The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos showed climate change has become a top issue for many businesses and governments, but also demonstrated a yawning gap between how they view the scale of the challenge and what can be achieved without significant new policies. It was a year in which the issue, which many people here believe has contributed to extreme weather-related events such as the Australian bush fires, appeared to shift from a fashionable talking point to a matter that is beginning to have real-world consequences for many banks and businesses.
“Davos turned into a climate-change conference this year,” Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said Thursday. But he said “the massive gap between ambition and concrete action to change the emissions trajectory remains glaring.” A large majority of climate scientists attribute the rise in global temperatures to the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and blame human activity for much of it. They recommend temperature rises should be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (3.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from preindustrial times to minimize the probability of major economic damage and to do that carbon emissions must be cut. But while few delegates—representatives of the Trump administration aside—challenge those assumptions, there wasn’t agreement on how best to bring down carbon output.