Climate Change: Rethinking the Last Stand against Hurricane Ian, Campaigner Colette Pichon Battle, and Re-WIRED GREEN

As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.

While climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in blue-skied San Francisco, Hurricane Ian continued its destructive path across southwest Florida, underscoring her already-urgent call to action. “I just want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now,” Pichon Battle said. She encouraged audience members to watch climate events around the world, from rain events in Baton Rouge and Houston to floods in Pakistan and Cape Verde.

At the end of her talk, Pichon Battle asked the crowd to reject climate projects that reduce emissions but still exploit and extract marginalized communities. She says people need to embrace more radical and equitable approaches to climate change. Pichan Battle said that the lie that transitioning from oppression to another form of oppression was going to save us needed to be stopped. Greening is an injustice. “It is time, my friends, to join us with your hearts and souls and your gut,” she said.

Climate can be a complex issue, made up of science, economics, and cultural expectations. We would like to give a clear and concise explanation of how issues like these work.

What are you asking about climate change? What are the questions that people ask? What points call for more clarity, or are particularly intriguing?

The cost of climate adaptation: where do we stand, what do we need to do? Where are we going? What will we do next? How will we get there?

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 these countries are important in climate terms. The United States, Australia and Britain are some of the biggest greenhouse gas offenders. Brazil contains the largest share of the Amazon rainforest, which stores vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide for the rest of the world.

There have been some bright spots. Australia, led by a newly progressive government, doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already 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. The low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

The CEO of Climate Investment Funds says that the cost of adaptation will just get more expensive if we don’t put emphasis on mitigation. She says that they have already locked in further impacts. Who is paying the cost disproportionately? The poor and the developing countries have more to do with it.

The research, published on 28 October in Science Advances1, estimates that the global economy lost between US$5 trillion and $29 trillion from 1992 to 2013, as a result of human-driven global warming. The effect on the national income in low-income tropical nations was the worst, with a reduction of 6.7%.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, wrote in the foreword that political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes.

“If we don’t want to spend the coming decades in emergency response mode, dealing with disaster after disaster, we need to get ahead of the game,” she added.

Climate Investment Funds Incentivizes the World with Climate Investments, a Critique of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt

One year later, the math still isn’t pretty. The margin of error? Somewhere between 0.9 and 1.3 degrees C past 1.5, according to a UN report released shortly before COP27, the next stop on the annual carousel of global climate talks, which begins on Monday. That stubborn overshoot is disappointing, says Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s lead authors. Since Glasgow there has been haggling. It would be foolish to not come back to Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, with more ambitious promises than ever before: Perhaps their country has discovered a way to cut methane emissions or passed legislation that funds renewables, or both. And yet, despite promises to the contrary, only a handful of countries have pledged more cuts, which together represent only 0.5 out of the 13 gigatons of CO2 scientists say must be slashed by 2030 to meet the Paris goal.

In United Nations jargon, the meeting is called the Conference of the Parties, or COP. The 27th meeting of the Conference of the Parties is called ‘COP 27’.

Mafalda Duarte is CEO of Climate Investment Funds, she says the discourse needs to be raised significantly and the level of ambition raised so that you can continue to mitigate even more.

Wind and solar farms are being funded to help limit the rise in global temperatures. That’s left a huge shortfall for projects like building flood defenses, or introducing drought-resistant crops that can help poorer nations cope with warming that’s already happened.

Failure to spend the funds necessary to limit and prepare for the impact of climate change exposes the world to potential risks, says Duarte. Those risks could include armed conflicts, refugee crises and disruptions in financial markets, analysts say.

“We have to change our mindset and the way we think, because, actually, when it comes to climate, you know, an investment across borders in other places is a domestic investment,” Duarte says.

Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker whose work has won the Livingston Award, the IRE Award and others. 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.

“Losses and Damages”: The Challenge for the Sustainable Development of a Small-Island Environment and the Future of Climate Change in Africa

Loss and damage is not a new ask. Developing countries and small island states have been pressing for these kinds of funds since 1991, when the Pacific island Vanuatu first proposed a plan for high-emitting countries to funnel money toward those impacted by sea level rise.

