Foreword

The unrelenting impact of climate change poses an existential crisis for our planet. Pakistan just witnessed the worst floods in its modern history. Apart from the loss of lives and mass displacement, the receding waters also left

widespread disease and destruction in their wake. The rest of the Global South also witnessed extreme weather and drastic climate events, including heatwaves in India, typhoons in the Philippines, floods in Malaysia, cyclones in southern Africa, drought in the Horn of Africa, and severe rainfall in West Africa.

Meanwhile, in the Global North, Hurricane Ian hammered Florida becoming the ‘costliest climate-induced disaster of the year’, with losses totaling over $100 billion. Earlier in the year, Europe went through two severe heatwaves in June and July, perhaps the worst in the past half century — leading to a number of wildfires. Elsewhere, a typhoon in Japan – “one of the most powerful” storms that the country had ever seen – and sandstorms in the Middle East raged. All these climate-related events highlight the need for Global South and North countries to partner together to undertake immediate and substantial climate action.

To that end, the Global Climate Alliance (GCA) Collaborative is an independent research effort to evaluate how Global South countries can best ally with Global North countries to accelerate climate action. Over the past two years, several academic institutions and think tanks have been collaborating on these issues and pooling their individual research efforts. This report offers the Collaborative’s perspectives on how a GCA can assist the Global South’s ability to address climate change, including mitigation, adaptation, and resilience measures.

The GCA initiative builds on multiple modelling studies that indicate that net-zero is net-positive. The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that current policies will lead to a 2.8°C increase in temperatures by 2100. Such accelerated global warming is likely to lead to disastrous economic impact around the world. On the other hand, if countries commit to the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5°C, the Global South will benefit from faster GDP growth, better public health, higher job creation, and more energy security.

Accordingly, the GCA Collaborative is proposing an open and inclusive global agreement to accelerate and catalyse the Global South’s ability to undertake climate action. As GCA members, countries would:

• commit to binding Paris Agreement-aligned transformation pathways with absolute near-term targets, both economy-wide and sectoral;
• develop transformation roadmaps in key tradable sectors to prevent carbon leakage; and
• implement a comprehensive climate finance package that would result in trillions of dollars of incremental climate financing from the Global North to the Global South.

I would like to acknowledge and appreciate the research contributions of the following institutions and people: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Timm Anton, Jan Cernicky, Ritika Jajoo, Karin Jancykova, Denis Schrey), Shakti Foundation (Anshu Bharadwaj, Shubhashis Dey, Koyel Mandal, Vedant Monger), World Resources Institute India (Varun Agarwal, Ulka Kelkar, Deepthi Swamy), London School of Economics (Hans Peter Lankes, Nick Robins, Nick Stern), McKinsey & Company, DIW Berlin (Karsten Neuhoff, Jesse Scott, Sangeeth Raja Selvaraju, Heiner von Luepke), Observer Research Foundation (Samir Saran, Mihir Sharma), The Fletcher Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University (Amy Jaffe, Tarun Gopalakrishnan, Easwaran Narassimhan, Kelly Sims Gallagher), Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt (Andreas Goldthau), and Amar Bhattacharya, Ajay Chhibber, Leonardo Garrido, Jamshyd Godrej, Varad Pande, Deborah Ramalope, John Sterman, and Akhilesh Tilotia in their individual capacities.

A special note of appreciation for the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) for their project management and financial support to the Collaborative. I would also like to thank the International Solar Alliance (ISA), Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Shakti Foundation for their support in preparation and release of this report. Thanks to Preeti Singh, for her help in editing this version of the report.