting policies that have the best chance of saving our planet — at least not yet — because doing so is still a bridge too far. It also doesn’t help that some governments (most notably the US) are also fighting an uphill battle on politically polarized opinion, more polarized in the US than anywhere else in the world. Here, climate change is an issue that conservatives have successfully portrayed as a hoax. Pursuing real solutions to climate change involves not only finding consensus on policy, but also breaking down barriers of social and political identity that have been built around this issue.
• Tradition. We’re also battling science communication tradition — which is to say that obtuse and nonthreatening IPCC reports are only respecting the traditional divide between research and policy. So goes the thinking, the proper role of science is to inform policymakers, who will then be in a position to act responsibly with this information. It is both beneath the dignity of science and above the pay grade of scientists to shout fire in a crowded theater, and on the few occasions in modern history when scientists have crossed this divide, they have been politically pilloried (see also James Hansen) and have arguably, to critics, even politicized an issue and made it more difficult to resolve.

Burying the lede

Maybe the biggest policy and communication faux pas we have committed to date — and one that we can most easily address — is that we’ve been burying the lede in our policy conversations about climate change, treating it like a distant threat with manageable impacts. One way we do this is to benchmark our climate goals against global average temperatures rather than highlighting the regional and system-level changes that will be happening (and are already happening now). This isn’t to say we aren’t already recognizing local change, just that there tends to be a disconnect between what we put into policy language and what we plainly see with our own eyes and instruments. In other words, many parts of our planet are already living in a 2C world, and could easily reach 3C by mid-century; and many parts of our world already have rapidly shrinking coastlines, threatened economies, and mounting food and water insecurity. For these regions, the local effects of a too-warm world have already arrived, and the impacts will be relatively much more severe than for environmentally and economically privileged regions like the US and EU. Countries around the world need to recognize these looming existential threats and sound the alarm bell now, not wait another 20 years before IPCC methodology and global political consensus says it’s okay to start taking action.

• Average temperatures. Since signing the Paris agreement in 2016, government policymakers have spoken in reverent tones about keeping our planet from warming more than 1.5C above preindustrial averages. Left unspoken was when we should start worrying. At 1.1C? 1.2? Or do we only break glass in case of emergency at 1.5C, or even 2C? Maybe not surprisingly, we’re opting for the latter approach. Annual global averages are already registering at or above 1.5C (1.53C in 2023, 1.62C in 2024, and 1.44C in 2025 — 2025 was a La Niña year, which typically results in a modest cooling). But the IPCC uses a 20-year moving average in order to smooth out annual variations; we can only consider our 1.5C goal “breached” after a ten-year midpoint in this trend. Critics of this methodology have noted that this is a real-world planetary crisis unfolding, not a lab experiment. Waiting 10 or 20 more years to take action would be catastrophic.

  

  As well, the IPCC’s official temperature estimate is an average of near-surface air temperatures over both land and sea. Critics of this approach point out that focusing on a global averages gives us a false sense of security regarding how warm our planet has already become, and essentially discounts the very real damage and struggle happening at local and regional levels. For example, near surface temperatures over land are twice as high as temperatures over ocean, with land temperatures clocking in at 2C in 2023, 2.28C in 2024, and 2.03C in 2025) — masking the fact that land areas are already experiencing higher temperatures than we might think.

  

There are also marked regional variations in temperature. Millions of people living in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South and Central America already experience unlivable heat and humidity for large parts of the year. These regions are trying to adapt by increasing their air conditioning capacity and also by becoming more nocturnal by closing businesses during the day when it is too hot to be outside. But these workarounds will fail as temperatures increase to the point where nighttime temperatures are also lethal. And while the general consensus is that global average temperatures could reach close to 3C above preindustrial averages by the year 2100 (combined with a curious lack of concern about how drastically 3C will change our planet), many parts of our planet could get much warmer than this, particularly in high-emission models. In the MENA region, for example, a global average temperature of 4C might result in regional land temperatures of 8C, leading to agriculture failure, energy grid failure, mass migration, and eventually societal collapse. For whatever reason, these regionally high temperatures are rarely modeled, perhaps contributing to our collective — but particularly regional — complacency. If it was clear to politicians in these regions that their countries will cease to exist in 75 years or sooner, they might be more inclined to lead the way toward real solutions rather than wait for far less affected regions like North America to lead.

• Sea levels. A recent study by Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud from Wageningen University has rewritten the timeline of climate adaptation models. In their study, the authors demonstrated that almost all previous estimates of sea levels are wildly inaccurate due to their overreliance on satellite measurements (which can have a sizeable error margin). Real life measurements show that sea levels in some parts of the world — particularly southeast Asia — are a full meter higher than previously believed. The explanations for this description are manifold — overreliance on satellite data in many parts of the world, not accurately accounting for how our land areas are settling (due to factors like the extraction of underground water reservoirs, compaction, and melting permafrost), and how oceans are expanding as they warm. These higher sea levels mean that millions more people than expected are under immediate and growing risk from sea level rise. Inaccurate risk assessments may have led to misinformed decision-making regarding coastal adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage discussions, and exposure thresholds for many communities may be reached much sooner than previously projected.
• Economic impacts. Like temperatures and sea levels, the looming economic impacts of climate change also aren’t communicated in a way that highlights regional risks. For example, the ILO estimates that by 2030, heat stress will reduce global working hours by 2.2 percent — the equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs lost — primarily in agriculture and construction. And a recent Swiss Re report noted that about 18 percent of global GDP will be wiped out by 2050 if we do nothing to stop temperatures. But the US may take only a 13 percent hit — even less in some parts of Europe — while Southeast Asian countries will lose almost half of their GDP. If we were communicating the economic impacts of climate change more clearly, we might say that in a mere 25 years, Southeast Asian countries will be at risk of having their economies collapse entirely. Instead, we are only talking about averages, which seems much more benign and manageable.