At the time, the Alliance of small-island states argued that polluters should pay the costs of their pollution.

It was the phrase “losses and damages” mentioned in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that boosted the LMIC cause. Christopher Trisos, an environmental scientist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, is one of the authors of the chapter on climate impacts in Africa.

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.

The world has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius so we do not have much wiggle room left. To reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades you’ll have to stay below that 1.5 degree threshold. That’s a short timeframe to transition the entire world to clean energy. We could wipe out the world’s coral reef and turn many of the world’s megacities into “heat stressed” places if we don’t act.

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.

Why Fossil Fuels Matter: The Peruvian Case Against a German Fracking Company over a Melting Glacial Glacier

Arguments against action have taken many forms over the decades. 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. The cause of a deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe is being linked to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.

The onslaught of storms, heat waves, and other adverse weather conditions can feel 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.

All developed economies should tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies. The funds should be used to help countries suffering the effects of the Climate crisis and people who are struggling with rising food and energy prices.

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 is contesting the lawsuit and says it should not 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. There are claims in international courts.

“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. We want them to respond in court.

Climate Change: Where are we going? How do we go from 2009 COP to present the most comprehensive climate science report ever? What do we need to know? How much carbon emissions do we know?

The debate is raging, even within the conference. The young climate activist, who was a media sensation at last year’s conference, has decided to skip this year’s conference due to the lack of effectiveness. The COPs are a place for people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing.

We know that because earlier this year, international climate scientists finished publishing the most comprehensive climate science report ever. It catalogued the ways in which climate change is affecting everyday lives around the world, because the Earth is already about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) hotter than it was in the late 1800s.

The money was given to help keep people safe in a warming world. 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. Or it could mean expanded early warning systems that can warn people about a flood or storm headed their way. Due to the projected high adaptation costs in developing countries, this year a push is being made to get more funding for these kinds of projects. The people who are most affected by climate disasters haven’t always been included at planning tables, and advocates are pushing for more locally led solutions.

Other wins have made it possible for emitters to make good on their promises. Fransen points to the United States, where the recent Inflation Reduction Act represented a massive step toward meeting its pledge of a 50 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels. The US isn’t on track to meet that commitment. Further upping the ante on its goals this year would “strain credibility,” she says, given the nation’s political gridlock.

Fransen is one of the people in the business of keeping track of all those emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It is difficult to take stock. For one thing, it means actually measuring how much carbon nations emit. The emissions will have an effect on climate in about 10, 20, or 100 years.

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing—or to prove that 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. Think of it like trying to find a water 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.” For instance, Climate Trace can train algorithms to use steam billowing from power plants as a visible proxy for the emissions they’re belching. Other scientists have been making some progress using weather stations to monitor local emissions.

How many lives could be saved by COVID-19? The case of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, anopheles stephensi

More than one million lives might have been saved if COVID-19 vaccines had been shared more equitably with lower-income countries in 2021, according to mathematical models incorporating data from 152 countries. Increased vaccine distribution and a drop in infections may be the reason why the emergence of SARS- CoV-2 variants has slowed.

• Much of the focus will be on evaluation, assessment and accountability. David Waskow says that we need to know if the current commitments are being carried out before moving on to new commitments.

Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have made their way from Asia to Africa, threatening progress there towards eradicating malaria. In a study in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia — the site of a malaria outbreak — Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found near the homes of participants with the disease. The notorious species can breed in urban environments and persist through dry seasons. If control measures aren’t put in place, it could affect more than 100 million people in Africa. There is no silver bullet for fast-spreading, says Fitsum Tadesse.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0

Why you should not be a hero if you are the only militaries in the world: eight new perspectives on the role of Africa in tackling complex global carbon dioxide emissions

Military carbon dioxide emissions are huge — per capita, US armed forces put out more CO2 than any nation in the world. The militaries are not subject to 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 and leaving out more than a billion people in Africa. “That’s the troubling truth behind net-zero emissions proposals.” We can’t engage meaningfully with the concept of net zero without Africa specific data, appropriate models and African expertise.

