SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Climate change talks have long been stymied over demands for transfers of billions of dollars — on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron backed a new push for the conversation to be measured in trillions.
Speaking at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Macron gave his support to elements of a plan outlined by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley that seeks to overhaul the way climate finance flows to the countries that most need it.
He called for a “huge shock of concessional financing,” suspension of debt for disaster-struck countries and putting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on notice.
It was a speech that signaled a shift in tone that developing countries have been long been pushing for.
During the first day of official speeches, leader after leader from wealthy countries highlighted the need to demonstrate “solidarity” with developing countries after a year in which calamitous disasters and a bubbling debt crisis helped reshape the often contentious conversation about climate finance.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Money is a central focus of this year’s climate talks given the widening gap between what has been pledged and what is needed. It extends from everything from clean energy transitions to hardening countries’ defenses against climate impacts to potential payments for irreparable climate damages.
In September, Barbados issued the world’s first pandemic and natural disaster bond. “The time has come for the introduction of natural disaster-pandemic clauses in our debt instruments,” Mottley said.
“God forbid, if we are hit tomorrow, we unlock 18 percent of GDP over the next two years, because what we do is effectively put a pause on all of our debt,” she said.
Macron called for the rules of the IMF, the World Bank and other major lenders to be changed to makeclauses that halt debt repayments in the event of a disaster far more common.
“What you’re asking of us in terms of debt reimbursement and guarantees, when we are affected by a climate shock, when we are a victim of a climate accident, to some degree, there must be a suspension of those conditions,” said the French president.
Broken promises
While the need for finance to spur the transition to clean energy across the world and guard against the ravages of climate change is already stretching into trillions, the U.N. climate system remains stuck on a broken decade-old promise from rich countries. They pledged to deliver $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020, but that’s not likely to happen until next year.
As climate impacts have grown more extreme and prolific, appeals for new and more innovative forms of finance have escalated. Ballooning debt in the wake of the pandemic has heightened those calls, with dozens of vulnerable countries threatening a debt strike in the lead-up to COP27.
Mottley has been a champion of elevating the debt crisis facing nations like her own and highlighting how it adds to climate inequities. The plan she outlined in September hinges on debt relief, increased finance, and new mechanisms for post-disaster recovery, like bonds.
The Barbados leader’s call to arms and Macron’s heavyweight backing brought a new reality and scale to the financial discussion.
Mottley has pushed for the IMF’s special drawing rights to be put toward helping climate-vulnerable nations recover and respond to climate impacts. That could be used to help unlock far more money from the private sector — $500 billion from the IMF could result in $5 trillion in investments, she said Monday.
The challenge is getting shareholders in those financial institutions to agree to reforms.
Officials in the U.S., Germany and other major economies have pushed for an overhaul of the way multilateral development banks lend to allow them to extend more climate finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called on the World Bank to draft a roadmap by the end of the year that could then be used to drive reform efforts at other development banks.
On Monday, Macron went further, saying that by next spring, global financial institutions would need to devise ways to “come up with concrete solutions to activate these innovative financing solutions and to help us to provide access to new liquidities.”
He paid tribute to Mottley’s “force of character” and said the two leaders — one who commands an economy 600 times larger than the other — had agreed to form a group of “wise minds” to develop suggestions for the overhaul of the international financial system.
But one Mottley suggestion that Macron swerved was her call for fossil fuel companies to pay a levy on their profits into a fund for disaster-hit countries.
“How do companies make $200 billion in profits in the last three months and not expect to contribute at least 10 cents on every dollar of profit to a loss and damage fund?” she asked.
A farmer in Nkayi, Zimbabwe, looks at an empty granary following a poor rainy season. Africa is experiencing massive impacts due to climate change. Credit Busani Bafana/IPS
by Busani Bafana (bulawayo)
Inter Press Service
Bulawayo, Nov 07 (IPS) – Africa is counting on COP27 to deliver it from climate change. But will it?
Global leaders from more than 125 countries gather in the resort city of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), from November 6-18, 2022. The UNFCCC is a global treaty mandating signatories to prevent “dangerous human-induced interference with the climate system by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations”.
The Convention puts the responsibility of cutting dangerous carbon emissions on the shoulders of developed countries. The major carbon emission emitters are China, the European Union, the United States, Australia, Japan, India, and Russia.
Africa contributes 3.8 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels and industry. However, it is experiencing significant impacts from climate change.
From Angola to Zimbabwe, cyclones, floods, high temperatures, and droughts are killing and displacing millions of Africa as climate change upends a continent unable to cope with its devastating impacts.
Dubbed the ‘African COP’, COP27 convenes in a changed world experiencing a combination of economic and political crises, including food and fuel crises. There are mixed expectations on how to save the world from a fiery Armageddon as climate change rises. For Africa, more is expected from COP27 than at any other time.
The money and adaptation COP
The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) says Africa is expecting to see the implementation of commitments made at COP26 for advancing the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and addressing the adverse climate change.
“African countries have committed the most ambitious NDCs under the Paris Agreement now the priority should be how to implement these targets. And for these, developed countries should deliver on their climate finance pledges,” Selam Kidane Abebe, Legal Advisor to the AGN, explained.
Abebe contended that the special needs and special circumstances of Africa are a priority for the AGN, as the recognition was reflected under the UNFCCC decisions. Such recognition is also important as Africa contributes less of the total historical and current emissions, and climate change is impacting Africa’s development trajectory, so even if African countries have strong development plans, their trajectory is going to be impacted by the adverse impacts of climate change,” she said, noting that African countries were investing up to 9% of the GDP on adaptation, money that should be invested in development sectors.
In 2009, developed countries committed to giving $100 billion annually until 2020 to help developing countries reduce emissions and cope with climate change. The money never came, and this target has been moved to 2023. Will it ever arrive?
“We hope so because it is the responsibility of developed countries to come forward with it,” Ambassador Wael Aboulmagd, Special Advisor to the COP27 President, told a media briefing in the buildup to COP27 last week.
“In all reality $100 billion is not going to solve the problem; it is not even close to addressing a fraction of the climate needs… the numbers are in trillions. The overall financial landscape needs to be revisited,” Aboulmagd noted, convinced that developed countries must be nudged to find a workable solution in climate finance.
Loss and damage
Finance is at the heart of the COP27 negotiations. Africa is anxious for a solution to the issue of loss and damage and is pushing for finance to address loss and damage as a result of global warming.
At COP27, the argument is that developed countries largely responsible for climate change should pay for the loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure, not to mention economic and cultural losses endured by developing countries that do not have the means to deal with the impacts of climate change.
An argument has been toyed with is that why not allow African countries to raise their emissions levels and develop their economies as developed countries did in industrializing? In Egypt, Africa is hoping to get commitments towards a specific loss and damage facility. Developed countries are reluctant to pick up the tab.
While countries have strengthened their commitments to tackle the climate crisis, climate change is not letting up. Floods in Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa, droughts in Kenya and Somalia, and food crises in the Horn of Africa have led to massive deaths and huge damage to homes and infrastructure that cannot be recovered. Who will pay for the climate damage?
“COP27 must provide a clear and time-bound roadmap on closing the finance gap for addressing loss and damage, ” UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said last week at the launch of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report. He argued that: “This will be a central litmus test for success at COP27”.
Climate change is hitting Africa hard, and extreme weather could cost the continent $50 billion annually by 2050, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Human activities, largely the burning of fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil, have released emissions that are causing global warming.
According to scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), life would be threatened should global temperatures rise beyond 1.8C. The Paris Agreement pledges have meant to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.
The COP Presidency is convinced a balanced approach that meets various interests is needed. Questions abound on what should be the arrangement for loss and damage, what kind of funding entity will be there, and who shoulders liability and compensation.
“As the COP27 Presidency, we are impartial and want all parties to be on the same page to agree and address all these issues. I think we have a good chance of doing that at this COP,” he said, expressing optimism that loss and damage will be on the agenda.
Hot energy finance
Despite some countries developing new and revising their NDCs, to raise their emission reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement, switching to clean energy and phasing out coal has been slow. Rising fuel prices as a result of the Ukraine war have flipped the script. Some developed countries are increasing subsidies for fossil fuels, while others have fired up coal plants and natural gas lines to fill the energy gap. Even China has recently approved new coal mines.
