There is a plea for Climate Justice from the US Gulf
Climate Change and Adaptation Finance: What do we need to do now to protect the planet? A comment on Pichon Battle on Re:WIRED GREEN
The weather made clear the importance of addressing climate change, as the Re:WIRED GREEN event came to a close yesterday.
The head of a climate justice group is on the front lines of the crisis. She lives on a Louisiana bayou, where the rising waters are already washing away some communities. And she knows her home will be lost to rising seas no matter what she does. The goal is to try to save the parts of the world that are still protected. Her closing speech was a generous but unsparing entreaty to the privileged, asking them not to turn away from the necessity for sweeping systemic change.
With tears in her eyes, Pichon Battle challenged the audience to be honest with themselves about the actions they should take to fight for a hospitable planet for all and urged them to take action beyond throwing a plastic cup into a recycling bin. “It’s my job today to bring the truth,” she said. “Even if it’s not what you want to hear.”
Climate can be a lot of things, including science, powerful economic forces, and cultural expectations. We want to provide concise and clear explanations of how these issues work, every chance we get.
What are your questions about climate change? What are the questions that friends, relatives and neighbors are asking? What points call for more clarity, or are particularly intriguing?
Until now, higher-income countries have preferred to concentrate their climate finance on mitigating the effects of climate change — for example, supporting green energy development — and, to a lesser extent, on adapting to a warmer world. So far, they have promised LMICs US$100 billion annually in climate finance, and $40 billion annually from 2025 specifically for adaptation finance (although neither of these targets is on track).
The models found that low-income regions that tend to have warm weather are more likely to be affected by increased temperatures than wealthier regions. Countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, and Mali were among the worst hit, with per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) reduced by around 5% annually compared with what it would have been without human-driven heatwaves. By contrast, the GDP reduction in countries such as Canada and Finland is only around 1%.
The UN Environment Program’s executive director wrote in a foreword to the report that political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes.
“If we don’t want to spend the coming decades in emergency response mode, dealing with disaster after disaster, we need to get ahead of the game,” she added.
Climate Change and the 21st Conference of the Parties: Putting a COP27 Towards Developing Countries Against Climate Inflation
Most nations aren’t even cutting emissions enough to meet the pledges they’ve already made. The world is heating up by 5 degrees by the end of the century. The countries that make most of the climate pollution won’t make dramatic reductions in emissions at these talks.
In United Nations jargon, the meeting is called the Conference of the Parties, or COP. This is the 27th Conference of the Parties meeting, so it’s frequently referred to as COP27.
This year’s COP is focused on figuring out how to live with the consequences of climate change, given how disastrous the situation is. So one of the big buzzwords at COP27 is “adaptation.” In order to double funding for adaptation measures, delegates will need to hammer out how they will make good on their promise.
“Many extremes, including heatwaves, heavy precipitation, drought, flooding, wildfire, and tropical cyclones/hurricanes, are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change,” the report’s authors write.
The UN also warned that issues unrelated to climate change, including worldwide inflation and the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, could limit how much money wealthier countries are willing to provide developing nations for adaptation.
“We have to change our mindset and the way we think, because, actually, when it comes to climate, you know, an investment across borders in other places is a domestic investment,” Duarte says.
John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist, and independent film maker, who has won multiple awards for his work. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. His own opinions are expressed in the commentary. You can read more opinion at CNN.
Rich countries have resisted loss-and-damage finance because of the fear of large claims. There are two reasons that they came to the table: first, there has been sustained advocacy from representatives of Climate-Vulnerable countries and climate campaigners, backed by research; and second, the horrific devastation now unfolding in regions that have contributed little to climate-altering emissions is impossible to ignore.
At the time, Vanuatu – on behalf of an alliance of small-island states – argued quite reasonably that polluters should pay for the costs of their pollution.
The world is not going anywhere fast enough: the need for tackling climate change with the United States and the Geneva High-Level Climate Champion Mahmoud Mohieldin
“There have been many promises,” says Mahmoud Mohieldin, the UN’s climate change high-level champion for Egypt, but “without finance, money and investment, nothing will progress”.
After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It is clear that the losses should be brought to the attention of the polluters.
