2024 Sustainability Year in Review
INTRO
Happy New Year! I can’t believe how quickly 2024 flew by and that we have now entered 2025. I have to admit that being in 2025 feels a little strange. When I was a young university student engaged in climate change issues we would often hear that we needed to see certain reductions in emissions by 2025 and that felt like forever away, yet here we already are. And just as was predicted back in those days, a lack of climate action is resulting in real consequences including bigger floods, hotter heatwaves, and stronger hurricanes, all of which we saw this year. In fact, the UN just published a report stating that 2024 will be the hottest year on record and that the top 10 hottest years of all time were the last decade we just experienced. And unfortunately, this year was not encouraging on the sustainability front. 2024 was marked by rising geopolitical tensions and several conflicts that have, rightly, taken much of the global community’s attention. In addition, in 2024 a record number of people, approximately 4 billion people in more than 50 nations, went to the polls to choose their leaders. And while there were some bright spots among those elections, like a climate scientist being elected in Mexico and France rejecting the far right, some key geographies, namely the US and the European Union, did make a notable shift to the right which many anticipate will set back progress on sustainability right at a time when bold action is needed most.
For me, this year revolved around a number of large multilateral meetings and negotiations, mostly related to environmental issues but not only. In 2024, all of the UN Conventions from the Rio Earth Summit - climate, biodiversity, and desertification - held their Conference of the Parties or COPs as you have probably heard them called. In addition, the global community struggled with negotiations on its global plastics treaty and the UN Secretary-General held his anticipated Summit of the Future. Interestingly most of these things took place in the second half of the year so the first part of 2024 was relatively slow on the global front.
EU Developments
Where we did see some movement on sustainability in the first part of the year was in the EU. Lawmakers anticipated a shift to the right in the June elections and therefore scrambled to pass a groundbreaking regulation for corporations before that. This regulation that was adopted is called the CSDDD or the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and it introduces new obligations for companies on identifying and managing adverse impacts on human rights and the environment. The CSDDD complements the EU’s other significant regulation for corporates focused on reporting called the CSRD or the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which was adopted in 2023. I think of these two pieces of regulation a little bit like ex-ante and ex-post, the CSDDD asks companies to ensure they are being good corporate citizens when planning their strategies and executing their operations whereas the CSRD asks companies to report on their activities related to social and environmental performance to enhance overall transparency. The EU is known for being a leader on sustainability regulation, so when they implement things like this it is worth paying attention to. For example, they published a taxonomy on sustainable activities in 2020 and since then 47 taxonomies have come into effect or are under development. The CSDDD did require some watering down to get it over the finish line but it is one of the most progressive pieces of corporate sustainability regulation on the planet. Interestingly, the EU also tried to put another piece of sustainability regulation into effect in 2024 - the EUDR or the EU Deforestation Regulation which will require companies that produce or use certain commodities like cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya, and wood to do additional due diligence to ensure that they are not contributing to deforestation. However, in November, the EU parliament officially delayed this regulation by one year meaning it should come into effect at the end of December 2025.
Swiss Climate Grannies Win Court Case
One of my favourite sustainability moments of the year took place in April when the Swiss climate grannies won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) (SwissInfo). The court case was put forward by over 2,000 senior women in Switzerland and the judgement states that Switzerland is violating the human rights of the older women because the state is not taking the necessary steps to combat global warming. This creates a legal basis for linking climate change to human rights which has a lot international legal significance. This was truly one of the bright spots in a mostly disappointing year for sustainability.
Plastics Negotiation
2024 was set to be an important year in the global negotiation to limit plastic pollution. These negotiations began in 2022 and there were two important meetings scheduled in 2024 to work towards a global agreement - one in April in Ottawa, Canada, and another, which was meant to be the final, in November in Busan, Korea. Unfortunately, the negotiations were fraught with challenges and media went so far as to call the negotiations in Korea a total collapse. The breakdown of the negotiations was due mostly to a few countries including Iran, India, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia who refused to accept a Treaty that would include any time-bound, numerical targets to reduce virgin plastics production levels – even with a targeted focus on the chemicals and items which are hardest to recycle and most harmful to human or animal health (Edie.net). Ultimately, negotiators were forced to push any decision on a global agreement to 2025.
Summit of the Future
In September at the General Assembly, the Secretary General of the UN convened the Summit of the Future. The Summit was touted as an effort to save and reinvigorate multilateralism and focused on forging a new international consensus on delivering a better present and safeguarding the future. UN Member States did adopt a “Pact for the Future” which included chapters on sustainable development and financing for development; International peace and security; Science, technology, and innovation and digital cooperation; Youth and future generations; and Transforming global governance. I am probably being cynical but to me and many others, this Summit ultimately felt like a failure and another talk shop for world leaders to say things that don’t get put into practice. Sure, it produced a document with some words on paper but that means little when multilateral institutions have been unable to do anything to prevent or stop massive conflicts like we see in Ukraine and Gaza. Ultimately, I believe this Summit will be nothing but a footnote in history.
After the UN General Assembly and Summit of the Future, a busy autumn season kicked off for all three of the Rio Conventions. In October, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity convened its 16th COP in Cali, Colombia. In November, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held its 29th COP in Baku, Azerbaijan. And finally, in December, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification held its 16th COP in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to outcomes of these COPs, so let’s go over some of the key things we saw at each one.
COP16 Biodiversity - Cali, Colombia
Starting with Biodiversity, there were two significant outcomes out of the Cali COP. First, the parties agreed to enhance the role of indigenous people and local communities in the biodiversity convention. Specifically, they adopted a program of work called Article 8j that embeds the rights, contributions, and traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities are further embedded in the global agenda. They also established a new permanent subsidiary body for IPLC and recognized the role of people of African descent in implementing the Convention and in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. The second large outcome was that governments also agreed to establish a new global fund (the ‘Cali Fund’) dedicated to sharing the benefits derived from using digital sequence information (DSI) from genetic resources. The fund will require a certain percentage of profits to be contributed by organizations that benefit commercially from the use of DSI, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, animal, and plant breeding companies. These funds will then support developing countries in biodiversity protection and regeneration. Unfortunately, discussions around the establishment of a new wider biodiversity fund were postponed, which was disappointing because the target of mobilizing $200B annually by 2030 to implement the Global Biodiversity Framework.
COP29 Climate - Baku, Azerbaijan
Moving to Climate, COP29 was rife with controversy from the beginning as it was reported that fossil fuel deals were being done on the sidelines by the host country and other fossil fuel-producing nations. Despite this disappointing dimension of the meeting, two main outcomes were reached. First, countries agreed to a new finance goal to replace the current $100 Billion per year by 2030 goal. The new goal is at least $300 Billion per year from the developed world by 2035. Second, a breakthrough finally happened around carbon market rules. Parties agreed on the carbon market rules underpinning both bilateral carbon trading and a centralized crediting mechanism.
COP 16 Desertification - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Finally, with desertification, the goal of COP16 was to reach an agreement on drought but unfortunately, that did not happen, however, the COP did end with the launch of the Riyadh Action Agenda , a platform that aims to mobilize action from countries to conserve and restore 1.5 billion hectares of land globally by 2030. In addition, pledges totaling $12.15 billion were made to Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to support 80 of the world’s most vulnerable countries in tackling drought resilience.
Keep Learning
Here are a few great resources for further reading and learning: