The United Nations Climate Conference is a Bonanza for Everyone with Anything to Lose or Become: Australia, Britain, and the United States
Consider the consequences of two recent votes — the federal election in Australia and the Conservative Party leadership contest in Britain — and the potential consequences of two upcoming ones: a presidential runoff this month in Brazil and U.S. midterms in November.
All of these countries are important in terms of climate. Australia, Britain and the United States are among history’s biggest emitters. Brazil is home to the biggest share of the Amazon rainforest, which has a lot of greenhouse gasses in it.
There are some bright spots. Australia, headed by a newly progressive government, has doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels. Several countries, including Chile, which is trying to make nature a part of its constitution, have promised more cuts or say they will soon. But most of those updates are from smaller polluters, or from those, like Australia, that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were egregiously lacking in detail or ambition. “A lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” Jansen says.
As the United Nations climate conference opens in Egypt, the most critical talks will likely focus on the soaring costs of limiting — and adapting to — global warming, especially in the world’s most vulnerable countries. More than a decade have elapsed since the contentious conversation began.
There are more than 200 countries that have accepted the convention and have become the Conference of the Parties. And in 1995, they held their first COP meeting in Berlin, Germany. The countries have gotten together many times in hopes of saving the world. At this point, the COP meetings have become a bonanza for anyone with anything to lose or gain from climate change. Indigenous peoples send their own delegates to represent their interests. Activists from the local area and from around the world flood the streets outside the conference. Big Tech, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporations are trying to sell themselves as part of the solution.
Sarr added that the bloc will push for funds to help developing countries adapt to droughts, floods and other climate-related events as well as urging developed nations to speed up their plans to reduce emissions. The group’s lack of ability to adapt to extreme temperatures makes them vulnerable to climate change.
Africa has attracted just 2% of the total clean energy investment over the last 20 years, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. The U.N. weather agency recently stated that it would take two decades for the world to double its clean energy supplies.
“We have delayed climate action for too long,” Sarr said, pointing to the promised $100 billion a year in climate aid for poorer countries that was pledged over a decade ago.
“We can no longer afford to have a COP that is ‘all talk.’ The climate crisis has pushed our adaptation limits, resulted in inevitable loss and damage, and delayed our much-needed development,” added Sarr.
The UN conference is one of the few places where nations can come together to hold countries accountable for historical responsibility, and the success of the Paris conference in setting the goal oflimiting warming to 1.5 degrees C is something that has been praised bySarr.
“We can’t stop emphasizing the benefits of mitigation, otherwise the costs will just increase.” says Mafalda Duarte, the CEO of Climate Investment Funds. She says they have locked in more impacts down the road. Who is bearing the cost disproportionately? It comes down to the poorest and developing countries.”
The impacts from global warming have hit the world’s poorest countries especially hard so far, even though they’re responsible for a relatively small share of the greenhouse gasses that are causing temperatures to rise. Flooding in Pakistan this summer that killed at least 1500 people and a multi-year drought in East Africa are evidence of “mounting and ever-increasing climate risks,” the UN report says.
“The message of this report is clear: strong political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, wrote in a foreword to the report.
She said that if we didn’t want to spend the coming decades in emergency response mode, we need to get ahead of the game.
Climate Investment Funds: Making the Most of a Domestic Investment and the Challenges that Climate Change Faces in the Global Economy and the 21st Century
A major international climate meeting starts in Egypt. Hundreds of world leaders will spend the next two weeks discussing global efforts to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pay for the costs of climate change.
“The discourse needs to be raised significantly, the level of ambition, so that you can actually continue to do what you’re doing on mitigation even more, but you at the same time meet the adaptation needs,” says Mafalda Duarte, CEO of Climate Investment Funds, which works with development banks like the World Bank to provide funding to developing countries on favorable terms.
The world needs to invest more money to prepare for more extreme weather in order to reduce the risks to people. Ensuring infrastructure is built to stand up to a hotter climate and providing early warning systems to help people evacuate in emergencies are some of the things that could be done.