Oliver Mller is back in school and has learned many valuable lessons after working at the internet giant. One of the most important: don’t be a hero. You are effectively hiding flaws in the system if a task can only be completed by putting your mental health at risk.

The leaders of wealthy nations are warned that they cannot back down on commitments made at the COP26 conference in Glasgow, UK last year.

Mahmoud Sakr, president of the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, says that scientists from climate-vulnerable countries will be urging COP delegates to boost research funding. He says that countries need to conduct more of their own climate studies in areas with low precipitation and arid conditions. The Arab world accounts for 1.2% of the published climate studies.

In 2015, Egypt estimated that it needs to set aside $73 billion for projects to help the country mitigate climate change and adapt its infrastructure. But this number has now more than tripled to $246 billion, says environment minister Yasmine Fouad. The climate actions we have implemented have been from the national budget, which adds a lot of burden and competes with basic needs.

Loss-and-damage finance in high-income countries shouldn’t be ignored: the example of Jordan and his friend Adil-Nazaram

Ian Mitchell, a researcher with think tank the Center for Global Development in London, warned of possible unintended consequences if agreement on loss and damage becomes a deal-breaker at the meeting. Loss-and-damage finance might be a part of humanitarian-aid spending in high-income countries, but it would not be new money.

Adil-Nazaram, who studies international climate diplomacy at Boston University, thinks that the politics will get messy if the issues are not resolved in Egypt. He said that the loss-and-damage finance can no longer be avoided by high-income countries due to the changes in climate impacts in vulnerable countries.

Fouad says that organizing this year’s COP in Africa has been transformative. More attention is expected to be given to issues like food security, desertification, natural disasters and water scarcity that are important in Africa and relevant to most developing countries. This COP is a chance for more African youth, non-governmental and civil-society organizations to be heard.”

Khan’s hometown was completely underwater. His friend rescued a woman who had walked barefoot, carrying her sick child, through stagnant floodwaters for 15 miles. Khan’s mother was unable to travel to see her daughter in case she was safe after the roads were washed out.

The need for a dedicated fund to protect the developing world from climate catastrophes: a reopening call on the middle east and South Asia

The South Asian country is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming emissions, but it is paying a heavy price. There are many countries like that around the world.

A major reason this type of fund is contentious is that wealthy nations are concerned that paying for such a fund could be seen as admission of liability, which may trigger legal battles. Developed nations like the US have pushed back on it in the past and are still tiptoeing around the issue.

Climate activists in developing nations told CNN that Pakistan’s cascading disasters are evidence of why a dedicated loss and damage fund is needed.

The developing world is “not prepared to protect themselves and adapt and be resilient” to climate disasters, former White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told CNN. The responsibility of the developed world to support the effort is theirs. Commitments have been made but they’re not being delivered.”

As a concept, loss and damage is the idea that rich countries, having emitted the most planet-warming gases, should pay poorer countries who are now suffering from climate disasters they did not create.

Khan said he understands why rich developed nations are “dragging their feet.” He said it was important for them to take responsibility.

“‘Reparations’ is not a word or a term that has been used in this context,” US Climate Envoy John Kerry said on a recent call with reporters. The developed world has a responsibility to help the developing world deal with the impacts of climate.

Kerry plans to have a discussion on a fund this year and in 2024, before a deadline to say what a fund would look like. And US officials still have questions – whether it would come through an existing financial source like the Green Climate Fund, or an entirely new source.

Kerry also sparked some controversy on the topic at a recent New York Times event, when in response to a question on loss and damage, Kerry seemed to suggest that no country has enough money to help places like Pakistan recover from devastating climate disasters.

Look at the defense budgets of the developed countries. We can mobilize the money,” Alden Meyer, senior associate at E3G, told CNN. “It’s not a question of money being there. It’s a question of political will.”