The world is not on track with its goal of cutting pollution that contributes to climate change. Nations have pledged to cut emissions by 3%. The science says emissions need to fall 45% by the year 2030. That’s to limit warming to the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That’s about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.
Climate Change, Economy, and Law: Why Climate Change Happens When Climate Change Is Not Happened, but Why We Shouldn’t
Over the decades, there have been many arguments against action. The problem was not the same as the present, but was a problem for the future.
To estimate the extreme heat that was caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, the researchers combined data on countries’ average annual temperatures and the five hottest days of each year from 1992 to 2013 with computational climate models. “Days that are very, very hot are one of the most tangible ways that we feel climate change,” says co-author Christopher Callahan, a climate-modelling researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. They damage crops, they reduce productivity, and they cause injuries at work. Callahan and his colleagues looked at the links between heatwaves and economic trends, at global and national scales.
The onslaught of heat waves, fires, and storms is both urgent and numbing. As long as humans have been burning fossil fuels, we have been making the planet more dangerous.
Over the last half a century, the oil and gas industry has made over three billion dollars per day. According to a recent report titled, “The Cost of Delay,” fossil fuel companies made more than $30 trillion in profits between 2000 and 2019.
According to the editor of Down to Earth, the Reimbursement for Loss and Damage is not Aid, but based on the Polluter pays principle, the basis of environmental laws around the world. Narain writes that this financing should be on the table not to be pushed away with another promise of a fund that never happens.
In the year 2021, the Commission of Small Island States on Climate change and international law was formed. There are claims in international courts.
“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. They want to respond in a court of law.
Greenwashing in the Era of the COSmi 2016 Climate Conference: Why the COPs are not really working, nor are they really doing anything?
This is a raging debate, even within the conference. After announcing that she will skip this year’s conference because it is not “really working”, the activist who was a media sensation in last year’s event said during an event in London that The COPs are not really working. “The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing,” Thunberg said.
The world is still concerned about warming past 2 degrees Celsius despite all the pledges made at the COPs. That’s even after countries submitted updated national action plans at last year’s COP, which marked a major deadline for nations to ratchet up their commitments under the Paris agreement.
The money is supposed to go toward new and improved infrastructure that might help keep people safe in a warming world. That might look like cities designed to be better at beating the heat or communities that are less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. It could mean that the early warning systems can warn people about floods or storms. There’s a push this year to secure even more funding for these kinds of adaptation projects, particularly since adaptation costs in developing countries have been projected to reach upwards of $300 billion a year by the end of the decade. Advocates are also pushing for more locally led solutions since what it means to live with climate change looks different from place to place and the people most affected by climate disasters haven’t always been included at planning tables.
There have been some bright spots. Australia, led by a newly progressive government, doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already promised more cuts or say they will soon. But most of those updates are from smaller polluters, or from those, like Australia, that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were egregiously lacking in detail or ambition. “A lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” Jansen says.
A few wins have made it easier to make good on last year’s promises. Fransen points to the recent inflation reduction act in the US as an example of how crucial it was to meet the pledge of a 50 percent emissions reduction. But the US still isn’t on track to reach that commitment. Further upping the ante on its goals this year would “strain credibility,” she says, given the nation’s political gridlock.
Fransen is one of the people in the business of keeping track of all those emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It is difficult to take stock. It means actually measuring how much carbon nations emit. It also involves showing the effects those emissions will have on the climate 10, 20, or 100 years from now.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing—or to prove that nations are holding to their pledges. The origin of the signals is muddyed by the gas in the atmosphere. Carbon is released by decaying vegetation and thaw permafrost, complicating matters. Think of it like trying to find a water leak in a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. That is why more advanced methods are needed. For instance, Climate Trace can train algorithms to use steam billowing from power plants as a visible proxy for the emissions they’re belching. Scientists have been using weather stations to monitor emissions.
Assessing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 emergence through monitoring, evaluation and accountability: A case study in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
Modelling shows that more than one million lives could be saved if it was possible to share the vaccines more evenly with lower-income countries. More even vaccine distribution, and a resulting drop in infections, might also have slowed the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.
The focus will be on assessment, evaluation and accountability. “We can’t just move on to new commitments without getting a grip on whether the current commitments are being carried out,” says climate-policy analyst David Waskow.
