Monday’s U.N. climate summit won’t end the threat of global warming, but that doesn’t mean Secretary-General António Guterres’ effort is a failure.

“I told leaders not to come with fancy speeches but concrete commitments,” Guterres said this week. “I expect that there will be announcements of a number of meaningful plans on dramatically reducing emissions during the next decade and on reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.”

That’s debatable, as even self-described climate leaders like the European Union won’t be able to meet that threshold.

The conference is supposed to spur greater action by countries in the face of increasingly dire scientific warnings about global warming. Most high-emitting countries “are lagging behind in the fight against climate change,” the U.N.’s development and climate programs said in a report released on Wednesday.

Although the commitments made in New York may fall short of Guterres’ aims, the U.N. chief has contributed to efforts to move the bar on climate change by putting the issue at the top of his priority list.

Ideas like becoming carbon neutral by mid-century have become the new normal; the U.K. has enshrined the goal into law, the new European Commission president-elect has set it as a target, most EU countries are on board with the idea.

“Climate neutrality is the really important thing,” Energy and Climate Action Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete told POLITICO before traveling to New York.

Guterres set clear red lines in advance of Monday’s gathering — governments should stop building coal plants after 2020, phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and commit to slashing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. He’s only allowing countries that make concrete climate commitments access to the podium at the summit.

But big polluters won’t likely meet his demands any time soon, which means there’s a risk that the summit becomes exactly what Guterres doesn’t want: a talking shop.

“Sticking out your head is always risky because there’s a chance that it could get chopped off,” said an EU diplomat. “I like that he’s doing it.”

In a May 23 letter to European Council President Donald Tusk seen by POLITICO, Guterres called on the EU to show leadership and commit to increasing its emission reduction efforts by 2030. He wants the bloc to boost its emissions cuts to 55 percent by 2030, from the current target of 40 percent. The EU should also adopt a long-term vision for a “carbon-neutral economy by 2050,” he said.

The EU won’t be able to satisfy either demand on Monday but it is trying to do more.

While the bloc hasn’t formally adopted a climate neutrality goal by 2050, efforts are underway to do so by the end of the year. European Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen has promised to set a 2050 climate neutrality goal and to raise the EU’s 2030 emissions reduction targets to 50 percent, if not 55 percent.

“The fact that at the last European Council 24 countries [out of 28] were supporting [climate neutrality] and we’re having a dialogue with four countries; the fact that those countries start to understand the impact of climate neutrality … that’s lot’s of progress already there,” Arias Cañete said.

That makes the EU something of a standout.

U.S. President Donald Trump promised in 2017 to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. And the U.S. is not expected to formally engage at Monday’s summit — although that doesn’t mean there won’t be informal exchanges, said an EU diplomat.

According to a draft agenda from last week, coal technology exporter Japan and major Asian economies such as South Korea as well as Australia aren’t on the speakers’ list.

China and India, however, are — although China isn’t expected to revise its climate pledge at the summit. The EU and China will continue bilateral exchanges on climate efforts at the summit, Arias Cañete said.

But Guterres’ push is helping to change the conversation on how far governments must go to stem man-made climate change, and align their policies with the goals of the Paris Agreement — which aims to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees, and ideally to only 1.5 degrees.

“António Guterres has put the bar exactly where it should be. Now, of course that is difficult,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and France’s special envoy during the 2015 summit that led to the Paris Agreement.

His demands “are not easy to listen to,” she added, calling the summit “the moment of truth for the Paris Agreement.”

This week’s U.N. report painted a gloomy picture, finding that existing national climate plans made under the Paris Agreement mean that by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 10.7 percent above 2016 levels and lead to warming of at least 3 degrees.

There’s growing pressure to take action, underlined by Friday’s global climate protests. The summit adds to the feeling of urgency.

“This is not the end of our process, but rather the beginning,” Luis Alfonso de Alba, the U.N. special envoy for the climate summit told reporters in Brussels this month. “We need to double or triple the commitments that we have on the table in order to reach our goals … The bar is very high, the ambition needs to scale up as substantially.”

Paola Tamma contributed reporting.