Your 2023 Climate Wins, Wrapped

This year didn’t just break records. It smashed them. It has officially been the hottest year on record. Relentless heatwaves sizzled the Southwest U.S., Southern Europe, and China. Wildfires of unprecedented scales tore through Greece, Hawaii, and Canada. Record-breaking droughts devastated Chile, the Amazon, and the Horn of Africa, while torrential rains caused catastrophic flooding in parts of the US, India, and Libya. And to top it all off, this year’s COP28 summit in Dubai swarmed with lobbyists for oil, gas, meat, and dairy industries. Their self-interest bled into the resulting agreement, which finally called for a transition away from fossil fuels but stopped short of a complete phase-out. Looking at these developments alone could easily give the impression that we’re screwed. 

Yet what often gets overlooked is the fact that, just as climate impacts are growing, so are the actions to tackle them. 2023 has seen some remarkable progress towards reducing emissions—record levels of solar installation and electric vehicle purchases, monumental drops in Amazon deforestation, and victories in U.S. courts and international policy, just to name a few. “I’m more hopeful today than I’ve ever been, despite the fact the reality of climate change is becoming more and more clear,” said Jonathan Foley, the executive director of the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown.

Of course, what we’ve accomplished still falls short of what’s needed to stop climate change quickly enough. But just as we need to call out the damage caused by rising temperatures, we also need to acknowledge the wins. The climate story, after all, is not just one of worry, but also one of hope—a story about all we stand to lose but also all there is to save. Ultimately, “it’s not a question of [being] screwed or not screwed, it’s a question of how screwed, and that choice is ours,” said Susan Joy Hassol, a climate change communicator who directs the nonprofit science and outreach project Climate Communication.

She and other experts worry that doomism, hopelessness, and despair on climate change are overshadowing this message of advancement. And although only 13% of Americans say they believe it’s too late to do anything about climate change—a number that’s been relatively stable over time—people around the world are growing increasingly worried as they see extreme weather events unfold in real-time, and the media tends to focus on the problems more than the solutions. “We worry that people are getting the message that it’s too late, that… the system has tipped,” Hassol said. The concern is that this mentality can have just the same effect as denying climate change outright; if people feel like there’s nothing that can be done—that nothing is being done—why would they bother doing anything about it? Growing voices on social media that make “the-end-is-nigh”-type proclamations may further fuel fear and inaction, Foley added.

While communicating the threats is important, it’s just as critical to highlight the progress on climate action. Studies show that people need both types of information to inspire the most constructive response to a problem, as solutions alone can create a false sense of hope and complacency, said John Kotcher, a social scientist at George Mason University. In a recent online experiment by Kotcher’s colleagues, participants reported that solutions-focused climate articles gave them a greater sense that actions can make a difference—something that increased their support for climate action. Other research demonstrates that people are much more eager to help tackle a problem if they know that we’re not starting from scratch, Hassol added. With climate change, “we’re not starting from ground zero,” she said. “That’s important for people to understand and internalize psychologically.”

One area of major progress is the world’s success in weaning the energy sector off fossil fuels. Contrary to the widely-held public view that renewable energy is expensive, the cost of solar power has fallen by around 90% and wind by 70% in the past decade. In most places, it’s cheaper to get energy from a new solar or wind plant than it is from a new coal or gas facility, and costs are continuing to fall. By contrast, energy generation from coal and gas is unlikely to see major price drops; analysts note that these processes have largely passed peak efficiency and still rely on expensive extraction of fossil fuels. 

The majority of new energy capacity being added in the U.S. and globally is solar, wind, and battery storage; these renewables already account for nearly 14% of the U.S. energy production and 12% worldwide. This year, boosted by investment incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. solar industry is predicted to add a record 32 gigawatts of solar capacity—53% more than last year. Residential installation is also soaring. Some researchers anticipate that solar will dominate global power generation in the next one to two decades. “I think we’re in an iPhone kind of moment when it comes to electricity,” Foley said.

Some scientists speculate that the growing efforts by fossil fuel companies to delay the green transition could signal the last gasp of a sunset industry. Their dying efforts still have a huge impact, as COP28 exemplified, but “it does seem like even those vested interests know that their time is up, especially in the energy system,” said Paul Behrens, an environmental scientist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands whose recent book explores the pessimistic and hopeful visions of our future. 

