Self-Centered Policies Darkening Outlook for Climate Change Measures

By Makoto Mitsui

8:00 JST, April 11, 2026

There is a growing trend in the international community to alter the status quo through military force and to adopt increasingly self-centered policies. The rise of unilateralism is casting a shadow over global climate action, which relies on international cooperation.

Under the Paris Agreement — an international accord on climate change — developed and developing countries alike are required to set greenhouse gas reduction targets and implement plans to achieve them. This was made possible by a framework in which each country sets and implements its own targets voluntarily, without the imposition of penalties.

However, the limits of this “voluntary approach,” which was designed to enable participation by all nations, are now becoming increasingly apparent.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries were scheduled to submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in 2025, outlining their greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2035. The initial deadline was February 2025. However, even by the time of the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) held in Brazil in November, only about half of the parties to the Paris Agreement had submitted their targets.

More critically, the submitted reduction targets were insufficient. Even if all countries’ targets are combined, emissions in 2035 would only be 12% lower than in 2019. To achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperatures to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, a 55% reduction from the 2019 level is required, underscoring the need for far stronger measures.

One major factor exacerbating the situation is U.S. President Donald Trump, who began his second term in January 2025 and has further solidified his stance of prioritizing economic activity over environmental measures.

In September 2025, at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Trump claimed that climate change “is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and dismissed scientists’ predictions of global warming, stating: “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people.” These remarks amounted to a fundamental denial of climate science and underscored the deepening crisis of the current situation.

Amid the spread of unscientific claims, a group of 12 countries at COP30, including host nation Brazil, issued the “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.” It noted that “the increasing threats to information integrity represent one of the defining challenges of our time, weakening the foundations of public debate and public trust and undermining societies’ capacity to build collective solutions.” The declaration emphasized the importance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in providing accurate, consistent and evidence-based scientific information. It also stressed the need to ensure equitable access to such information to promote informed and inclusive climate action.

Beyond these political and ideological disputes, global warming continues unabated in accordance with the laws of physics.

In January, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts released findings indicating that the global surface air temperature in 2025 was 1.47 C above pre-industrial levels, making it the third hottest year on record. Including 2024, which was the hottest year on record, the average for 2023-25 exceeded 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The increase in temperatures was driven not only by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions but also by a rise in sea-surface temperatures associated with an El Nino event, which is a short-term occurrence. Even so, the current level of long-term global warming is estimated to be around 1.4 C, and it could reach 1.5 C by the end of this decade based on the current rate of warming.

In January, Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the foundation of the Paris Agreement, following the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement itself. Prof. Seita Emori of the University of Tokyo expressed growing concern, saying, “The worst-case scenario is that the U.S. influence causes other countries to scale back their measures, and if major nations stop cooperating on climate action, even if the remaining countries collaborate, climate change will not be halted, and the world as a whole will give up.”

Amid this grim reality, it is worth recalling the words of Prof. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, whom I interviewed in 2017 during my time as a Yomiuri Shimbun Washington correspondent, after Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement during his first term.

“Ever since I first worked on this issue in the 1980s, I thought that it was a race between rationality and the ability to get things done sooner versus the speed at which the climate was changing. We are losing the race.”

Nine years have passed since that interview, and the reality has grown even more dire. However, if there is any hope, it lies in the fact that even though we are losing the race, we still have a chance to reverse the trend. Precisely because we live in an era where international political stability is crumbling and scientific consensus is under attack, we must summon the resilience to persevere.

Political Pulse appears every Saturday.

Makoto Mitsui

Makoto Mitsui is a Senior Research Fellow at the Yomiuri Research Institute.