Duarte says that failing to spend the money that’s necessary to limit and prepare for climate change exposes the entire world to potential risks. According to analysts, there are risks that could include armed conflicts, refugee crises and financial market disruptions.
When it comes to Climate, an investment across borders in other places is actually a domestic investment.
The Livingston Award, IRE Award and others have been won by John D. Sutter, who is also a CNN contributor and climate journalist. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion.
Van Lierop’s Climate Action: Why the World is Way Off Track from its Climate Change Goals & Why the U.S. Needs an Insurance Pool
In an article in the journal, Robert Van Lierop proposed to UN climate negotiators that an insurance pool is needed to compensate for damage caused by sea level rise.
The small island states of Australia and New Zealand, as part of an alliance, argued that polluters should pay for their pollution.
The UN’s climate change high-level champion for Egypt says “without finance, money and investment, nothing will progress”
After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It’s clear that polluters should be held accountable for these losses to territory, culture, life and property.
In short, the world is way off track from its goal of cutting the pollution that drives climate change. The nations have said they plan to cut their emissions by 3%. The scientists say emissions need to fall 45% faster than in the past. That’s to limit warming to the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. It’s about 2 degrees cooler than the sun.
The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.
Climate Change and International Law in the Light of the 2003 European Heat Wave: The Peruvian Landowner suing a fossil fuel company for damages caused by a melting glacier
There have been many arguments against action over the years. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.
That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. Scientists linked a deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.
It can feel as if the heat waves and fires are both urgent and numbing. The truth is that as long as humans have been burning fossil fuels, we’ve been making the planet more dangerous.
The oil and gas industry has raked in $2.8 billion per day in profits over the last 50 years, according to a recent analysis. That includes more than $31.3 trillion in profit for fossil fuel companies between the year 2000 and 2019, according to a recent report, “The Cost of Delay,” released by the Loss and Damage Collaboration and supported by two dozen organizations.
Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. RWE does not believe that it should be held responsible for the damage.
And in 2021, Tuvalu and other countries formed the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. The aim is to look at claims in international courts.
The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda said last year that litigation was the only way to be taken seriously. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”
Climate Change 2015 Conference Elephant in the Room: Egypt’s Climate Crackdown on Climate Protests and Implications for the Sustainable Development Goals
Even in the conference, this is a raging debate. “As it is, The COPs are not really working,” youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was a media sensation at last year’s conference, said during an event in London this week after announcing that she will not attend COP27 this year. “The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing,” Thunberg said.
Scientists say it’s possible to limit overall global warming to about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, (2 degrees Celsius), which is the upper limit set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
In a warming world, new and improved infrastructure is supposed to help keep people safe. That might look like cities designed to be better at beating the heat or communities that are less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. It could mean expanded warning systems that can alert people about floods or storms. There’s a push this year to secure even more funding for these kinds of adaptation projects, particularly since adaptation costs in developing countries have been projected to reach upwards of $300 billion a year by the end of the decade. Climate change looks different for everyone and the people who are most affected by climate disasters haven’t always been included at planning tables.
The conference is happening in Sharm el-Sheikh. As a result, there’s one more elephant in the room at this year’s UN Climate Conference: Egypt’s crackdown on climate protests — and dissenting voices more broadly. Dozens of people have reportedly been arrested in the days leading up to the climate conference in an effort to quell demonstrations, adding to tens of thousands more political prisoners believed to be detained currently in Egypt.
The world leaders at the meeting last year agreed to transition away from fossil fuels and reduce emissions much quicker than in the past. But they failed to make substantive promises about how that would happen.
Other wins have simply put emitters on the path to making good on last year’s promises. Fransen points to the United States, where the recent inflation reduction act represented a major step towards meeting its commitment to reduce emissions by 50 percent. The US is not on track to meet that commitment. She says that if the goals are raised this year it will make them less credible.
Fransen is in charge of keeping a record of all emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It is difficult to take stock. It means measuring how much carbon nations emit. It also involves showing how those emissions will influence the climate for a long time to come.