But should Africa – yearning to boost industrialization – abandon fossil fuel dependence and join the race for renewables?
“The speed of this energy transition should not be the same for every country around the world, many African countries are languishing in extreme poverty, and they make the case that if we are being told to keep that resource underground for the global good then the international community has to come up with a package to allow us otherwise to eliminate poverty and pursue our sustainable development goals,” opined Aboulmagd.
He said while there is a global case for emissions reduction targets and transition to renewables, developing countries cannot just be told to quit fossil fuels without financial support to go green. A tailored approach for every country, depending on its circumstances, is called for.
“It is essentially telling people to stop having energy; by the way, Sub-Saharan Africa has less than 20 percent access to energy in their entire population. We need to make sure that when we make a demand of a country it is a reasonable one that they can reasonably be expected to do without almost devastating their development objectives and poverty reduction elimination objective,” he urged.
Time for talking is over; action now
A UN report released last week found that the world is off track in meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures below 1.5°C by the end of the century. The Emissions Gap Report 2022 warns that the window is closing and that the world must cut carbon emissions by 45 percent to avoid global catastrophe because governments have failed to effect adequate cuts as pledged since COP26 in Glasgow.
The report finds that, despite a decision by all countries at the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, UK (COP26) to strengthen Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), action has been poor and ambition low that the world could be facing a temperature rise of above the Paris Agreement goal of well below 2°C. The report shows that current policies alone will lead to a 2.8°C temperature rise highlighting the gap between actions and promises.
“Climate adaptation may not seem like a priority right now,” says Inger Andersen, United Nations Environment Programme, Executive Director, opined. “Even if all commitments are implemented immediately, the reality is that climate change is going to be with us decades into the future. And the poorest keep paying the price for our inaction. It is, therefore, imperative that we put time, effort, resources, and planning into adaptation action.”
ATHENS, Greece — Exxon Mobil is poised to start a delayed gas prospecting project off southwestern Greece, the country’s leader said Monday amid tensions between Greece and Turkey over offshore rights and as Europe seeks alternative energy sources due to the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. energy giant will start seismic exploration “in the coming days” southwest of the southern Peloponnese peninsula and the island of Crete, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told private Antenna TV.
The project has been heavily criticized by environmental groups, which argue that the deep-sea prospecting would have “unbearable” consequences on endangered Mediterranean whales and dolphins. Critics also highlight the potential risk of spills, and say the project, if successful, would increase Greece’s use of fossil fuels amid the planet’s climate change crisis.
Mitsotakis insisted Monday that Greece remains dedicated to “fast green transition.” But he added: “Our country … must ascertain whether it currently has the ability to produce natural gas, which would contribute not only to our own energy security but also to that of Europe.”
European countries are scrambling to replace their former dependency on Russian fossil fuels following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent damaging of pipelines designed to bring natural gas from Russia to Germany.
Meanwhile, Greece and Turkey are at loggerheads over offshore exploration rights in the eastern Mediterranean, and Turkish prospecting east of Crete in 2020 prompted a military build-up and bellicose rhetoric.
In 2019, Greece granted rights for exploration — which, however, didn’t go ahead — in two blocks of seabed south and southwest of the island of Crete to a consortium of TotalEnergies and Exxon Mobil with Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum.
The areas include the Mediterranean’s deepest waters. The Hellenic Trench, at 5,267 meters (17,300 feet) is a vital habitat for the sea’s few hundred sperm whales, and for other cetaceans already threatened by fishing, collisions with ships and plastic pollution.
These mammals are particularly sensitive to the underwater noise produced by seismic surveys for fossil fuels, in which sound waves are bounced off the seabed to locate potential deposits. Sonar used by warships has been shown to have deadly effects on whales, and experts say seismic surveys can do the same.
———
Follow all AP stories about climate change issues at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.
The COP27 climate summit kicked off on Sunday with yet another dire report about the state of the planet. As world leaders gathered for the conference in Egypt, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the past eight years have been the hottest in recorded history.
In the period from 2013 to 2022, the global average temperature was an estimated 1.14 degrees Celsius above 1850-1900 levels, according to the U.N. agency’s provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022 report.
And according to the agency, “the warming continues” — accompanied by accelerating sea level rise, record-breaking glacier melting in Europe and extreme weather.
“We just had the 8 warmest years on record,” the U.N. agency said. “The global average temperature in 2022 is about 1.15 °C above the pre-industrial level.”
Officials warned for years that to prevent the most severe impacts of climate change, the world needs to stay below a global average of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to pre-industrial times. Now, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas warns that is looking improbable.
“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” he said. “We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5ºC of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach.”
The development echoes a string of reports the U.N. issued less than two weeks ago that found nations are failing to create and enact sufficient plans for tackling the climate crisis. The reports found that based on current actions, plans and emissions, Earth is on track to hit nearly 3 degrees Celsius of warming in less than 80 years.
The WMO’s latest report said the record heat comes as “the tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change are becoming more dramatic.”
We just had the 8 warmest years on record. The global average temperature in 2022 is about 1.15 °C above the pre-industrial level.
In its provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022 report, the WMO found that greenhouse gases have hit record levels. The rate of sea level rise doubled since 1993 and has risen by nearly 10 millimeters since January 2020, hitting a record high in 2022. Ocean heat also hit record levels in 2021.
“The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago,” the WMO said.
Glaciers played a large role in this. In Europe, glaciers in the European Alps are believed to have had “record-shattering melt” since January alone. The Greenland ice sheet, which combined with Antarctica stores about two-thirds of the planet’s fresh water, lost some of its mass for the 26th consecutive year and got its first rain in September, the report found.
“It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security,” Taalas said. “The rate of sea level rise has doubled in the past 30 years. Although we still measure this in terms of millimetres per year, it adds up to half to one meter per century and that is a long-term and major threat to many millions of coastal dwellers and low-lying states.”
The WMO said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to unveil a plan at COP27 for a global early warning system, which the agency noted half of nations lack. The Early Warnings for All Initiative will seek $3.1 billion of investments over the next five years to help with “disaster risk knowledge, observations and forecasting, preparedness and response, and communication of early warnings.”
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt — The only way to “put an end to all this suffering” from “a highway to climate hell” is for the world to cooperate or perish, dozens of leaders were admonished as they gathered Monday for international climate talks.
More than 100 world leaders will speak over the next few days to try to deal with a worsening problem that scientists call Earth’s biggest challenge. Nearly 50 heads of states or governments started to take the stage Monday in the first day of “high-level” talks at this year’s annual U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, with more to come in the following days.
Much of the focus will be on national leaders telling their stories of being devastated by climate disasters, culminating Tuesday with a speech by Pakistan Prime Minister Muhammad Sharif, whose country’s summer floods caused at least $40 billion in damage and displaced millions of people.
“The planet has become a world of suffering. … Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the summit host, told his fellow leaders.”Climate change will never stop without our intervention. … Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.”
El-Sisi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the world “is on a highway to climate hell.”
He called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to work more closely together, with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. He called on the United States and China – the two biggest producers of climate-changing emissions – to especially work together on climate, something they used to do until the last few years.
“Humanity has a choice: Cooperate or perish,” Guterres said. “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact.”
The World Meteorological Association issued a report at the summit Sunday saying, “The past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, fueled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat. Extreme heatwaves, drought and devastating flooding have affected millions and cost billions this year.”
The report said the “tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change,” such as the reate of sea level rise and glacial melting “are becoming more dramatic.”
Still, the fire and brimstone displayed by Guterres may not have quite the impact as it might have in past meetings.
Why? Because of bad timing and who isn’t showing up, is coming late or is dithering about it.
Most of the leaders are meeting Monday and Tuesday, just as the United States has a potentially policy-shifting midterm election. Then the leaders of the world’s 20 wealthiest nations will have their powerful-only club confab in Bali in Indonesia days later. Add to that, “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.
Leaders of two of the three biggest carbon polluting nations – China and India – appear to be skipping the climate talks, although underlings are here negotiating. The leader of the other top polluting country – President Biden – is coming days later than most of the other presidents and prime ministers on his way to Bali.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was initially going to avoid the negotiations, but public pressure and predecessor Boris Johnson’s plans to come changed his mind. New King Charles III, a longtime environment advocate, won’t attend because of his new role. And Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine created energy chaos that reverberates in the world of climate negotiations, won’t be here.
