Keeping the World Focused on Climate Change Is a Nonstop Job

The job of organizing diplomats into a global agreement on climate change went from hard to impossible this year for Patricia Espinosa. As the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, she’s responsible for marshaling the climate conferences that steer the world’s governments toward lower emissions, which culminate in an annual meeting. This year’s event, known as COP26, was supposed to be a landmark for new commitments from countries aimed at keeping the world under the 2° Celsius warming limit set by the Paris climate agreement. With the pandemic, the meeting has been postponed and climate change has dropped down on the global priority list.

Espinosa’s job now is to keep climate action front and center, even as the world appears to be falling apart on any number of other fronts. Today, on World Environment Day, she’ll launch “Race to Zero,” a UN initiative to rally non-state actors—including nearly 1,000 businesses, almost 500 local governments, and a few dozen investors to push for climate action. In conversation with Bloomberg Green, Espinosa spoke about why the Paris agreement is still the best way to conduct climate diplomacy, what can be done to bring fossil fuel companies onboard, and how the economic recovery can be harnessed to boost climate action.