As delegates head into the second week of negotiations in Glasgow, no one believes they have accomplished enough to call this COP a success.
Writing for Bloomberg News, Akshat Rathi notes “even taken at face value and assuming maximum follow-through, the pledges being made at COP26 don’t add up to temperatures that remain below the increase of 1.5°C enshrined in the Paris Agreement.”
At the summit’s midpoint, New national commitments could remove 9 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2030; 13 billion additional annual tons would need to be removed to remain at 1.5°C of warming.
This week, negotiators will address the creation of an “ international carbon market. If there’s an agreement on the details of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the market could enable countries and companies to trade carbon offsets. That could result in up to $1 trillion in financing for developing countries, according to the International Emissions Trading Association.”
Article 6 discussions have been unsuccessful at previous COPs; however, this year Brazil has softened its stance on a few items. The US and the EU, on the other hand, are lining up on clauses that could hamper the ability to reach a consensus.
On the table for discussion this week are:
- determining regulations for carbon markets
- evaluating how developed countries can rise to the occasion and address the loss and damage incurred by the Global South
- working on reliable transparent financing for adaptation in the Global South.
The suggestion that countries update their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) on an annual basis is gaining some traction among negotiators as they head into week two.
"It's an emergency. Every five years? That's not treating it like an emergency," said Saleemul Huq, advisor to the 48-country Climate Vulnerable Forum, which favored a shorter review period even before COP26.
US Climate Envoy John Kerry also backed the idea of more frequent reporting.
"I hope we come out with a very good framework. Whether it's five years (or) less, I can't tell you today," Kerry told journalists Friday. "But I definitely believe it should be as short as we can.
"It would be negative in my mind to come out of here with too long a horizon," Kerry said.
In a Guardian article Cop26’s worst outcome would be giving the green light to carbon offsetting, Greenpeace International executive director writes about the nine paragraphs of article 6 and says carbon markets should not be a distraction at COP26.
Some governments and industries want article 6 to be interpreted as a mandate for new markets in carbon offsets, endorsed by the UN. Carbon credits could, for example, be generated by planting trees or buying up existing forests, as a way to “offset” a dirty power project on the other side of the world or further oil development, such as Total in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But offsetting doesn’t stop carbon entering the atmosphere and warming our world, it just keeps it off the ledgers of the governments and companies responsible. According to the Institute for Applied Ecology, about eight out of 10 offsetting projects rich countries relied on to meet their climate targets under the Kyoto protocol were deemed unlikely to have delivered any climate benefit. Offsetting has been tried and it has failed – to pursue this as a solution now is nothing more than greenwashing and would blow a huge hole in the Paris agreement.
The world needs to make immediate, dramatic and consistent emissions reductions now – not push the global south, in particular, further to the brink with offset schemes. They have led to land-grabbing, biodiversity destruction and human rights abuses. To protect nature, and people’s futures, governments must work in partnership with local Indigenous peoples to manage the land justly.
African Countries’ Struggle
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate says the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 is already too high for her country.
“1.2C is already hell for us. It’s already destruction. It’s already suffering. It’s already disaster. Any rise will only make things worse,” Nakate said last week at a COP protest.
“Historically, Africans are responsible for only 3% of emissions, and yet some of us are suffering some of the most brutal impacts fuelled by the climate crisis,” she said.
These impacts include extreme weather and altered patterns of rainfall which lead to drought and floods as well as an increase in temperatures.
Nakate also denounced the policy of assisting the Global South with loans to address the climate crisis.
“It means that our countries are going to have more and more debt being added to already existing debt. So we have this burden of paying back this money for something that we did not cause.”
In a BBC article COP26: What African climate experts want you to know, a group of climate experts also stressed the need for grants, not loans as they work towards implementing clean energy standards on the continent. Africa finds itself in a quagmire: needing more power to address its “rapid economic growth” and finding that power by developing clean energy sources so as not to contribute to global heating.
According to Dr. Rose Mutiso, research director of Energy for Growth Hub, the “average African uses less electricity each year than one refrigerator consumes in the US or Europe,” a statistic that is undoubtedly going to shift as global heating increases energy needs on the continent. More power will be needed for farmers for irrigation and for everyone to cool their homes.
“While Africa welcomes partnerships, countries on the continent cannot sacrifice their ambitions. More thought needs to be given to what Africa needs in terms of industrialization and creating jobs,” Dr. Mutiso says. “This means that richer nations need to actually reduce their own emissions and they need to live up to funding promises - in the past, there have been pledges but little upfront money.”
Nigerian climate governance and international development scholar Chukwumerije Okereke says support for Africa is minimal, despite the enormity of climate change on the region.
“The global consensus seems to be that all countries must quickly achieve a target of net zero - which means not adding to greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, so any emissions are balanced out by removing greenhouse gasses via plants or new technologies,” he says. “This neglects the massive development and energy challenges Africa faces. Put bluntly, emissions from the continent may need to rise significantly in the near term before they fall.”
In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf writes What Africa Needs Right Now is for the Global North (the world’s largest emitters) to present climate targets which keep a 1.5 degree rise in temperature front and center.
“Crucially, whatever is agreed on in Glasgow needs to be carried out, with heads of state making it a personal political priority,” Sirleaf writes. “Not only would that be good in itself, it would also build a precious commodity in the fight against climate change: trust.”
How do you tell people that they must leave their community or drown? This was the gut-wrenching decision I faced five years ago, as president of Liberia, when thousands of families in the capital’s largest township saw their homes swept out to sea.
Similar devastation stretches across Africa. Mozambique and Zimbabwe are still struggling to recover from the deadly Cyclone Idai that hit in 2019, and Madagascar is on the brink of famine. As weather patterns become more volatile, irregular rain is common, badly affecting crop and livestock yields. For a continent dependent on agriculture — it accounts for around one-fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output — the effects of climate change are especially ruinous.
Sirleaf says that the $100 billion a year pledged to help the Global South (a figure agreed to ten years ago and still not met) is not sufficient.
“Many African nations are already spending much more than they receive from the international community to mitigate a crisis they did little to create,” she writes. “Leaders must go much further and agree on a target that accurately reflects developing countries’ needs.”
Climate finance can do only so much. Indebtedness across the continent is alarmingly high: In Liberia, for example, debt was 54.85 percent of G.D.P. in 2019 — and a staggering 94.5 percent in Zambia. So long as countries are constrained by debt, successfully adapting to climate change is hard to envision. The African Union recently called for rich countries to pass along the pandemic funds allocated to them by the International Monetary Fund to developing countries. Amounting to $100 billion for the continent, this would be a powerful and timely gesture of solidarity.
“The rich world can no longer keep its head in the sand about the consequences of inaction. Now is the time to step up and act — before the flood submerges us all.”
Africa’s natural landscapes hold the key to solving our climate crisis
I once had the privilege of sleeping out in the rainforest in the Congo River basin. This stunning ecosystem is one of the largest basins in the world, second only to the Amazon. It is also one of our strongest remaining defences against climate change. Unlike other large tropical rainforests, Congo remains a strong net carbon sink. Currently, it removes 4 per cent of the planet’s annual carbon emissions. These sprawling landscapes are nature’s very own carbon removal devices, absorbing it and sequestering it away.
Video shown at the beginning of COP26.
Monday, Nov 8, 2021 · 2:55:21 PM +00:00
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Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.
The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.
“If we don’t know the state of emissions today, we don’t know whether we’re cutting emissions meaningfully and substantially,” said Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. “The atmosphere ultimately is the truth. The atmosphere is what we care about. The concentration of methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is what’s affecting climate.” from WAPO behind firewall