The GST is the primary international mechanism to systematically track global progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, including the goal on adaptation. The process should enable countries and stakeholders to understand collective progress and gaps. As the first GST concludes at COP28, the outputs of the process should explicitly recognize that an important part of the picture is missing. This moment also represents an opportunity to assess the barriers to systematically track global progress in building resilience to transboundary risks.

This brief distils relevant insights from this year’s assessment, The Global Transboundary Climate Risk Report and complements them with perceptions from expert interviews with international scientific and climate policy experts, to reveal the scientific, technical, political and procedural barriers to including transboundary climate risks into the GST. It presents proposals to overcome these barriers and lay the foundations for redressing the “transboundary gap” in the second GST in five years’ time, as well as to enhance international cooperation for climate action in the crucial intervening years.