Giving Compass' Take:

• As the UN Climate Summit approaches, there is concern that countries will not commit to climate resilience plans. Leaders may need to employ other strategies that tap private-sector efforts to address climate change.

• The private sector's responsibility to climate action includes industry and energy transitions, along with commitments to reducing carbon footprints. How can donors help engage the private sector to expand these climate strategies?

• Learn more about businesses taking action on climate change. 

Next week’s U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York, and the roughly yearlong process it will kick off, presents the world with a challenge. On the one hand, the science of climate change is clear and it points to a need for a substantially enhanced global response—and quickly. Over the next year, as part of processes from the Paris climate agreement, countries around the world will re-evaluate their commitment to reducing emissions domestically.

On the other hand, there is concern that the world, and particularly key individual countries that are essential to the solution, are wavering on their earlier commitments and, in some cases, pursuing strategies that are contrary to solving the problem. The Summit itself will undoubtedly reflect this tension, representing at once a confluence of voices eager to see enhanced commitments from national leaders, and some national governments unsure of how forward they should be about the timing and pace of their commitments.

Given these tensions, the Summit cannot deliver a globally comprehensive set of new national-level climate commitments. However, by highlighting examples of current action and prompting some leading commitments by groups of stakeholders and some individual countries, the Summit can help world leaders to coalesce around the ambitious expectations that will be needed as countries evaluate their options for revising their existing climate strategies and look ahead to make new ones.

One approach that may bear fruit is a set of collaborative workstreams that seek to facilitate action across governments and other stakeholders, for example on industry transitions, energy transitions, and analyzing and pricing climate risks and resilience for the private sector.

That said, the overarching Summit goal is to advance global action on climate change, with the biggest indicator of success being whether countries commit to, and implement, national targets and strategies that allow them to get on a pathway toward significant global reductions by 2030.

Read the full article about climate summit by Nathan Hultman at Brookings.