“We always want more” leaders, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said in a Sunday news conference. “But I believe there is sufficient (leadership) right now for us to have a very productive outcome.”
In addition to speeches given by the leaders, the negotiations include “innovative” roundtable discussions that “we are confident, will generate some very powerful insights,” Stiell said.
The leaders showing up in droves are from the host continent of Africa.
“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.”
“The South is actually stepping up,” Adow told The Associated Press. “The North that historically caused the problem is failing.”
Monday will be heavily dominated by leaders of nations victimized by climate change, not those that have created the problem of heat-trapping gases warming up the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel. It will be mostly African nations and small island nations and other vulnerable nations that will be telling their stories.
And they are dramatic ones, droughts in Africa and floods in Pakistan, in places that could least afford it. For the first time in 30 years of climate negotiations, the summit “should focus its attention on the severe climate impacts we’re already seeing,” said World Resources International’s David Waskow.
“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. In this case, with the passage of the first major climate legislation and $375 billion in spending, Mr. Biden has a lot to share, he said.
While it’s impressive that so many leaders are coming to the summit, “my expectations for ambitious climate targets in these two days are very low,” said NewClimate Institute’ scientist Niklas Hohne. That’s because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused energy and food crises that took away from climate action, he said.
VIENNA, Nov 07 (IPS) – Ahead of this year’s COP27 in Egypt, industry and government representatives from 15 developing countries across Asia, Latin America and Africa met in a series of consultations about the challenges and opportunities they face in decarbonizing some of their most energy intensive industries like steel, cement and concrete.
A report from these consultations – which were organized by the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), where I work – will be released during COP27’s Decarbonisation Day (Friday 11 November) and should be widely-read by decision-makers across energy, environment and industrial sectors.
During these meetings, it was evident that the pace of progress so far is too slow and that puts us at real risk of not meeting global climate commitments. It simply won’t be sufficient for industrialized countries to lower emissions within their boundaries and enforce restrictions for products entering their markets. This must happen everywhere.
Global action and new forms of inter-sectoral cooperation are urgently needed to address critical questions including: what are the opportunities for emissions reductions, and what is needed to deliver these reductions in the fastest and most economical way?
How do we speed up the development and implementation of new carbon-cutting technologies – and ensure that they are widely accessible and affordable, including to small and medium sized enterprises?
Currently, many developing country governments do not have reliable and up-to-date data on the emissions of their different industries and how they compare internationally. Relatively little has been established so far in the way of infrastructure to facilitate the widespread introduction of new and emerging technologies for industrial decarbonization.
Access to and know-how about low-carbon technologies is largely concentrated within industrialized countries and large multinational companies.
This must change. For industrial decarbonization efforts to succeed, we need to see significantly increased investments in research and development into new technologies – but we also need to scale up the deployment of technologies that exist but are not yet widely available, including those for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS).
We also need to much more widely implement strategies and technologies that are already available and affordable – including on energy efficiency, which lowers the demand for energy including from renewable sources.
This likely requires new funding for technical assistance to help make markets in developing countries ready and able to implement low-carbon technologies. It’s not just about funding individual projects, but about really coming up with more meaningful ways to partner around spreading technology our planet urgently needs. Industrialized countries cannot leave developing ones to ‘do this on their own’.
Some of the steel and cement (which is also used to make concrete) businesses working in developing countries are multinational companies which are bringing decarbonizing technologies into their operations from abroad. This is a good thing.
But there are also local companies – including within the supply chains of these multinationals – which need to be involved in order to make decarbonization succeed.
In India, for example, more than half of the steel manufacturing industry is small and medium sized enterprises without the same access to these technologies. Does this local market currently have the technical capacity to adopt and service new hydrogen fuel installations, for example?
Unfortunately, the answer is: Not really.
In many cases, these local companies will likely be unaware of the need to actually change their practices to move towards something that’s low-carbon – let alone how to do this and what technology options exist to help them. The speed of change needed means that the world cannot wait for them to do this alone.
Governments everywhere have a role to play here, in ensuring that their policy frameworks drive decarbonization, promote the right technologies and prevent the proliferation of production processes that aren’t low-carbon.
Imagine: If construction products are in demand in a developing country and they’re not already or sufficiently available on the market, a company or investor may see an opportunity to set up a new business – and if stringent regulations aren’t in place, they might do this using outdated technology with higher emissions.
Decarbonization is not the mandate of small steel and cement manufacturers, as participants noted in the pre-COP27 Asia consultation, or their area of expertise.
It is an area that requires collaboration across different sectors – including to get better and more detailed data, and measurement, reporting and verification frameworks on emissions that can help guide government, and industry, decision-making.
Steel and cement companies might often be seen by some of the public as ‘bad guys’. Globally, these sectors do currently contribute about 50% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
But they produce essential materials to build our houses, schools and cities and are needed for our growing communities. The demand should not be to stop production today, but to make it low-carbon today.
Without more meaningful global partnerships on industrial decarbonization, there’s a big risk that we won’t be able to deliver on our climate commitments. We cannot afford this.
Countries and industries globally need to move all together towards the same climate goals at the same time. Cooperation – including on policy, infrastructure development, and technology – will be key to doing this.
Rana Ghoneim is the Chief of the Energy Systems and Infrastructure Division, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna.
Country consultations mentioned in this op-ed, which will be released during COP27’s Decarbonization Day (Friday 11 November), will be available on the website of UNIDO’s Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator.
Voters will render a midterm verdict on President Joe Biden as they decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress. Forgive them if their views about the president’s record so far are a bit complicated.
In less than two years, Biden has chaotically ended the war in Afghanistan while struggling to bring the nation fully out of a two-and-a-half-year pandemic. Domestically, he’s pursued nothing less than a transformation of the American social safety net, with an agenda comprising a dizzying number of progressive policy goals. Biden has accomplished quite a lot of them—perhaps more than most political observers expected with such narrow Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. Some of his legislative moves, on infrastructure and clean-energy manufacturing, for example, have even been bipartisan victories. But Biden has also failed to achieve many of his most progressive priorities, which have fallen victim to a combination of lockstep GOP opposition and crucial defections in his own party.
Biden’s approval ratings have languished far below 50 percent for more than a year; the end of his presidential honeymoon coincided with the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the prolonged pandemic. Most conservatives, of course, never gave him a chance. Many blame his high-spending policies for exacerbating inflation. The view from Democrats and independent voters is more complex: Will they conclude that Biden’s legislative successes—a record infusion of funds to fight climate change, a major infrastructure bill, action to lower prescription-drug prices, modest gun reform—outweigh his failure to enact promises such as paid family leave, universal pre-K, far-reaching voting-rights legislation, and a ban on assault weapons? In the past few months, Biden has bolstered his progressive record without the help of Congress, unilaterally forgiving student-loan debt for millions and pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.
The signing of just three enormous bills—the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, and this summer’s climate-and-health spending bill—made Biden’s first two years among the most productive of any president in the past half century. The initial pandemic bill, also known as the American Rescue Plan, was about the size of Barack Obama’s two biggest legislative achievements—his initial economic stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act—combined. The legislation sent $1,400 checks to Americans across the country, nearly doubled the child tax credit, shored up state budget accounts, and funded testing, treatment, and vaccines to fight the pandemic. The politically named Inflation Reduction Act is actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time.
Beyond those headline bills, Biden more quietly amassed a bevy of smaller legislative wins, often with bipartisan support. A modest gun-safety bill expanded background checks (although not universally), made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking, and provided federal funding for so-called red-flag laws. Congress also passed the CHIPS Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, a long-stalled postal-reform bill, substantial military aid for Ukraine, and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act—all with fairly broad support from both parties. Biden’s executive actions on student-loan forgiveness and pardons for marijuana possession answered a pair of progressive demands.
Perhaps Biden’s biggest legislative disappointment in his first two years was the Senate’s failure to overcome a Republican filibuster of a major voting-rights-and-election-reform bill at the start of the year. (Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona memorably refused to support an exemption to the Senate’s rules to pass the bill.) The shrinking of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda sacrificed another large chunk of the president’s initially transformative progressive vision. Democrats jettisoned plans for a $15 federal minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, free community college, a huge affordable housing initiative, an expansion of Medicare, and an extension of the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit. They also bowed to Sinema’s opposition to reversing tax-rate cuts enacted by former President Donald Trump.