We will have a fund by the end of the two weeks. Egypt ambassador Mohamed Nasr said he hopes, but he wouldn’t like how the parties deliver on that.

Nasr said that it is unlikely that countries will have a breakthrough on financing mechanisms if they are still haggling over whether or not to even put loss and damage on the agenda.

He said it’s more likely that the loss and damage conversation will continue over the two weeks of Sharm, perhaps ending a framework established for a financing mechanism – or clarity on whether funds might come from new or existing sources.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/world/loss-and-damage-explained-cop27-climate/index.html

How much climate finance is needed to keep the world on the front line? Analysis of the OECD 2020 climate crisis in the Barbados and Latin American countries

“For countries not on the front line, they think it’s sort of a distraction and that people should focus on mitigation,” Avinash Persaud, special envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, told CNN. “If we had done mitigation early enough, we wouldn’t have to adapt and if we’d adapted early enough, we wouldn’t have the loss of damage. We have not done those things.

The climate crisis is intensifying and there are a lot of short-term crises and pressures to contend with, so how do we keep going? “The problem is going to be, how do we keep our head above water when there are so many short-term crises and pressures?” asks the

Experts say making good on that promise is crucial to keep poorer nations on board with efforts to cut emissions. But they also say that $100 billion is just a fraction of the money the developing world is going to need.

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 debt burden of governments already on shaky financial footing is added to by the bulk of the money being delivered through loans.

Mia Amor Mottley, the leader of Barbados, thinks that developing nations should be able to get loans on the same favorable terms as their counterparts in the developed world.

As an alternative, there are calls to provide more climate financing in the form of grants, which don’t have to be repaid, says Gaia Larsen, director of climate finance access and deployment at the World Resources Institute’s Sustainable Finance Center.

“[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, the United States’ special presidential envoy for climate change, has suggested that the president’s goal could be at risk depending on the outcome of midterm elections in the U.S.

“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.

But observers say those goals are just 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.

Whats At The Stake At The Cop27-Global-Clime-Negotiations? The Prospects For COP27

“[Raising] ambition in a way that is centered around real results is what I hope will come from COP,” says Bhattacharya, “rather than the rhetoric of the $100 billion.”

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. Coal-fired power plants are the most important source of greenhouse gas emissions and multiple countries including China increased their reliance on them in the immediate aftermath of the war.

But there have been positive developments as well. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is growing rapidly. The International Energy agency predicts that global demand for fossil fuels will peak in the next 20 to 30 years.

China and India, the two largest sources of emissions, plan to increase their emissions until at least 2030. They’ve argued that their growing economies need the support of fossil fuels, as other wealthier countries have historically done.

Climate change is unavoidable, because of how much global temperatures have already risen. Billions of people will have to change to a hotter Earth.

But limiting emissions could avoid some of the most extreme impacts, like much more deadly heat waves, more flooding in coastal cities due to sea level rise and the loss of almost all coral reefs.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1132796190/faq-whats-at-stake-at-the-cop27-global-climate-negotiations

Climate Change and the World’s 20 Richest Countries: The U.N. is on the Road to Climate Hell, and the Middle East is on a Road to Bali

They say wealthier nations should pay for the cultural losses that occur when towns and villages must relocate. wealthier countries have agreed to keep discussing, but haven’t committed to providing new funding

It’s going to be a lot of work. There is no way to get around it. But there’s also a lot of money to be made eliminating emissions from the global economy. And experts say the cost of not dealing with this problem could be ruinous.

In the United States alone, quickly cutting carbon emissions could grow the country’s economy by $3 trillion over the next 50 years, says Deloitte, the consulting firm. Not responding adequately to climate change could cost the U.S. almost $14.5 trillion over the same period.

The UN chief told dozens of leaders that the world is on a road to climate hell, and urged the two biggest contributors to global warming, the United States and China.

The leaders of countries that are being affected by climate change will make up the bulk of Monday’s proceedings. The majority of the stories it will be about will be from African nations and small island nations.

