Resetting the Course on Climate Progress

Why the Paris Agreement is falling short

Last week’s COP30 in Belém marked 10 years since the Paris Climate Agreement — a milestone that should have invited celebration. Instead, it underscored an uncomfortable truth: The treaty is falling short. Even if every current national plan is fully implemented, we are still headed for at least 2.3 °C of warming by century’s end. Under the Paris Agreement, each country pledged to publish and regularly update its own Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC): a plan for doing its share to keep warming to 1.5 °C, or at most 2 °C. That mechanism is working in a narrow sense. Countries are submitting and revising their NDCs. The problem is that, taken together, those commitments don’t add up to the goal.

I’m not arguing that we abandon the Paris Climate Agreement. Without it, global climate prospects would almost certainly be far worse. If anything, you could call Paris a partial failure — and, crucially, one that is still fixable. Every party to the treaty accepts the need for urgent action, and every party admits that today’s plans aren’t enough. There even seems to be a broad appetite for moving faster. And yet, these yearly conferences struggle to translate that shared recognition into concrete upgrades and higher ambition in the NDCs. How is that possible?

Political barriers slowing climate action

Part of the answer is political gravity. Paris is stuck in a classic coordination trap: No country wants to absorb near-term costs without confidence that others will match them, especially when voters see little local upside. Mitigation is meeting growing public resistance, particularly in developed economies. Climate change unfolds slowly and globally, which makes it feel abstract: For many people, it still doesn’t register as something they live every day. Meanwhile, cutting emissions demands an expensive overhaul of almost all energy and industrial systems. Put those together, the dominant story becomes this: Mitigation is a costly, complicated, government-led project that delivers little that individuals can see or feel. At best, we spend a fortune just to keep things from getting worse. And if people are going to buy into a plan like that, they need to believe the pain is shared fairly. Of course, people do feel the impacts of climate, even if the causes of specific increases in wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes are debated in the public arena. Still, the benefits of mitigation feel distant, and one country’s measures won’t meaningfully change the outcome on their own. Politically, no country is willing — or even able — to move first. Seen in that light, it’s an achievement that the agreement didn’t unravel entirely after the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year.

Reframing climate mitigation as real progress

Changing that dynamic means changing the story we tell about the transition. We’ve made expensive, system-wide, technology-driven shifts before — and they didn’t take a century. They unfolded over 15–20 years and, in hindsight, felt surprisingly smooth. Think of the mass adoption of cars and the infrastructure that followed (roughly 1908–1927 in the U.S.), the rapid spread of television (1939–1955), and more recently the internet (about 1985–2001). Unlike today’s climate narrative, those technology-enabled societal transformations were framed as progress — not as a painful and costly way to preserve the status quo. Even though those transitions required massive infrastructure investments, decarbonization is a league of its own. It’s not like buying a car or a TV. Still, the adoption lesson holds: Transitions and infrastructure development accelerate when people perceive immediate personal and local gains.

What consumers see as meaningful climate progress

People embrace technology when it is associated with progress — when it makes life better. They don’t embrace change merely to keep things the same. So, what does progress look like in the context of technology, particularly technology for climate mitigation? We posed that question to Lux Research’s Virtual Anthropologist — an AI interface to our vast body of consumer insights and trends research — to capture consumer perspectives in the EU and U.S.

The top three themes for EU consumers were “Cleaner technology that actually helps,” “Growth that helps communities,” and “Useful tech for daily life.” For the U.S., they were similar, with a slightly different emphasis: “Jobs and growth first,” “Rules and safeguards,” and “Real-world payoff.” In both regions, the pattern is clear. Progress should benefit the local economy, improve daily life now (not only by the end of the century), and be trustworthy. (“Rules and safeguards” and “technology that actually helps” point to the same underlying demand.) Climate-mitigation technologies have a much easier time delivering visible local benefits in less-developed economies. That helps explain why resistance is often strongest in richer ones.

How community participation accelerates the energy transition

Making climate mitigation feel like real progress means involving local communities in shaping and co-owning projects—from wind farms and EV charging stations to solar parks and CO₂ capture. This grassroots approach makes technology tangible: a neighborhood that was built with materials from locally captured CO₂; a company like Flux in Kenya that boosts soil quality and farmer income by spreading silicates to enhance CO₂ absorption; the Zeeuwind cooperative in the Netherlands that raised EUR 16 million from 3,400 citizens to co-develop wind energy and share returns; and in Brazil, the E-Lounge charging hub that doubles as an emergency power source. While community involvement adds transaction costs up front, it often prevents costly delays and backlash, risks that often pose a bigger threat to project timelines and returns. More importantly, it turns clean energy into shared progress people can see, shape, and benefit from.

Strategies to build consumer support for decarbonization

The Paris Agreement is caught in a loop. Industry looks to policymakers for regulation because regulation is the only way to justify a more expensive route to the same outcome. Policymakers, meanwhile, look to industry to deliver affordable solutions so they can regulate without triggering public backlash. The consumers — the people who ultimately decide whether transitions succeed — are the ones left out. Yet, history shows that rapid societal transformation happens only when consumers are central to it.

To put them back in the loop, you could:

1. Develop financial instruments that let consumers participate directly.
2. Source from local communities where possible and make that visible.
3. Create clear mechanisms for community benefit, such as preferred rates within a defined distance.
4. Communicate transparently and engagingly about project impacts, both positive and negative.
5. Highlight one real, direct improvement your project delivers.

For example, your charging point may resolve grid congestion in the area and improve everyone’s return on their rooftop solar. That’s what builds support: not just mitigation, but visible, shared progress.

To learn more about how to connect decarbonization efforts with consumer needs, connect with a Lux analyst.