The emergence of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes threatens progress towards the eradication of Malaria in Africa. In a study in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia — the site of a malaria outbreak — Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found near the homes of participants with the disease. The notorious species can breed in urban environments. If people are not protected against it, it could affect 100 million people in Africa. Fitsum Tadesse stated that there was no silver bullet for this fast-spreading vector.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0
What to do about military carbon dioxide emissions if we don’t listen to the data? An energy researcher in Africa warns against net-zero emissions proposals
Military carbon dioxide emissions are huge — per capita, US armed forces put out more CO2 than any nation in the world. But militaries are largely spared from emissions reporting. Eight researchers outline how to hold militaries to account in the global carbon reckoning.
“Imagine making a data-driven plan for the world, but leaving out more than one billion people in Africa,” writes energy researcher Rose M. Mutiso. The net-zero emissions proposals have that very troubling truth behind them. She thinks we can’t meaningfully engage with net zero without appropriate models and data, as well as African expertise.
After a stint at Google, astronomer Oliver Müller is back in academia — and he has learnt some valuable lessons. One of the most important: don’t be a hero. You are effectively hiding flaws in the system if a task only needs to be completed to put your mental health and physical health at risk.
The Egyptian hosts of the COP27 climate conference are warning the leaders of wealthy nations that there can be no “backsliding” on commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, last year.
Climate Change Research in the Middle East and North Africa: A Call to Address the Politics of Loss-and-Damage Finance?
There is a huge gap in climate research in the Middle East and North Africa. Most of the studies focus on Europe, or the Mediterranean region. It wouldn’t be helpful to find research on Egypt because it is like a by-product of research on other parts of the world.
The country needs to put aside $73 billion for projects to help it mitigate climate change and adapt its infrastructure, according to an estimate in 2015. The environment minister says that this number has more than tripled to $246 billion. “Most climate actions we have implemented have been from the national budget, which adds more burden and competes with our basic needs that have to be fulfilled.”
Ian Mitchell is a researcher with the Center for Global Development in London who warned about consequences if agreement on loss and damage became a deal-breaker. Loss-and-damage finance is not new money if high-income countries agree to the principle and then use it for humanitarian-aid spending.
Adil Najam, who is studies international climate diplomacy at Boston University in Massachusetts, thinks that the politics will make it hard for these issues to be resolved. He adds that loss-and-damage finance can no longer be avoided by the high-income countries, especially given that climate impacts in vulnerable countries are becoming much more visible and severe.
Fouad says that organizing this year’s COP in Africa has been transformative. “We are expecting more attention towards issues that are crucial and meaningful to us Africans and relevant to most developing countries, such as food security, desertification, natural disasters and water scarcity. There is an opportunity for more African organizations to be heard.
There have been significant changes since then. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will loom over this year’s meeting. The invasion caused problems between the world’s largest economies and ended fossil fuel markets. Coal-fired power plants are the most intense global source of greenhouse gas emissions and countries like China have increased their dependency on them in the wake of the war.
There have been positive developments as well. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is growing rapidly. The International Energy Agency predicts that global demand for all types of fossil fuels will peak by the mid-2030s.
China and India plan to increase emissions until the year 2030. They’ve argued that their growing economies need the support of fossil fuels, as other wealthier countries have historically done.
Scientists also warn that decades of sea level rise, extreme drought, heat waves and storms are unavoidable because of how much global temperatures have already risen. That means billions of people will need to adapt to a hotter Earth.
It is possible to change course, according to the report. The consequences of climate change can be avoided and if we can limit the warming to 2% more than the temperature in the 1860s, that can happen. Sea levels would rise a lot less. Heat waves and storms would be less deadly. Many of the organisms in the oceans would be able to adapt.
How much do rich countries really have to do? The impact of climate change on the U.S. economy, economic capacity and the role of rich nations
They think that wealthier nations should foot the bill for cultural losses that occur when towns and villages move. So far, wealthier countries have agreed to keep discussing it, but haven’t committed to providing new funding.
It’s going to require huge investments. There’s no getting around it. But there’s also a lot of money to be made eliminating emissions from the global economy. The cost of not dealing with this problem could be terrible, say experts.
