The next 10 years will be crucial in the fight against climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sent a clear and unavoidable message last month: the global economy needs to undergo rapid and far reaching decarbonization. Business as usual is over. It is against this backdrop that government negotiators, business leaders and sub-national governments meet in Katowice, Poland, this week for the next round of UN climate talks dubbed the most important since the signing of the Paris Agreement.

Jennie Gleed, CDP’s Policy and Public Affairs Manager, looks at how Poland’s coal heartland could become an unlikely location where governments collectively raise their climate ambition and agree a powerful tool for action: The Paris Rulebook.

A new report released on the eve of the UN climate talks has found that state and regional governments are responding to the threat of climate change faster than their national counterparts. In fact, with leading states and regions committed to decarbonize at a rate of 6.2% a year, they are moving at almost double the rate of G20 governments.

Responsible for over 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions and representing more than 17 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, transitioning the oil and gas sector will be critical to hold global temperature rise below 1.5C. In our new report, we rank 24 of the largest and highest-impact publicly listed oil and gas companies on business readiness for the low carbon transition.

The clean energy transition is now inevitable and unstoppable. In a new report by the RE100 initiative - a collaboration between CDP and The Climate Group - we show that a dramatic upsurge in demand for renewables from multinational companies is shifting markets away from fossil fuels in more than 140 markets worldwide.

It is not only in the energy sector that the battle for a climate-safe future will be won or lost. CDP’s Director of Corporates and Supply Chain examines the role of the world’s largest retailers, and how by failing to take the vital step of environmental disclosure, online retailers are trailing behind their offline counterparts.