  

• Agriculture. In the 1950s, some scientists entertained the prospect of increasing carbon dioxide levels as a way to increase photosynthesis and stimulate plant growth. The Trump Administration has recently taken to repeating such fantasies. Under real world conditions, however, increased CO2 is a net negative: The productivity increases in agriculture the world has witnessed over the last few generations — stemming from improved farming methods, fertilizers and pest-resistant seeds — have been offset by plant stress resulting from increased temperatures and climate instability. A 2025 PLOS study looking at the global impact of rising CO2 levels on agricultural productivity puts the net impact across all regions and crops at a negative 1.2 percent. And going forward, increased warming will reduce crop yields even more, at an accelerating pace. The message here is clear: Rising CO2 levels are not a boon to agriculture, but a threat, and one that will continue reducing global productivity over the coming years.

  

• Water. Regional water scarcity impacts are also important to highlight. Example abound. In the Southwestern US, the Colorado River basin has lost about 20 percent of its flow since 2000. Roughly half of this decline can be attributed to warming, not just precipitation changes, since higher temperatures increase evaporation and soil moisture loss. In the US Pacific Northwest, decades of intergovernmental agreements regarding the Columbia River have been negotiated to protect salmon runs, but the survival of this species is being increasingly threatened by water temperatures that are too warm. And globally, the United Nations University concludes that our world has now moved from a state of temporary “water crises” to a permanent state of “water bankruptcy” wherein societies everywhere have chronically overspent their hydrological assets, depleting non-renewable groundwater while climate change has destroyed aquifers, glaciers and wetlands. Everywhere, we see:
  • Shrinking lakes: More than 50 percent of the world’s large lakes have lost significant water volume since the early 1990s.
  • Wetland depletion: Over the last 50 years, 410 million hectares of natural wetlands — an area equivalent to the European Union — have been lost. This loss is valued at US$5.1 trillion in lost ecosystem services.
  • River alteration: Approximately one-third of global river basins face significant flow alterations. Major rivers such as the Colorado, Indus, and Tigris-Euphrates frequently fail to meet environmental flow needs or reach the sea.
  • Land subsidence: Over 6 million square kilometers (5 percent of global land area) is sinking due to groundwater extraction. In some areas, the land sinks by 25 centimeters per year. Compaction of overdrawn aquifers is often irreversible, meaning the storage capacity can never be restored even if pumping stops.
  • Cryosphere and “water tower” retreat: The world has lost more than 30 percent of its glacier mass since 1970. This represents the loss of “water savings” that provide baseflow for 1.5 to 2 billion people, particularly in the Indus, Ganges, and Yangtze basins. Once these glaciers disappear, the late-summer water security of these populations is fundamentally compromised.

It’s important to note that water bankruptcy is not solely the result of climate change. Rather, climate change has acted as an accelerant, making systems that might have been manageable under historical conditions become unmanageable due to warming and increased variability. Altered precipitation patterns, snowpacks, and glacier mass have reduced our renewable water supply; as well, droughts have evolved from episodic, climate-driven hazards into chronic conditions.

What now?

Governments need to know what’s in store so they can begin taking more meaningful action. But we need to communicate this information free of jargon and judgement and with a strong focus on real solutions, not more mirages. The magnitude of the crisis we’re facing with climate change, combined with the fact that we aren’t even mobilizing yet behind the right strategies, has set us up for “learned helplessness” (or more colloquially, “apocalypse fatigue” ) — a condition where we stop trying to solve problems if we feel we have no control over the outcome.

With the right communications and outreach strategy, we can avoid this outcome and help governments recognize that there is a realistic and achievable pathway to success; we already know there is broad global support for real climate action. Efforts like the Vancouver Declaration can be a starting point, helping politically de-risk this pivot and mobilization, while also building the global policy and resource base needed to achieve real progress.

In parallel, the environmental policy community also needs to adjust course and begin moving toward a more realistic mindset regarding how we can stop global warming while there’s still time. Specifically, we need to build a new climate policy pillar devoted solely to carbon dioxide removal, and stop selling the illusion that conserving energy, reducing emissions, and converting to green energy will be enough to save us. If we had done all these things 30 years ago, maybe, but not today. Carbon dioxide removal is our new reality, and the longer we wait to acknowledge this and start making CDR goals achievable, the more likely a 3C (or hotter) future will become. It’s going to be a long journey, but one with a clear beginning, clear mileposts, and a goal that could hardly be more important.