Some of Biden’s plans never stood a chance. The Senate did not make a serious effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform or more aggressive gun-control measures, such as universal background checks or a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Nor did Congress act on restoring the public insurance option left out of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
QUESADA, Spain — An extremely hot, dry summer that shrank reservoirs and sparked forest fires is now threatening the heartiest of Spain‘s staple crops: the olives that make the European country the world’s leading producer and exporter of the tiny green fruits that are pressed into golden oil.
Industry experts and authorities predict Spain’s fall olive harvest will be nearly half the size of last year’s, another casualty of global weather shifts caused by climate change.
“I am 57 years old and I have never seen a year like this one,” farmer Juan Antonio Delgado said as he walked past his rows of olive trees in the southeast town of Quesada. “My intention is to hang on as long as I can, but when the costs rise above what I make from production we will all be out of a job.”
High temperatures in May killed many of the blossoms on the olive trees in Spanish orchards. The ones that survived produced fruits that were small and thin because of not enough water. A little less moisture can actually yield better olive oil, but the recent drought is proving too much for them.
This year has been the third-driest in Spain since records were started in 1964. The Mediterranean country also had its hottest summer on record.
Spain’s 350,000 olive farmers typically harvest their crops in early October, ahead of their full ripeness, in order to produce the olive oil. But with his olives still too puny to pick, Delgado left most of the fruit on his trees, hoping for rain. So far, no luck.
If the wished-for rain doesn’t arrive soon, the country will produce nearly half as many olives as it did last year, according to Spain’s agriculture minister.
“Our forecast for this harvest season is notoriously low,” Agriculture Minister Luis Planas told The Associated Press. “The ministry predicts that it won’t even reach 800,000 tonnes (882,000 U.S. tons),” compared with 1.47 million tonnes (1.62 million U.S. tons) in 2021.
Olive trees cover 2.7 million hectares (6.8 million acres) of Spain’s soil, with a full 37% of them found in Jaén province, which is known for its “sea of olives” and where Delgado farms.
On average, Spain grows more than three times as many olives as Italy and Greece, which also are seeing smaller yields.
Olive oil production in the European Union as a whole is forecast to fall drastically compared with last year, according to the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organizations and the General Confederation of Agricultural Cooperatives,
The European farming organizations, known by the acronyms COPA and COGECA, warned in September that the yield could drop by 35% due to drought and high temperatures. The two groups called the situation in Spain “particularly worrying.”
The smaller harvest is driving up prices, according to Italian olive oil producer Filippo Berio. The company said the price of European olives for extra virgin oil has soared from 500 euros per tonne ($495) to 4,985 euros ($4,938) per tonne.
Along with warmer than usual weather, the drought is affecting Spanish olives in other ways. Farming method consultant Antonio Bernal is witnessing the return of long-forgotten diseases during his visits to Quesada. He believes that milder winters are helping fungi to proliferate.
Bernal also fears that the most widespread variety of olive cultivated in Jaén won’t be able to adapt to such a quickly changing climate.
“The solution is to stop climate change: Olive groves cannot adapt at a pace to assume such a fast change,” Bernal said.
Besides the olive branch being the universal symbol of peace, the olive is a symbol of the Mediterranean. Plato was said to have dispensed his wisdom under an olive tree and the olive’s widespread cultivation in Spain goes back to the Romans.
When it got too dry for orange and lemon trees, olive trees were counted on to continue thriving. The short, gnarly trees cling to dry, rocky ground and seem not to mind when the sun comes pounding down. Under torrid midday conditions, microscopic pores on their leaves close to reduce water loss.
“For Jaén, the olive has been our culture, our way of subsisting and feeding our families,” said olive farmer Manuel García.
Yet even the hearty olive has limits. These days, the fruit represents the challenges communities face in a hotter, dryer world.
Researcher Virginia Hernández is an olive expert based at the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Seville, Spain. She is studying how to adapt irrigation practices to drought, specifically the point at which “sub-optimum” quantities of water can be used to promote sustainability.
With less rain likely to become a norm, using water sparingly is critical, Hernández said. She thinks a more intelligent use of high-tech irrigation systems combined with more drought-resistant varieties of trees could save the industry as the planet warms.
According to climate experts, the Mediterranean is expected to be one of the fastest warming regions of the world in the coming years. The trick is convincing farmers that reducing their output some today might save their livelihoods tomorrow, the kind of adaptability at which olives are particularly adept, Hernández said.
“The truth is that the olive is the paradigmatic species when it comes to resisting a lack of water,” she said. “I can’t think of another that can hold up like the olive. … It knows how to suffer.”
———
Joseph Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Photojournalist Bernat Armangue and videojournalist Iain Sullivan contributed from Quesada.
———
Follow AP’s coverage of the climate and environment: https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
London — The scientific community and the majority of the world’s political leaders agree that climate change is one of the biggest threats to life on this planet, and the impacts are already being seen and felt around the world in the form of droughts, more frequent and more severe storms, rampant flooding, heat waves and wildfires.
While there’s little doubt that the problem can only be addressed through international cooperation, it can be hard to keep track of global efforts to do that. Every year there is one major global event that seeks to put it all in one place.
Below is a breakdown of what to expect from the biggest international climate conference, COP27, as it kicks off Sunday in Egypt.
What is a “COP”?
COP stands for “conference of parties.” It happens every year, and this is the 27th time it has been convened. It is a meeting of governments that have signed onto the world’s major climate change agreements: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, or the Paris Agreement.
The gathering is hosted by a different country each year, and this year it is being held in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, from November 6-18. The event is an opportunity for the signatory nations to discuss everything from steps they are taking to adapt to the impacts of climate change, to financing climate action.
But this year’s gathering is also seen by many as a critical test of whether the global community can or will do enough to prevent the worst predicted outcomes of climate change.
A critical test for climate action
Under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, the first legally binding international climate change treaty, 194 countries committed to the goal of limiting the rise in the global average temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius — and ideally below 1.5 degrees Celsius — compared to pre-industrial levels.
Under the treaty, each country decides for itself how much it will reduce its emissions every year to meet that goal. Every five years, those targets are revised and made more ambitious; this is called a “ratchet mechanism.”
COP26, which took place in Glasgow in 2021, was the first test of the ratchet mechanism, and the results weren’t promising. The targets submitted by governments for that conference were insufficient to limit global warming to the desired levels. Countries were therefore asked to revise their targets before COP27.
According to a U.N. report released in October, just weeks ahead of COP27, the policies currently in place put the world on track for warming of 2.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and there is currently “no credible pathway” to the goal of limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track toward a 1.5 degrees Celsius world,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of U.N. Climate Change, said in October. “To keep this goal alive, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years.”
Who is going to COP27?
President Biden, alongside U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, will attend the conference, as will at least 90 other heads of state.
Britain’s King Charles III, who devoted a huge amount of attention to environmental causes before inheriting the throne, will not attend, it was confirmed by Buckingham Palace. The U.K.’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, initially said he would be unable to attend because of the financial turmoil at home, but after it emerged that former premier Boris Johnson, a same-party rival, might show up in Egypt, Sunak confirmed on Wednesday that he’d go.
There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change.
There is no energy security without investing in renewables.
That is why I will attend @COP27P next week: to deliver on Glasgow’s legacy of building a secure and sustainable future.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg said she was not going to the conference this year, dismissing the global summit as a forum for “greenwashing.”
“As it is, the COPs are not really working, unless of course we use them as an opportunity to mobilize,” Thunberg said.
Thunberg said she also believed space for activists at the conference was limited, and she wanted to leave room for other advocates to attend.
“Commitments to net zero are worth zero without the plans, policies and actions to back it up,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said ahead of the conference. “Our world cannot afford any more greenwashing, fake movers or late movers. We must close the emissions gap before climate catastrophe closes in on us all.”
Most of the world’s population has been affected in some way by climate change — 85% of the world, in fact. But the effects of climate change haven’t been equally felt by all. Some communities have seen a slight rise in temperature here and there, but others have had their entire communities wiped out.
As the rise of global temperatures and sea-level continues to affect the world with increasingly frequency and intensity, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change?