It is hard to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing or how much nations are holding to their pledges. That’s because the gas is all over the atmosphere, muddying the origin of each signal. Natural processes also release carbon, like decaying vegetation and thawing permafrost, further complicating matters. Imagine if you will trying to find a leak in a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s why we need more sophisticated methods.” Climate trace can use steam billowing from power plants as a proxy for emissions to train its program. Scientists are using weather stations to monitor emissions.
The Truth Behind Net-Zero Emissions: Why the World Needs More COP27, Not Just Africa? The Case of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
More than one million lives could have been saved if COVID-19 vaccines had been shared more equally with poorer countries, according to mathematical models. More even vaccine distribution, and a resulting drop in infections, might also have slowed the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Progress towards eliminating Malaria in Africa is being threatened by the introduction of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes from Asia. Anopheles stephensi was the most abundant mosquito in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia where there was a Malaria outbreak. The species can breed in urban environments and thrive through dry seasons. It could infect more than 100 million people in Africa if they are not protected by vaccines and other control measures. But “there is no silver bullet” for this fast-spreading vector, says molecular biologist Fitsum Tadesse.
Military carbon dioxide emissions are huge — per capita, US armed forces put out more CO2 than any nation in the world. Military units aren’t affected by emissions reporting. Eight researchers outline how to hold militaries to account in the global carbon reckoning.
“Imagine making a data-driven plan for the world, but leaving out more than one billion people in Africa,” writes energy researcher Rose M. Mutiso. The truth behind net-zero emissions proposals is troubling. She argues that we can’t we can’t engage meaningfully with the concept of net zero — at COP27 and in general — without Africa-specific data, appropriate models and African expertise.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0
COP27 is coming: How rich countries can we go? Oliver Müller tells us how to be hero at climate change conference in Egypt
After a stint at Google, astronomer Oliver Müller is back in academia — and he has learnt some valuable lessons. One of the most important: don’t be a hero. You are effectively hiding flaws in the system if a task only involves putting your mental health and physical health at risk.
The Egyptian hosts of the COP27 climate conference are warning the leaders of wealthy nations that there can be no “backsliding” on commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, last year.
The Egyptian president of the academy of scientific research and technology says that climate-vulnerable countries will ask the delegates to boost research funding. Countries, he says, need to conduct more of their own climate studies — especially in the Middle East and North Africa, which already experience low rainfall and arid conditions. The Arab world accounts for just 1.2% of published climate studies, according to an analysis1 published at the end of 2019.
Over the course of one year, Egypt estimated it needs to put aside about $73 billion for projects to help it mitigate climate change. But this number has now more than tripled to $246 billion, says environment minister Yasmine Fouad. “Most climate actions we have implemented have been from the national budget, which adds more burden and competes with our basic needs that have to be fulfilled.”
Ian Mitchell is a researcher with the Center for Global Development, which warned of the potential consequences if agreement on loss and damage becomes a deal-breaker at the meeting. When high-income countries agree to the principle, they would absorb loss-and-damage finance as part of humanitarian-aid spending.
Adil Najam, who studies international climate diplomacy at Boston University in Massachusetts, thinks it is unlikely that these issues will be resolved in Egypt, and says that the politics will probably get messy. He adds that loss-and-damage finance can no longer be avoided by the high-income countries, especially given that climate impacts in vulnerable countries are becoming much more visible and severe.
Fouad says that organizing this year’s COP in Africa has been transformative. We expect more attention to issues which are important to Africans and relevant to most developing countries such as food security, desertification, natural disasters and water scarcity. This COP is a chance for more African youth, non-governmental and civil-society organizations to be heard.”
“The challenge is going to be, how do we maintain momentum when there are so many short-term crises and pressures, and yet the climate crisis is intensifying?” says Amar Bhattacharya, who is part of an independent group of experts that was convened ahead of COP27 to advise conference leaders on how to increase climate financing.
