Dear Reader,

Climate promises are starting to resemble New Year’s resolutions: easy to make, hard to keep.

The worldwide push to stem the climate crisis has drawn in many of the big institutions that most need to act: not just governments but corporations of all kinds, including big banks and other institutional money managers, commodity producers, consumer products companies and many more. Even the companies digging or pumping fossil fuels out of the ground are feeling the pressure to make commitments.

We are disappointed to report that the past few years have seen a wave of backsliding on those climate commitments, however. Some of this regression has occurred in direct response to political pressure in the United States, where right-wing politicians are scoring points by attacking ​‘woke capital,’ sometimes using the financial firepower of state governments to get what they want. But the bigger problem has been a lack of courage, fortitude and determination at a global scale as some of the leaders who made big promises at the climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 realise how difficult those promises will be to keep. Like New Year’s resolutions so enthusiastically made in January but forgotten by April, these commitments have lately been falling by the wayside. 

We are especially disappointed by some of our colleagues in the financial services industry who took bold stances only a few years ago but are now wriggling out of their promises. Less surprising, alas, is that some of the half-hearted pledges made by oil companies have lately been abandoned. Even stalwart companies determined to act on climate are finding that cutting their emissions is hard going.

Now the biggest climate promise ever made is finally on the table: an agreement, negotiated in Dubai late last year, that committed the entire world to ​‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels. 

Can we do it? 

We must do it, and the real question: how fast we can go? The faster the nations of the world get moving, the sooner we can achieve net-zero emissions — the point where any remaining greenhouse gas emissions can be balanced out by removals from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the biggest problem we confront has not gone away: the sheer power of human and economic inertia.

We offer readers the eighth edition of our Sustainability Trends Report, taking stock of the climate and environmental crises at a global scale. Last year’s report was buoyed by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, primarily a climate law, in the United States and by European success at countering the energy crisis manufactured by Vladimir Putin. This year, we feel compelled to write in detail about the difficulties still facing the world as it tries to bring emissions down.

We have not lost heart. But every single one of us must recognise that we will be working on this problem for the rest of our lives, and at no point is it likely to be easy.