Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pushing the planet towards a future marked by intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued by the United Nations this week. Another study by The Lancet raised concerns not only about the direct health consequences of dependence on fossil fuels and rising temperatures, including heat-related mortality, pregnancy complications and cardiovascular disease, but also the indirect costs, such as the effects that drier soil could have on malnutrition and how a changing climate can expand habitats suitable for mosquitoes that, in turn, would lead to a spike in dengue fever and malaria, both of which ravage Bengal and Calcutta. Each study on the changing climate throws up alarming results, even as governments globally have their heads buried in the sand.

Spiralling energy costs, soaring inflation and the geopolitical fallouts of the war in Ukraine are on the minds of the global fraternity, relegating the climate emergency to the back-burner of policymaking. There is enough in the latest reports to set the alarm bells ringing and the CoP-27 summit, which begins in November, would be a litmus test for nations. Of course, the history of climate summits is one of failure to pass this test. CoP-26 in Glasgow had set its targets too far into the future to be of use. India’s pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2070 is a case in point. This collective inertia is proving to be fatal. The Lancet report, for instance, identified newer constituencies being affected by the rising temperature. Adults older than 65 years and children younger than one year of age are two such groups, who were exposed to 3.7 billion more heatwave days in 2021 than annually in 1986-2005; heat-related fatalities have increased by 68% between 2000-04 and 2017-21. Established vulnerable groups remain in peril. According to the World Bank’s Groundswell report, up to 216 million people could be compelled to leave their nations by 2050 as a result of the emergence of climatic catastrophes such as water scarcity, decreased food yields and rising sea levels.

One major point of failure of climate summits concerns the onus of taking historical responsibility for climate change and make reparations. The developed world refuses to adequately compensate poor and developing countries, which would bear a disproportionate share of the disaster, so that the latter can take mitigatory action. Could nimble imagination resolve the discord? Alaska set up the Alaska Permanent Fund, which mandates that the country’s mineral wealth belongs not to the government or to the private players but to all its citizens, including the unborn, entitling them to annual dividends from activities like oil drilling. If implemented on a global scale, the idea of the environment as a universal asset-based resource that can be used to fund change may save the planet.