Setting 2030 as the climate target

The latest IPCC report sounds the alarm once again: not enough is being done, not fast enough, and global warming is accelerating. The reason is simple: the climate is a global public good, the preservation of which requires strong cooperative and coordinated policies, defining a target effort and a time horizon before distributing this effort among the participants. The Paris Agreement has made it possible to affirm a common objective at the international level, but it does not ensure either coordination or cooperation. Lack of coordination because the sum of the Nationally Determined Commitments does not make it possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, even if these commitments were met. Intrinsic problem of cooperation in application of the “tragedy of the commons”: the benefits of action are immense and shared between all countries, but each has an interest in benefiting from the efforts of others without bearing the cost. Under these conditions, the year 2030 is an important milestone. It will be both the assessment of 15 years of failure of the Paris Agreement and the start of the countdown: only two decades left before the indispensable horizon of carbon neutrality.