“Developed countries know that if we are to reach our global emissions reduction targets that everybody has signed up to, that developed countries need to have credibility and need to have trust established with developing countries,” says Tonkonogy. The question of finance is a very important aspect of establishing trust.
The latest tally by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows developing countries received $83.3 billion from public and private sources in 2020.
The bulk of the money is being delivered through loans, which critics say add to the debt burden of governments that are already on shaky financial footing.
Developing nations should have access to loans similar to those given to their counterparts in the developed world, according to the prime minister of Barbados.
Climate Finance and the U.S. Cop 27 Deal: How Countries Can Make More Money in the Form of Climate Grants, Not the Repayments of Its Grants
There are calls for more climate financing in the form of grants, which do not need to be repaid, says the Director of Climate Finance access and deployment at the World Resources Institute.
“[Hopefully], going forward, there will be means of making sure that countries are able to act on climate and that they’re able to do so without further getting themselves into trouble in terms of their debt levels and their ability to pay for all the things they need to pay for,” Larsen says.
Some impacts from climate change are irreversible, according to the UN, and even if countries could immediately stop emitting greenhouse gasses, the effects of global warming would still be felt for decades.
Meanwhile, it can be “tricky” for the most vulnerable countries to access funding, Larsen says. The process can require data and technical expertise to show how climate funding would be used, and how it would benefit the climate, and some developing countries lack the resources for these analyses
For the past year, United States President Joe Biden has been pushing to quadruple U.S. climate funding for developing countries to more than $11 billion annually starting in 2024. About half of that money needs to be appropriated by Congress.
John Kerry suggests that the president’s goal could be at risk if there is a negative result in the elections.
“Simply put, we developed countries need to make good on the finance goals that we have set,” Kerry said in October at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
Observers say the goals are a drop in the bucket. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has said emerging economies will need at least $1 trillion a year to eliminate or offset their carbon emissions.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1133532209/money-will-likely-be-the-central-tension-in-the-u-n-s-cop27-climate-negotiations
What is at stake at the COP27 global climate negotiations? A view from India, China, India, and the world’s largest economies
“Raising ambition in a way of centered around real results is what I hope will come from the COP,” says Bhattacharya “rather than the rhetoric of the $100 billion.”
In United Nations jargon, the meeting is called the Conference of the Parties, or COP. This is the 27th Conference of the Parties meeting, so it’s frequently referred to as COP27.
Since then, there have been some big geopolitical changes. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will loom over this year’s meeting. The invasion further complicated relationships between the world’s largest economies, and upended global fossil fuel markets. One immediate effect of the war is multiple countries including China have increased their short-term reliance on coal-fired power plants, which are the most intense global source of greenhouse gas emissions.
There have been positive developments. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is growing rapidly. Demand for all fossil fuels will peak in the mid-2030s, according to the International Energy Agency.
China and India plan to increase their emissions until the year 2030. Other wealthier countries have supported fossil fuels as a way to support their growing economies.
Scientists also warn that decades of sea level rise, extreme drought, heat waves and storms are unavoidable because of how much global temperatures have already risen. Billions of people need to adapt to a hotter Earth.
More flooding in coastal cities could be avoided by limiting emissions, as well as the loss of coral reefs due to sea level rise and heat waves.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1132796190/faq-whats-at-stake-at-the-cop27-global-climate-negotiations
Cultural losses caused by the relocating towns and villages: is the U.S. going to cut its carbon emissions to the next-century a ruinous economy?
They say that wealthier nations should pay for the cultural losses caused when towns and villages are relocated. So far, wealthier countries have agreed to keep discussing it, but haven’t committed to providing new funding.
It’s going to require a lot of money. No one can get around it. But there’s also a lot of money to be made eliminating emissions from the global economy. It could be a ruinous cost if this problem isn’t dealt with.
According to a report by the consulting firm, cutting carbon emissions in the United States will grow the country’s economy by $3 trillion over the next 50 years. On the other hand, not doing enough to respond to climate change could cost the U.S. $14.5 trillion over the same period.