———
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
———
The answer is clear, according to climate scientists, climate and environmental justice experts and international research efforts on the question. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in a 2022 report that vulnerability to climate change is “exacerbated by inequity and marginalization linked to gender, ethnicity, low income or combinations thereof.”
“(The) poor, ethnic minorities, and women are very clearly the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing today: heat waves; displacement and smoke due to fires; and price shocks due to supply chain interruptions, higher energy prices,” Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a coordinating lead author on IPCC reports, told The Associated Press.
These populations are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change because of racism, sexism and pursuit of profits over protection of people, according to Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance.
“Due to the continued search for profits by our current economic system and (by) the fossil fuel industry in particular, there are entire neighborhoods that are deemed worthy of becoming sacrifice zones, and this breaks down every time around race, class, and national lines,” she said.
Research also shows that disabled people are more vulnerable to effects of climate change than abled bodied people.
The increased vulnerability to climate change experienced by these populations and who is to blame for causing these inequities have become increasing topics of conversation at the international level. Debate about loss and damage — the climate harm caused by some nations to others, how much and what should be done about it — has waged on since at least COP23.
A study published in July 2022 found that richer nations like the U.S. caused climate harm to poorer countries.
In terms of repairing damage already caused to vulnerable populations and countries and helping them become less vulnerable, experts told the AP that it starts with including them in developing policies.
“A natural start is to develop policies to target these underserved communities with enhanced attention and support,” Kammen said.
Albert said it should go a step further with direct economic investments in communities most vulnerable to climate change.
“Economic resources should go directly to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis to develop and implement their own community-led solutions,” she said. “Communities rather than profits must be the motive if we are truly going to solve the climate crisis.”
———
Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
———
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The provisional 2022 State of the Global Climate study outlines the increasingly dramatic signs of the climate emergency, which include a doubling of the rate of sea level rise since 1993, to a new record high this year; and indications of unprecedented glacier melting on the European Alps.
The full 2022 report is due to be released in the Spring of 2023, but the provisional study was brought out ahead of COP27, the UN climate conference, raising awareness of the huge scale of the problems that world leaders must tackle, if they are to have any hope of getting the climate crisis under control.
“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts”, said WMO chief Petter Taalas, who launched the report at an event held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the venue for this year’s conference. “We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5 degree of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach. It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security”.
Critical conditions in all parts of the world
The report is a dizzying catalogue of worrying climate events, taking place against a backdrop of record levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – the three main greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming – which is currently estimated to be around 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Throughout the alps, an average thickness loss of between three and over four metres was recorded, whilst in Switzerland, all snow melted during the summer season, the first time this has happened in recorded history; since the beginning of the century, the volume of glacier ice in the country has dropped by more than a third.
The increasing ice melt worldwide has led to sea levels rising over the last 30 years, at rapidly increasing rates. The rate of ocean warming has been exceptionally high over the past two decades; marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent, and warming rates are expected to continue in the future.
The study details the effects of both droughts and excessive rains. Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia are facing crop failure and food insecurity, because of another season of below-average rains, whilst more than a third of Pakistan was flooded in July and August, as a result of record-breaking rain, displacing almost eight million people.
The southern Africa region was battered by a series of cyclones over two months at the start of the year, hitting Madagascar hardest with torrential rain and devastating floods, and in September, Hurricane Ian caused extensive damage and loss of life in Cuba and southwest Florida.
Large parts of Europe sweltered in repeated episodes of extreme heat: the United Kingdom saw a new national record on 19 July, when the temperature topped more than 40°C for the first time. This was accompanied by a persistent and damaging drought and wildfires.
Early warnings for all
In a statement released on Sunday, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, described the WMO report as a “chronicle of climate chaos,” which details the catastrophic speed of climate change, which is devastating lives and livelihoods on every continent.
Faced with the inevitability of continued climate shocks and extreme weather across the world, Mr. Guterres is to launch an action plan at COP27 to achieve Early Warnings for All in the next five years.
The UN chief explained that early warning systems are necessary, to protect people and communities everywhere. “We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action, ambitious, credible climate action,” he argued. “COP27 must be the place – and now must be the time”
In his first presidential address to Congress, President Biden focused on one word when discussing how America can meet the climate crisis: jobs. “There’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing,” Mr. Biden said. Watch his remarks and read more here.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Delegates landing in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for U.N. climate talks this week are a global elite bent on tearing down national borders, stripping away individual freedoms and condemning working people to a life of poverty.
That dark view is held by a range of far-right or populist parties — among them Donald Trump’s Republicans, who are seeking to retake control in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections. Some of these radicals are rampaging through elections in Europe while others, such as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro last week, have been defeated only narrowly.
Republican and Trump acolyte Lauren Boebert derides the environmentalist agenda as “America last;” Britain’s Brexit-backing Home Secretary Suella Braverman says the country is in thrall to a “tofu-eating wokerati;” and in Spain, senior figures in the far-right Vox party dismiss the U.N.’s climate agenda as “cultural Marxism.”
Right-wingers of various strains around the world have co-opted climate change into their culture war. The fact this is happening in countries that produce a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions has alarmed some green advocates.
“Reactionary populism is now the biggest obstacle to tackling climate change,” wrote three climate leaders, including Brazil’s former Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira, in a recent commentary.
In the U.S., Republicans are eyeing a return to power in one or both houses of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Many at the COP27 talks will be reliving the first week of the U.N. climate conference in Morocco six years ago when Trump’s election struck the climate movement like a hurricane.
A Republican surge would gnaw at the fragile confidence that has built around global climate efforts since President Joe Biden’s election, raising the specter of a second Trump term and perhaps the withdrawal — again — of the U.S. from the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal.
“I don’t want to think about that,” said Teixeira’s co-author Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat who led the design of the Paris Agreement and who now leads the European Climate Foundation.
Some on the American right are pushing a more conciliatory message than others. “Republicans have solutions to reduce world emissions while providing affordable, reliable, and clean energy to our allies across the globe,” said Utah Congressman John Curtis, who will lead a delegation from his party to COP27.
Tubiana and others in the environmental movement are trying to put on a brave face. They argue Republicans won’t want to tamper too much with Biden’s behemoth Inflation Reduction Act, which contains measures to promote clean energy.
“You might see railing against it, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of political talk and rhetoric, but I don’t expect that would be a focus for the Republicans,” said Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a green NGO based in Arlington, Virginia. Nevertheless, if Republicans take both houses, “we certainly won’t make any progress,” Keohane said.
Trump’s first term and the presidency of Brazil’s Bolsonaro — which ended in a narrow defeat in last month’s election — now look like the opening skirmishes in a struggle in which the planet’s stability is at stake.
In parts of Europe, the right present their policies as sympathetic to the risks of climate change while dismissing internationally sanctioned action as sinister elitism that threatens their voters’ prosperity.
“The Sweden Democrats are not climate deniers, whatever that means,” Swedish far-right leader Jimmie Åkesson told a crowd days before a September election that saw his party win big. But Sweden’s current climate plans, Åkesson said, were “100 percent symbolic” rather than meaningful. “All that leads to is that we get poorer, that our lives get worse.”
This is the gibbet on which the far right are hanging environmentalism: depicting them as the witting or unwitting cavalry of global elites.
“We consider it to be a globalist movement that intends to end all borders, intends to end our freedom, intends to end our freedom for our identities,” Javier Cortés, president of the Seville chapter of Spain’s far-right Vox party, said in an interview with POLITICO. “We are not in favor of CO2 emissions. On the contrary, we want to respect the environment. All we are saying is that the European Union has to clarify that it wants to sell us a climate religion in which we cannot emit CO2, while we make our industries disappear from Europe and we need to buy from China.”
To describe this as climate denial — a common but often inaccurate charge — would be to miss the point that this is now just another front in the culture wars.
Online disinformation about the last U.N. climate talks was largely focused on the hypocrisy and elitism of those attending, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The main spreaders weren’t websites and figures traditionally associated with climate denial, but culture war celebrities such as psychologist Jordan Peterson, Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
Populist attacks on globalism “rely on a well-funded transnational network,” said Tubiana. “It warrants serious scrutiny.”
But while economic interests may be powering parts of the movement, there is also a sense of political opportunism at work. Huge changes to the economy will be needed to lower emissions at the speed dictated by U.N.-brokered global climate goals. There will be winners and losers — and the losers may gravitate toward populists pledging to take up their cause.