“Is it not time to put an end to this misery?” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi asked his peers at the summit. “Climate change will never stop without our intervention … Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres did not mince words in his opening remarks. He warned that we were on a road to climate hell.

He called for a new pact between rich and poor nations to make deeper cuts in emissions with financial help and to eliminate coal in rich nations by 2040. He called for the United States and China to work together on climate, something they used to do before.

Most of the leaders are meeting Monday and Tuesday as the United States has a potentially policy-changing election. Then the leaders of the world’s 20 wealthiest nations will have their powerful-only club confab in Bali in Indonesia days later.

The climate talks are being held without leaders of China and India, the two biggest emitters. The leader of the top polluting country, President Biden, is coming days later than most of the other presidents and prime ministers on his way to Bali.

“There are big climate summits and little climate summits and this was never expected to be a big one,” said Climate Advisers CEO Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. negotiator.

Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate chief, said at a Sunday news conference that they always want more leaders. I think there is enough leadership to have a productive outcome right now.

The negotiations have included speeches by the leaders, as well as “innovative” roundtable discussions that will be “very powerful insights.”

Adow, Adow and the Climate Change Impact in the Emerging Universe: Implications for Climate Change and Climate Action in Africa and the Global South

“The historical polluters who caused climate change are not showing up,” said Mohammed Adow of Power Shift Africa. “Africa is the least responsible, the most vulnerable to the issue of climate change and it is a continent that is stepping up and providing leadership.”

Mohammed Abdullahi, Nigeria’s Environment Minister, said that wealthy countries should show their full commitment to help countries hardest hit by climate change. “Our priority is to be aggressive when it comes to climate funding to mitigate the challenges of loss and damage,” he said.

“We can’t discount an entire continent that has over a billion people living here and has some of the most severe impacts,” Waskow said. “It’s pretty clear that Africa will be at risk in a very severe way.”

Leaders come “to share the progress they’ve made at home and to accelerate action,” Purvis said. He said Biden has a lot to share with regards to the climate legislation and the $375 billion in spending.

The findings could inform the way in which strategies that help countries to adapt to extreme heat or heavy rainfall are implemented. The five hottest days of the year on the entire year are thought to have outsized effects due to the fact that they were pinpointed as economic effects. The heat extremes in the hottest parts of the year have the potential to deliver major economic returns.

The study also emphasizes the need for rich countries to pay their share, says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. The global south needs the global north’s support in dealing with the adverse effects of climate change.

The global population is expected to swell to 8 billion during the climate meeting. “How will we answer when baby 8-billion is old enough to ask ‘What did you do for our world, and for our planet, when you had the chance?’” Guterres asked a room full of world leaders.

COP26: The forest and climate leaders’ partnership (FCCLP) calls for more money to protect the poorest and most vulnerable countries and regions

The U.N states that half the world isn’t covered by multi-hazard early warning systems that collect data about disaster risk, monitor and forecast hazardous weather.

The new plan calls for $3.1 billion to set up early-warning systems over the next five years in places that don’t already have them, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable countries and regions. The warning systems will need more money in the future.

The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, went one step further in her opening speech to fellow leaders. She called out corporations that profit in our fossil-fuel intensive economy, including oil and gas companies themselves.

Those corporations should help pay for the costs associated with sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, heat waves and droughts around the world, she argued, and especially in places like her nation that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don’t have the money to protect themselves.

“We want other organizations and communities to see where they’re potentially vulnerable to climate change and take steps to become resilient,” Charlene Lake, AT&T’s chief sustainability officer, said in a news release.

The Climate risk and resilience portal will provide information on the weather. Additional risks such as wildfire and flooding will be added in the coming months.

More than two dozen countries say they’ll work together to stop and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030 in order to fight climate change.

Chaired by the United States and Ghana, the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership includes 26 countries and the European Union, which together account for more than one-third of the world’s forests.

More than 140 countries attended the 26th Convention of the Parties, known as COP26, in Glasgow last year to deal with forests and other environmental issues. However, the U.N. said on Monday that not enough money is being spent to preserve forests, which capture and store carbon.