The world as a whole is dangerously behind schedule in slowing catastrophic climate change, and its richest people will have to make big changes in their everyday lives in order to shift course, a major United Nations report warned Wednesday.
But nearly five years after a landmark international climate agreement in Paris, there are signs of a sea change, including from some of the biggest polluters in the world.
The "undercurrent” of the global economy has shifted, said Christiana Figueres, a former U.N. diplomat who led the negotiations that yielded the Paris Agreement in 2015. "We are moving faster than we ever were,” she said in a call with reporters Wednesday.