“Far-right organizations are recognizing this as a potentially lucrative topic that they can win votes or support on,” said Balsa Lubarda, head of the ideology research unit at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.
Loving the losers
The far right’s focus on the losers has been “turbo charged” by the energy crisis, said Jennie King, head of civic action and education at ISD, which populists have wrongly argued is the fault of green policy. The European Parliament’s coalition of far-right parties has grown and capitalized on the energy crisis by joining with center-right parties to vote down environmental legislation.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson — newly elected with Åkesson’s support — aims to dilute the country’s ambitions for cutting some greenhouse gas emissions, a move center-right Liberal Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari justified in familiar terms: “That is a reaction to the reality people are facing.” And in Britain, Brexit leader Nigel Farage retooled his campaign to become an anti-net zero mouthpiece.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right | Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
Strains of right-wing ecology may also mean that not all groups are actively hostile to the climate agenda, said Lubarda. Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a huge fan of the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, which center on the Shire, an idealized bucolic homeland. Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right, but the protection of national economic interests still comes first.
“There is no more convinced ecologist than a conservative, but what distinguishes us from a certain ideological environmentalism is that we want to defend nature with man inside,” she said in her inaugural speech to parliament last month.
While Meloni has announced that she will attend COP27, she has also renamed the Ministry for the Ecological Transition the Ministry for Environment and Energy Security. The governing program of her Brothers of Italy party includes a section on climate change, but it strongly emphasizes the need to protect industry.
It’s this broad sense of demotion and delay that alarms those who are watching these ideas grow in stature among populists on the right. They say that while it may not sound like climate denial, the result is effectively the same.
“You can say that you are climate friends,” said Belgian Socialist MEP Marie Arena. “But in the act, you are not at all. You are business friends first.”
Jacopo Barragazzi, Charlie Duxbury and Zack Colman contributed to this report.
This article is part of POLITICO Pro
The one-stop-shop solution for policy professionals fusing the depth of POLITICO journalism with the power of technology
Over the next two weeks, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will prod each other at COP27 to raise their clean energy ambitions, as average global temperature has already climbed 1.2 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution.
They will haggle over ending the use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which has seen a resurgence in some countries amid the war in Ukraine, and try to come up with a system to funnel money to help the world’s poorest nations recover from devastating climate disasters.
But a flood of recent reports have made clear leaders are running out of time to implement the vast energy overhaul needed to keep the temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists have warned the planet must stay under.
Reports from the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association show carbon and methane emissions hit record levels in 2021, and the plans countries have submitted to slash those emissions are beyond insufficient. Given countries’ current promises, Earth’s temperature will climb to between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Ultimately, the world needs to cut its fossil fuel emissions nearly in half by 2030 to avoid 1.5 degrees, a daunting prospect for economies still very much beholden to oil, natural gas and coal.
“No country has a right to be delinquent,” US Climate Envoy John Kerry told reporters in October. “The scientists tell us that what is happening now – the increased extreme heat, extreme weather, the fires, the floods, the warming of the ocean, the melting of the ice, the extraordinary way in which life is being affected badly by the climate crisis – is going to get worse unless we address this crisis in a unified, forward-leaning way.”
Here are the top issues to follow at COP27 in Egypt.
Developing and developed countries have for years tussled over the concept of a “loss and damage” fund; the idea which suggests countries causing the most harm with their outrageous planet-warming emissions should pay poorer countries, which have suffered from the resulting climate disasters.
It has been a thorny issue because the richest countries, including the US, don’t want to appear culpable or legally liable to other nations for harm. Kerry, for instance, has tiptoed around the issue, saying the US supports formal talks, but he has not given any indication of what solution the country would sign on to.
Meanwhile, small island nations and others in the Global South are shouldering the impact of the climate crisis, as devastating floods, intensifying storms and record-breaking heat waves wreak havoc.
The deadly flooding in Pakistan this summer, which killed more than 1,500 people, will surely be an example the countries’ negotiators point to. And since September, more than two million people in Nigeria have been affected by the worst flooding there in a decade. At this very moment, Nigerians are drinking, cooking with and bathing in dirty flood water amid serious concerns over waterborne diseases.
It is likely loss and damage will have space on the official COP27 agenda this year. But beyond countries committing to meet and talk about what a potential loss and damage fund would look like, or whether one should even exist, it is unclear what action will come out of this year’s summit.
“Do we expect that we’ll have a fund by the end of the two weeks? I hope, I would love to – but we’ll see how parties deliver on that,” Egypt’s chief climate negotiator Ambassador Mohamed Nasr recently told reporters.
Former White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told CNN she thinks loss and damage will be the top issue at the UN climate summit this year, and said nations including the US will face some tough questions about their plans to help developing nations already being hit hard by climate disasters.
“It just keeps getting pushed out,” McCarthy said. “There’s need for some real accountability and some specific commitments in the short-term.”
People will be watching to see if the US and China can repair a broken relationship at the summit, a year after the two countries surprised the world by announcing they would work together on climate change.
The newfound cooperation came crashing down this summer when China announced it was suspending climate talks with the US as part of broader retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
Kerry recently said the climate talks between the two countries are still suspended and will likely remain so until China’s president Xi Jinping gives the green light. Kerry and others are watching to see whether China fulfills the promise it made last year to submit a plan to bring down its methane emissions or updates its emissions pledge.
The US and China are the world’s two largest emitters and their cooperation matters, particularly because it can spur other countries to act, too.
Separate from a potential loss and damage fund, there is the overarching issue of so-called global climate finance; a fund rich countries promised to push money into to help the developing world transition to clean energy rather than grow their economies with fossil fuels.
The promise made in 2009 was $100 billion per year, but the world has yet to meet the pledge. Some of the richest countries, including the US, UK, Canada and others, have consistently fallen short of their allocation.
The US is working on separate deals with countries including Vietnam, South Africa and Indonesia to get them to move away from coal and toward renewables. And US officials often stress they want to also unlock private investments to help countries transition to renewables and deal with climate effects.
COP27 is intended to hold countries’ feet to the fire on fossil fuel emissions and gin up new ambition on the climate crisis. Yet reports show we are still off-track to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
A UN report which surveyed countries’ latest pledges found the planet will warm between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. Average global temperature has already risen around 1.2 degrees since the industrial revolution.
Records were set last year for all three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
There is a spot of encouraging news: the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles is surging and helping to offset the rise in fossil fuel emissions, according to a recent International Energy Agency report.
But the overall picture from the reports shows there is a need for much more clean energy, deployed swiftly. Every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise will have stark consequences, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.
“The energy transition is entirely doable, but we’re not on that pathway, and we have procrastinated and wasted time,” Andersen told CNN. “Every digit will matter. Let’s not say ‘we missed 1.5 so let’s settle for 2.’ No. We must understand that every digit that goes up will make our life and the life of our children and grandchildren much more impacted.”
The clock is ticking in another way: Next year’s COP28 in Dubai will be the year nations must do an official stocktake to determine if the world is on track to meet the goals set out in the landmark Paris Agreement.
The 1,200 indigenous Guna people on the island of Gardi Sugdub in Panama can’t hang on much longer. They’re moving next year to the mainland because their land is being inundated by the rising Caribbean amid climate change.
They’ll become the first residents of Latin America to be moved by the government because their island — home to a community for 100 years — is fated to disappear beneath the rising sea, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
“When the tide goes up, the water enters some houses and the people have to move their belongings to higher ground,” said local grade school computer science teacher Pragnaben Mohan. Teachers and students have to wear rubber boots to wade through water to classrooms, he said.
The move to modern homes in the new community of La Barriada late next year has been planned for more than a decade, according to the Journal.
Gardi Sugdub is one of 365 islands, most of them uninhabited, in the San Blas archipelago. Some 39 of the islands were settled more than a century-and-half ago by 30,000 Guna, who came from the Colombian and Panamanian mainland.
Serious problems for the other islands are on the horizon. Many of them will likely be under water by 2050, experts say.
“Based on current sea-level rise predictions, it is almost certain that within the next 20 years the Guna will have to start leaving these islands, and by the end of the century, most will probably have to be abandoned,” Steven Paton, the director of the physical monitoring program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, told the Journal.
“Little by little, all of the Guna will have to move,” said Ligia Castro, who’s in charge of climate-change policy at Panama’s environmental ministry. “At least we have time from now to 2050 to move them slowly to the mainland.”
