Context

• With the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) pushed back a full year – to November, 2021 – the UNFCCC’s Climate Ambition Alliance has launched a global campaign called “Race to Zero” that encourages countries, companies, and other entities to deliver structured net-zero greenhouse-gas emission pledges by the time the talks begin.

About the Campaign

• The campaign aims to codify commitments made via the Climate Ambition Alliance (CAA), which launched ahead of last year’s COP25 in Madrid.
• Signatories are responsible for 23 percent of current greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide and 53 percent of global GDP, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
• “Race to Zero” is intended to be an umbrella campaign for coordinating commitments made under existing initiatives by providing comparability and establishing criteria for best practices.
• The UN-led initiative instructs nations to submit more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that were created for the Paris Agreement.
• According to the UN, the world is “way off-track” to deliver the aims of the Paris Agreement. Preliminary data for 2019 suggests that greenhouse gas emissions increased globally in 2019 and carbon emissions from fossil fuels grew by more than 0.5% last year.
• The Race to Zero campaign will encourage renewed commitments to reaching the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement.