(CN) — A mixed – and often muted – reaction around the world to the United Nations' latest dire report on the dangerous speed and voracity of global warming is a jarring reminder of just how difficult it will be to rein in carbon emissions on a planet with 7.9 billion people.
In Europe and the United States, where global warming is now a top concern for a public spooked by extreme weather, major news outlets ran scary banner headlines about the stark warnings of “irreversible” sea level rise and other “unprecedented changes” contained in a report on Monday issued by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body made up of scientists around the world studying global warming.
Reacting to the report, many politicians in Europe and the U.S. issued urgent statements about the need to curb carbon emissions by eliminating the use of coal, investing in renewable energies and putting new taxes on fossil fuels. But leaders elsewhere in the world were mostly silent.
A review by Courthouse News of newspapers and news agencies around the world reveals that the new U.N. report is barely making headlines in many places where climate change appears to be just one problem among so many others – such as civil wars, conflict between superpowers, the coronavirus pandemic, famine and societal unrest.
In China, the U.N. report was hardly mentioned by major newspapers and state-run news agencies. Instead, Chinese media such as Global Times, the People's Daily and Xinhua, focused on a new wave of coronavirus infections in China, the country's successes at the Olympic Summer Games and the threats posed by a U.S. engaged in an all-out campaign to contain China's rise.
With its vertiginous economic success, China has become a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and it must play a major role in reducing emissions for there to be any success at stopping the planet from excessive heating.
In recent years, the communist nation of 1.4 billion people has developed a plan to reduce its carbon emissions. China, which serves as the world's factory in so many areas, has vowed to reach so-called net zero by 2060 but it also projects to continue belting out an increasing amount of carbon emissions until at least 2030, when it says its emissions will peak. In other words, China plans to do its part, but slowly.
Chinese media, though, is not alone in largely ignoring the U.N. report. News outlets in Russia, Japan, India, the Middle East and South America also gave it scant attention, the review of global news outlets shows.
In India, like elsewhere, if the U.N. report was mentioned at all it got treated like just another news story. The English edition of the Dainik Jagran, India's second-biggest newspaper and the world's fifth largest newspaper in terms of circulation, ran an AFP news story. The Hindi version of the newspaper appeared to not even mention the report, though it has run numerous stories about how climate change is causing dangerous flooding and landslides in the Himalaya mountains.
With 1.3 billion people, India is the world's second most populous nation. Like China, it has a national plan to reduce emissions and uphold the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The landmark Paris Agreement made it legally binding on the world's nations to prevent the planet from surpassing the threshold of additional warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
India is rapidly modernizing and it has become the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter. But there are hopes that India is on the right path because its new modernization is also taking place with massive investments in renewable energies, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. nonprofit.