Electric vehicles are also becoming cheaper and more attractive than their gas-guzzling counterparts, Foley said. Although places like Norway and China lead in EV sales, the U.S. reached a major milestone this year: For the first time, more than one million EVs have been sold in a calendar year. This year, EVs are on track to account for 9% of all new passenger vehicles sold—up from 7.3% last year, in part boosted by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Solar power, EVs, and technological advances in other green technologies like heat pumps give Foley a lot of hope. They can empower politicians to take bolder steps on climate change, especially as the many positive side effects of these technologies become clear, he said. “Now we’re at a stage where, wow, the alternatives to fossil fuels are cheaper, better, cleaner, more secure, they don’t pump money into tyrannical states and cartels.” 

This year has also seen important developments on the policy front. At COP28, delegates took a historic step in establishing a loss and damage fund, the latest development in a three-decades-long fight to have wealthy, high-emitting countries compensate vulnerable, developing ones for the harms of climate change. Although the $700 million pledged so far doesn’t come close to the estimated hundreds of billions worth of damages, experts acknowledge that agreeing to a fund is a big deal. 

Meanwhile, in Europe, a landmark policy took effect in October: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. In the EU, companies have long needed to adhere to strict limits on their carbon emissions, which has incentivized them to offshore production to other countries. The new legislation charges corporations for importing certain polluting products into the union unless they come from countries that have their own carbon price. This move could nudge many nations around the world to set a price on carbon pollution, Behrens explained. “The [policy], I think, has one of the biggest potentials, as a single legislation, to really revolutionize the structures of global trade.”

Climate action has also taken to the courts, where there’s a growing global movement to sue governments for exacerbating the climate crisis. In Europe, where several major cases have framed climate inaction as a violation of fundamental human rights to life and health, a Belgian court went as far as ordering the government to cut carbon emissions more quickly. A U.S. court finally joined this global trend when a Montana judge ruled that fossil fuel development could indeed violate a group of young people’s state constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, wrote César Rodríguez-Garavito, an international human rights expert who heads New York University’s Climate Litigation Accelerator, in an email. Meanwhile, the state of California is suing five major oil companies over climate disinformation, and the European Court of Human Rights has been conducting historic hearings for major climate cases that could influence climate policy in many countries. “Climate litigation has emerged as a frequent tool to expedite and amplify climate action,” Rodríguez-Garavito wrote. 

What has given ecologist Vigdis Vandvik of the University in Bergen hope this year is a growing recognition at the U.N. level that the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis require the same solutions. After all, protecting carbon-storing ecosystems is critical for tackling climate change, and vice versa. In a widely overlooked policy success last December, nations around the world adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a well-formulated, albeit nonbinding, series of policies to halt and reverse the loss of nature, Vandvik said. And this August at the U.N., nearly 70 countries signed a long-awaited “high seas treaty,” raising hopes for protecting the vital marine ecosystems in international waters, which encompass half of the planet’s surface.

Meanwhile, in South America, the long-rampant deforestation of the Amazon is finally slowing, by nearly 50% compared to last year. It’s a promising step toward the Brazilian president’s vision, which remains contentious among South American nations, of a deforestation-free Amazon by 2030. “We are doing much less than we should, but more than we could. And we are seeing that what we are doing makes a difference,” Vandvik wrote via email, pointing to a recent success in clearing up plastic pollution along Norway’s west coast, where she’s based. “The incredible forgiveness of nature, its potent powers and ability to bounce back [and] fill the spaces that we allow it, is perhaps my greatest source of hope,” she added.

Awareness of these advances isn’t just increasing among policymakers and scientists. More news publications are shifting towards solutions-based climate coverage, and there are signs that public perceptions around certain solutions are changing. Kotcher and his colleagues have been surveying people about the Inflation Reduction Act. While last fall, only 22% of participants thought the law would help them personally and 26% believed it would help their family, those figures increased to 30% and 33% in this year’s survey. Whether this reflects greater news coverage, political messaging, or people’s lived experiences, “it gives me hope that at least things are moving in the right direction,” Kotcher said. “That bodes well for the long-term viability of the law.”

Many trends are on the right track. While globally, emissions are still creeping upwards, they are falling in more than 30 countries, including most of Europe and the U.S. There are “so many Americans who’d have no idea that’s even true,” Foley remarked.