The country’s economy could grow by more than $3 trillion over the next 50 years if we cut carbon emissions quickly, says the consulting firm. On the other hand, not doing enough to respond to climate change could cost the U.S. $14.5 trillion over the same period.
Experts say making good on that promise is crucial to keep poorer nations on board with efforts to cut emissions. But they also say that $100 billion is just a fraction of the money the developing world is going to need.
The findings could inform which strategies are used to adapt to extreme heat and heavy rains. “The fact that we were able to sort of pinpoint this effect of the five hottest days of the year on the whole year, as economic effects, implies that those few days have really outsized effects,” says Callahan. “So investments targeted at mitigating the effects of heat extremes in the hottest parts of the year could deliver major economic returns.”
The study also emphasizes the need for rich countries to pay their share, says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. “Given the unequal burden and the share of historical emissions … the global north needs to support the global south in terms of coping with these adverse effects.”
The UN secretary general warned about the climate hell earlier this week, and he is racing to do his part to avert it.
He also referenced the fact that the global population is expected to officially hit 8 billion people during this climate meeting. “How will we answer when baby 8-billion is old enough to ask ‘What did you do for our world, and for our planet, when you had the chance?'” Guterres asked a room full of world leaders.
What Happens Today at the u-n-s-cop27? What Happened Yesterday at the Prime Minister’s Climate Negotiations in Barbados
Roughly half of the world isn’t covered by multi-hazard early warning systems, which collects data about disaster risk, monitor and forecast hazardous weather, and send out emergency alert.
The new plan calls for $3.1 billion to set up early-warning systems over the next five years in places that don’t already have them, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable countries and regions. A lot of money is needed to maintain the warning systems.
The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, went one step further in her opening speech to fellow leaders. She spoke of corporations that profit from our economy’s intensive use of fossil fuels.
Those corporations should help pay for the costs associated with sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, heat waves and droughts around the world, she argued, and especially in places like her nation that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don’t have the money to protect themselves.
The US government and AT&T are trying to provide free data on the country’s future climate risks. The goal is for leaders to better understand local dangers from more extreme weather.
The Climate Risk and Resilience portal will give information about a number of variables. The risks of flooding and wildfire will be increased in the coming months.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134696214/heres-what-happened-today-at-the-u-n-s-cop27-climate-negotiations
The United States Climate Assessment (NACA): Monitoring climate change in the U.S. and the aquifers of the Southwest
More than two dozen countries say they’ll work together to stop and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030 in order to fight climate change.
Chaired by the United States and Ghana, the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership includes 26 countries and the European Union, which together account for more than one-third of the world’s forests.
At COP26 in Glasgow last year more than 140 countries agreed to conserve forests. However, the U.N. said on Monday that not enough money is being spent to preserve forests, which capture and store carbon.
The National Climate Assessment, which is a congressionally-mandated report the federal government releases every four or five years, summarizes all the latest science and research on climate change in the United States. The new draft, going through a long period of public review before it is officially published next year, gives vital context about the degree of pain the climate crisis is causing in the US today and how far we are from creating a world safe for future generations.
The federal report paints a dire picture of what life is now like in America amid the climate crisis, and the incredible changes in store in the future. It outlines some truths about global warming, but hasn’t said much about how we can stop it.
“In the 1980s, the country experienced on average one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar [extreme weather] event every four months,” the draft report states. “Now, there is one every three weeks, on average.”
The frontline communities are often the least responsible for global warming because they have been forced to move into low-lying areas due to discrimination.
The rampant burning of fossil fuels is contributing to a worsening US water crisis. The Southwest will be most affected by the increased severity of the drought according to the report.
The report’s authors highlight the threat to the country’s aquifers — massive reservoirs of underground water built up over thousands of years — which are “particularly vulnerable to over-pumping.”
The U.N. Climate Summits: What Do They Need to Know About Climate Change, and Why Does It Matter? Mr. Biden and the Egyptian Dissident
The report states that factors leading to future migrations include flooding in the South, rising seas in Florida and wildfires in California.
Mr. Biden mentioned recent climate disasters that had caused misery and destruction in every part of the globe, explaining that no one was safe from the threat posed by a warming Earth, and that collective action was the only way to face the crisis. He urged other nations to take the lead of the US in making deep and swift cuts in pollution that is driving climate change.