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron released a selfie video on social media platforms Saturday asking the public to send him questions about what France should do about climate change and biodiversity.
Thousands of responses quickly poured in. Several were hostile or questioned his sincerity, but they also included rigorous questions about fossil fuel subsidies, sea pollution and nuclear energy.
Macron, who will take part in the U.N. climate talks opening in Egypt on Sunday, promised to respond to the questions starting next week.
In the video, he read from a letter from the public asking why he doesn’t declare an “environmental state of emergency.” He said the letter “prompted me to ask questions about what we are doing about this ecological challenge, the challenge of our generation.”
Early in his presidency, Macron pledged to make tackling climate change issues a top priority, but he has come under widespread criticism for not instituting enough tangible change.
At the COP27 talks in Egypt on Monday, Macron is expected to discuss climate-related financing, protecting forests, Africa’s Great Green Wall, and other climate adaptation measures, according to his office.
He’s also expected to raise the importance — and challenge — of sticking to climate commitments as Europe faces an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Those are all key issues at the climate talks at the Red Sea coastal resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, which are expected to include more than 120 world leaders and run from Nov. 6-18.
Laurent Fabius, the French diplomat who presided over the U.N. talks in 2015 that produced the Paris climate agreement, made a plea Saturday to those gathering in Egypt: “Keep in mind that the most beautiful announcements mean nothing if they’re not backed up by precise and rapid policies and actions.”
———
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
Hundreds of climate activists breached a runway Saturday at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to try to stop private jets from taking off, in the latest demonstration by protesters aimed at drawing attention to the climate crisis.
Greenpeace Netherlands said “more than 500” Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion activists were at the airport, one of Europe’s largest, on Saturday afternoon, in a press release. A spokesperson for the Schiphol security forces could not confirm that figure.
There were about “more than 300” activists, the spokesperson of The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the military force guarding the airport, told CNN.
Robert Kapel, acknowledged it was a “big scale” demonstration but said air traffic was unaffected as the runway was exclusively used for private jets and no flights are scheduled until late Saturday night.
“This morning activists gathered in the forest nearby, carrying flags and banners with slogans such as ‘SOS for the climate’ and ‘Fly no more.’ At the same time another group reached the airport from the opposite direction with bicycles,” Greenpeace said.
Images from Greenpeace show groups of dozens of demonstrators sitting down on the tarmac by multiple planes on the runway. Further images show demonstrations inside the terminal.
More than 100 arrests “and counting” have been made so far, Kapel said. He added that he thinks all arrests will have been made by 10 p.m. (local time), which is when he said the first flight is scheduled to take off. Security forces have blocked off the area and made it inaccessible from other parts of the airport, he commented.
Protesters “plan to keep air traffic from the private jet terminal grounded for as long as possible,” Dewi Zloch, spokesperson of Greenpeace Netherlands, said in a statement.
She continued: “The airport should be reducing its flight movements, but instead it’s building a brand-new terminal. The wealthy elite is using more private jets than ever, which is the most polluting way to fly. This is typical of the aviation industry, which doesn’t seem to see that it is putting people at risk by aggravating the climate crisis. This has to stop. We want fewer flights, more trains, and a ban on unnecessary short-haul flights and private jets.”
Greenpeace warned authorities there would be some kind of action at Schiphol weeks in advance, Zloch, who was on the scene, told CNN. They did not disclose the exact location, she added.
Schiphol Airport CEO Ruud Sondag said activists should “feel welcome, but let’s keep things civil.”
He was responding to a previous letter from Greenpeace and stated his objective was to achieve “emissions-free airports by 2030 and net climate-neutral aviation by 2050”.
“However, this is only possible if we all work together”, Sondag said in a statement published Friday.
“Coming together for our environment, the government, and for society, clear laws, regulations, and proper permits are a necessity. We need clarity on that soon,” he added.
Elsewhere in Europe, two climate activists were arrested in Madrid in Spain after they each glued one of their hands to the frames of two Goya paintings in the Prado Museum on Saturday.
There was no apparent damage to the paintings, but the suspects are being charged with public disorder and damages, the Spanish National Police press office for Madrid told CNN.
The suspects, two Spanish women, wrote “+1,5C” on the wall between the artworks, which were Goya’s masterpieces “Las Majas,” according to the police.
Futuro Vegetal, a Spanish activist group, tweeted a video on the museum protest. The group is taking responsibility for the incident.
They described themselves as a “collective of civil disobedience and direct action in the fight against the Climate Crisis through the adoption of a food growing system based on plants.”
“Last week the UN recognized the impossibility of keeping ourselves below the limit of the increase, of the Paris Accord, of 1.5 degrees (C) temperature, with respect to pre-industrial levels,” Futuro Vegetal wrote in its tweet.
Security guards at the Prado quickly alerted the National Police, which has a unit dedicated to protecting the perimeter of the famed museum, and officers made the arrests in just minutes, the Police press office said.
The Paris Agreement, which was adopted by 196 parties at the United Nations’ COP 21 in December 2015, aimed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The protest comes just a day before the COP27 climate conference is due to start in Egypt.
EDE, Netherlands — Hundreds of climate protesters blocked private jets from leaving Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Saturday in a demonstration on the eve of the COP27 U.N. climate meeting in Egypt.
Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion protesters sat around private jets to prevent them leaving and others rode bicycles around the planes.
Dewi Zloch of Greenpeace Netherlands said the activists want “fewer flights, more trains and a ban on unnecessary short-haul flights and private jets.”
Military police said they arrested a number of protesters for being on the airport’s grounds without authorization.
Responding Friday to an open letter from Greenpeace, Schiphol’s new CEO Ruud Sondag said the airport is targeting “emissions-free airports by 2030 and net climate-neutral aviation by 2050. And we have an duty to lead the way in that,” but conceded it needed to happen faster.
More than 120 world leaders will attend this year’s U.N. climate talks at the Red Sea coastal resort of Sharm el-Sheikh starting Sunday.
Thorny issues up for discussion at the Nov. 6-18 talks, including further cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting financial aid for poor countries struggling with the impacts of climate change.
Corals and coral reefs are found around the islands and atolls of the Pacific. In Vanuatu, the government, with the support of SPC, implemented a coral reef climate change adaptation project based on coral gardening. Photo credit: SPC
by Catherine Wilson (sydney)
Inter Press Service
Sydney, Nov 05 (IPS) – Today, the window of opportunity for scaled-up global climate action to prevent disastrous global warming and build resilience in the most vulnerable nations is closing fast. And a major impediment to reducing emissions and accelerating climate adaptation is both lack of financial investment and major bureaucratic hurdles to accessing those funds that are available.
For Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS), the failure of the international community to provide US$100 billion per year to address climate change impacts in the developing world, a pledge made thirteen years ago, has grave consequences. And it will be a major issue for Pacific leaders at the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference due to start in Egypt on Sunday.
On Kadavu and Ra Islands in Fiji, SPC supported the implementation of an Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) and climate change resilience project. Photo credit: SPC
“The Pacific is at the frontline of the impacts of climate change. Climate finance is critical to allow mitigation and adaptation actions, yet the region is suffering from a lack of access to the climate finance already committed to global mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. Due to global priority setting or global priorities, it is not flowing to where it is needed most,” Dr Stuart Minchin, Director-General of the regional development organization, Pacific Community, in Noumea, New Caledonia, told IPS. “It seems the polluters are setting the rules, and consequently, the flow of climate finance is more like a drip feed than the torrent that is required to meet the challenges of the region.”
Island nations scattered across the Pacific Ocean are among the world’s most exposed to climate extremes, such as rising air temperatures, ocean acidification, more damaging cyclones, heatwaves and the critical loss of biodiversity, water and food security, the IPCC reported this year. The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat estimates that the region needs US$1 billion per year to implement its climate adaptation goals and US$5.2 billion annually by 2030.
“Without global funding, Pacific Island countries and territories will not be able to identify and implement climate solutions,” Anne-Claire Goarant, Programme Manager for the Pacific Community’s Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability Programme in Noumea told IPS, adding that the costs will be high. “Already climate-induced disasters are causing economic costs of 0.5 percent to 6.6 percent of annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pacific Island countries. This trend will continue in the future in the absence of urgent climate action. Without adaptation measures, a high island, such as Viti Levu in Fiji, could experience damages of US$23-52 million per year by 2050.”
