PATRICIA ESPINOSA CANTELLANO

Rich countries including the European Union and the United States have pushed back against efforts to put financial help for poor nations suffering the devastating effects of global warming firmly on the agenda for this year’s U.N. climate summit.

Australia’s new government has formally committed to a more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target of 43% by the end of the decade in fulfillment of a key election pledge.

The U.N. climate chief has urged countries to keep up hope and focus on tackling global warming despite the many obstacles now to international cooperation.

While world leaders hail the Glasgow climate pact as a good compromise that keeps a key temperature limit alive, scientists are much more skeptical.

U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa was not happy with a last-minute fight over coal that ended in a compromise at the Glasgow climate talks.

Officials are touting faint progress on money, but little on pollution at a United Nations world leader summit on climate change.

The head of the United Nations says a new report shows the world is on a “catastrophic pathway” toward a hotter future unless governments make more ambitious pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.N.’s top climate official is urging governments to stop their “deferral and delay” tactics and instead embrace rapid, widespread measures to curb and adapt to global warming.

China and India have missed a U.N. deadline to submit fresh targets for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.

President Joe Biden takes center stage in a two-day climate summit highlighting America's return to the fight to curb global warming.

President Joe Biden takes center stage in a two-day climate summit highlighting America's return to the fight to curb global warming.

A United Nations report released on Friday, Feb. 26, 2021, finds the countries of the world are not promising to do enough carbon-cutting to keep global warming from hitting dangerous levels. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)The newest pledges by countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions are falling far short of what's needed to limit global warming to what the Paris climate accord seeks, a new United Nations report finds. Most countries — especially top carbon polluters China, United States and India — missed the Dec. 31 deadline for submitting official emission-cutting targets for November’s climate negotiations in Scotland. Fewer than half of the world’s countries, accounting for 30% of the world’s carbon emissions, submitted targets by the deadline. At least 10 countries that submitted goals last year did not provide tougher goals, Hare said.

FILE - In this Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017 file photo, Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, smiles in the U.S. Climate Action Center during the "AMERICA'S PLEDGE" and "WE ARE STILL IN" campaign at the COP 23 Fiji UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany. Their hopes were further boosted by Biden's election win earlier this month and his pledge to undo President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement. That will mean denying COVID-19 economic recovery funds to polluting industries while putting up the $100 billion each year world leaders pledged in Paris to help poor countries tackle climate change by 2020, she said. “It is absolutely indispensable that we align those recovery packages to the goals of the Paris agreement,” Espinosa said.