It has not been a good few weeks for global action on climate change, particularly given the new U.S. administration and its early move of withdrawing from the Paris agreement.

Next week will mark an important intended staging post in the transition to a low-emission economy, given a United Nations deadline for locking in national and international climate targets for greenhouse gas reductions by 2035, now just a decade away.

But according to a report this week, few of the major polluting countries that would make most of a difference in committing to those goals have yet set them adequately. Most are also some way off course with their action to reduce emissions by stated levels by 2030.

It is easy to point to those early days of Trump’s second coming having undermined international commitment to the Paris accord, which aims to cut global warming levels to well below 2oC, ideally to 1.5oC.

Yet the reality is that the action needed to set 2035 targets is something that should have been ongoing over the past few years. Various EU members were already late and tracking poorly to be able to meet next week’s deadline, although the UK is one major economy that has already stiffened and submitted its climate goals, despite some of the detail around that having been criticised.

That said, the UK’s aim of reducing emissions by 81% by 2035 remains one of the most ambitious in the world.

Switzerland is another European nation to have ratified 2035 targets in recent days.

The overall signs of renewed commitment to 2035 numbers are not good, and we can expect more media scrutiny over who is late with plans and why that is over the coming days. Worrying headlines continued to appear this week, including a report on the UK being unprepared for the fire risks of climate change and a Greenpeace report outlining that the vast majority of younger children are constantly worried about the impact of a warming world. Rats are on the rise too.

Yet in the business world, there are ongoing stories of innovations and breakthroughs that can have the potential for direct impact on achieving such ambitious targets. Earlier this week, there was news of a private equity-backed scale-up having signed a deal with HSBC to supply low-emission aviation fuel made from animal fat and used cooking oil to Cathay Pacific, which could be transformative for the airline industry.

Even so, ahead of next week’s deadline came the stern warning that climate change inaction had created a heady cocktail of impacts that would see a 2oC temperature rise by 2045, accelerated warming and irreversible shifts in planetary weather conditions, although that itself has come in for criticism.

The world’s largest economy may have forcibly changed its tune on climate action, but the pressure on others will likely increase as the UN deadline passes.