The unique characteristics of islands, such as small land areas, the very close proximity of many communities, infrastructure and economic activities to coastlines and precarious economies, means that severe weather events can have disastrous impacts. Fifty-five percent of the Pacific Islanders live less than 1 kilometre from the sea, and every year more villages face relocation as their existence is endangered by flooding and sea erosion. Excessive heat, drought and rainfall are predicted to threaten crop and food production, and by the end of the century, important revenues from Pacific tourism could plummet by 27-34 percent.
The costs of climate adaptation could reach more than 25 percent of GDP in Kiribati, 15 percent of GDP in Tuvalu and more than 10 percent of GDP in Vanuatu. Yet Pacific Island nations are ‘among the least equipped to adapt, putting their economic development and macroeconomic stability at risk,’ reports the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
One of the two largest global sources of climate finance is the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has the mandate to focus on the needs of developing countries, and another, the Adaptation Fund, supports tangible adaptation projects. However, most of the global funding tracked by Oxfam in 2017-2018 did not reach the most fragile nations. Only 20.5 percent of reported finance was allocated to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and 3 percent to Small Island Developing States.
“On financing adaptation in developing countries, what’s happened thus far is not good enough. We need to scale up quite dramatically the ambition within the multilateral development banks and bilateral donors. And we need to work on blended finance, where some public finance leverages private finance, and there is a proper sharing of risks between the private and public sectors,” Mark Carney, the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Finance, has stated.
The Pacific Community is working closely with nations across the region to develop and submit climate funding proposals and support them in implementing projects once finance is approved. In Fiji, Nauru, Tonga and the Solomon Islands, for example, it is supporting projects on the ground to build climate resilience expertise and capacity among smallholder farmers with a Euro 4.6 million grant from the multi-donor Kiwa Initiative.
But many countries in the region are experiencing limited success with funding applications. In the Federated States of Micronesia, financial support is needed for increasing resilience in health, protecting coastal areas, lifeline access roads, and critical infrastructure from climate destruction and improving water security, Belinda Hadley, Team Leader in FSM’s National Designated Authority for the Green Climate Fund explained. But funding remains elusive as the island states struggle with overly difficult and resource-intensive application processes.
“The processes to apply for multilateral climate finance are heavy and complex. This makes accessing climate finance a slow and onerous process. In-country capacities within governments and other institutions are insufficient in the face of such complex processes. Many countries don’t have enough sufficient personnel to meet the burdensome requirements set by the donors,” Dirk Snyman, Co-ordinator of the Pacific Community’s Climate Finance Unit told IPS. “Even after project approval, disbursement of funds can still take one to two years. This does not allow countries to implement their adaptation and mitigation actions within the timeframes required.”
Funders need “to facilitate faster and easier access to climate finance in such a manner that the climate change priorities of Pacific communities, rather than the priorities and policies of the donors, are driving the regional portfolio of climate change projects,” Maëva Tesan, Communications and Knowledge Management Officer for the Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability Programme emphasized.
Snyman said that the situation could be improved if multilateral finance providers made application procedures more streamlined and flexible, changed the current compliance-based approach to a focus on positive project impacts and a dedicated climate fund was established for losses and damages in the region.
These views are echoed by the IMF, which recommends that climate finance providers should recognize ‘the shrinking window of opportunity to address the climate crisis’ and ‘consider further efforts to rebalance the risks to shareholders with the urgency of climate adaptation needs of small and fragile countries.’
The COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on 6-18 November.
“To force poor countries to repay a loan to cope with a climate crisis they hardly caused is profoundly unfair. Instead of supporting countries that are facing worsening droughts, cyclones and flooding, rich countries are crippling their ability to cope with the next shock and deepening their poverty.” Credit: Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS.
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Nov 04 (IPS) – Just a few days ahead of the UN Climate Conference (COP27) in Egypt (6-18 November), new revelations show how far rich, industrialised countries –those who contribute most to the growing catastrophes- have been lying over their real contributions to climate finance.
The report estimates between just 21-24.5 billion US dollars as the “true value” of climate finance provided in 2020, against a reported figure of 68.3 billion US dollars in public finance that rich countries said was provided (alongside mobilised private finance bringing the total to 83.3 billion US dollars).
The global climate finance target is supposed to be 100 billion US dollars a year, an amount which is slightly more than the 83 billion US dollars the world’s biggest nuclear powers spent in one single year– 2021, on such weapons of mass destruction.
Furthermore, “the combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to 100 billion US dollars,” said already last august the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, adding that it was “immoral” that major oil and gas companies are reporting “record profits”, while prices soar.
“Very misleading”
Moreover, “rich countries’ contributions not only continue to fall miserably below their promised goal but are also very misleading in often counting the wrong things in the wrong way. They’re overstating their own generosity by painting a rosy picture that obscures how much is really going to poor countries,” said Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International Climate Policy Lead.
Mostly loans
“Our global climate finance is a broken train: drastically flawed and putting us at risk of reaching a catastrophic destination. There are too many loans indebting poor countries that are already struggling to cope with climatic shocks.”
There is too much “dishonest” and “shady” reporting. The result is the most vulnerable countries remain ill-prepared to face the wrath of the climate crisis, warned Dabi.
Rich countries’ “manipulation”
Oxfam research found that instruments such as loans are being reported at face value, ignoring repayments and other factors. Too often funded projects have less climate focus than reported, making the net value of support specifically aiming at climate action significantly lower than actual reported climate finance figures.
Currently, loans are dominating over 70% provision (48.6 billion US dollars) of public climate finance, adding to the debt crisis across developing countries.
“To force poor countries to repay a loan to cope with a climate crisis they hardly caused is profoundly unfair. Instead of supporting countries that are facing worsening droughts, cyclones and flooding, rich countries are crippling their ability to cope with the next shock and deepening their poverty.”
Least Developed Countries’ external debt repayments reached 31 billion US dollars in 2020.
Such ‘funding’ is primarily based on loans
“A climate finance system that is primarily based on loans is only worsening the problem. Rich nations, especially the heaviest-polluting ones,” said Dabi.
A key way to prevent a full-scale climate catastrophe is for developed nations to fulfil their 100 billion US dollars commitments and genuinely address the current climate financing accounting holes. “Manipulating the system will only mean poor nations, least responsible for the climate crisis, footing the climate bill,” said Dabi.
Stalling all efforts
Other findings by this global confederation which includes 21 member organisations and affiliates reveal that an average of 189 million people per year have been affected by extreme weather-related events in developing countries since 1991 – the year that a mechanism was first proposed to address the costs of climate impacts on low-income countries.
The report, The Cost of Delay, by the Loss and Damage Collaboration – a group of more than 100 researchers, activists, and policymakers from around the globe – highlights how rich countries have repeatedly stalled efforts to provide dedicated finance to developing countries bearing the costs of a climate crisis they did little to cause.
Six fossil fuel companies
“Analysis shows that in the first half of 2022 six fossil fuel companies combined made enough money to cover the cost of major extreme weather and climate-related events in developing countries and still have nearly $70 billion profit remaining.”
The report reveals that 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries have suffered climate-induced economic losses totalling over half a trillion dollars during the first two decades of this century as fossil fuel profits rocket, leaving people in some of the poorest places on earth to foot the bill.
Super profits. And massive deaths
It also reveals that the fossil fuel industry made enough super-profit between 2000 and 2019 to cover the costs of climate-induced economic losses in 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries, almost sixty times over.
The report estimates that since 1991, developing countries have experienced 79% of recorded deaths and 97% of the total recorded number of people affected by the impacts of weather extremes.
The analysis also shows that the number of extreme weather and climate-related events that developing countries experience has more than doubled over that period with over 676,000 people killed.
The entire continent of Africa produces less than 4% of global emissions and the African Development Bank reported recently the continent was losing between five and 15% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth because of climate change.
Enormous gains
Lyndsay Walsh, Oxfam’s Climate policy adviser and co-author of the report said: “It is an injustice that polluters who are disproportionately responsible for the escalating greenhouse gas emissions continue to reap these enormous profits while climate-vulnerable countries are left to foot the bill for the climate impacts destroying people’s lives, homes and jobs.”