Mr. Biden is also buoyed by a surprisingly strong showing of his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, a performance that bucked historical trends and may allow the Democrats to retain control of Congress.
“There is more than enough money in this economy,” said Wanjira Mathai, an environmentalist and activist from Kenya. “There was plenty out there when Covid happened and economies need to be shored up — $17 trillion showed up. There’s money. We have a crisis in our understanding of others.
A climate adviser under Bill Clinton, Paul Bledsoe, said that Vice President Joe Biden would not support the idea of loss and damage payments.
He said that America is not culturally capable of meaningful reparations. It’s not likely they will be considered regarding climate impacts to foreign nations even though they weren’t made to Native Americans or African Americans. It’s a complete nonstarter in our domestic politics.”
US envoy John Kerry spoke against such a fund at the COP 27, saying that existing funds could be used to pay damages from the climate. The US disagreed with the idea of high greenhouse-gas emitters taking liability for their historical emissions, fearing that it could lead to trillions of dollars in claims.
After addressing the gathering, Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet with Egypt’s president and discuss the case of the Egyptian dissident who is currently on a hunger strike. Mr. El Fattha said last Sunday that he was stopping drinking water at the start of the summit. Representatives of nongovernmental groups have threatened to walk out of the conference if he dies.
There have been tighter restrictions imposed on demonstrators, who are mainstays at the U.N. climate summits. A group of about 100 people from the Friday’s for Future, a youth-led and organized Climate movement and protesters opposed to oil and gas drilling in Africa made their presence known on Friday at the summit that is under the control of the United.
Higher-income countries must accept responsibility for their previous blocking tactics as they approach this part of the negotiations. COP27 needs to succeed because it needs to speed up decarbonization more than was promised so far. It must make good on climate finance that has already been pledged. In addition to loss-and-damage financing, the thorny topic of attributing historical responsibility for current impacts must be broached. It is not likely that this summit will solve all the issues. It wouldn’t serve any of the interests to divide the countries so that the meeting is in danger.
It will fall to conference hosts Egypt to help find a way forward. This year Pakistan holds the presidency of the G 77, the largest group of LMICs that also includes China, as it was a third of which was under water because of flooding. This group is not yet aligned on one model.
It might prove instructive to examine the experience of negotiators on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Compared with those working on the climate convention, biodiversity delegates have been more willing to discuss rules for liability and compensation. Take a biodiversity agreement called the Cartagena Protocol, which concerns the international transport of genetically modified (GM) organisms, signed in 2000 after a multi-year negotiation. When organisms caused harm, African countries decided to include a provision for liability and compensation. This idea was opposed by some high-income countries, led by the United States, on the grounds that there was no or little evidence that GM organisms could be harmful. In the end, the provision was not included, because it risked endangering the whole treaty. However, all parties promised to continue discussions, and liability and compensation rules were adopted by UN biodiversity-convention member states in 2010.
The Climate Crisis Advisory Group is made up of people who care about climate issues. Fatima Denton is a long-term U.N. official and member of the group. As the crisis grows, the solidarity issue will become bigger. Support is needed for that idea.
The United States is acting. Everyone has to act,” Mr. Biden said. It is a duty and responsibility of global leadership. Supporting developing countries is important if countries are to make decisions about climate change.
He reiterated a 2021 pledge to provide $11.4 billion annually by 2024 to help developing countries transition to wind, solar and other renewable energy. The money, which is different from the loss and damage fund, was promised by wealthy nations. Last year, Mr. Biden was only able to get a small amount of money from Congress.
Climate Change Research and Development in the Nile Delta: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Generations and Young Farmers in the Era of COP 27
Mr. Biden said that the U.S. government will require oil and gas companies to fix methane leaks that trap more heat than carbon dioxide in the short run. The fossil fuel industry is the main source of methane emissions in the US, it’s odorless gasses are often accidentally released by gas producers. Stopping methane from escaping into the atmosphere is critical to slowing global warming, scientists say.
Nature spoke to four climate scientists from the host country about their research and challenges, as the conference enters its second week.
At my research institute, we study the impact of sea-level rise in the Nile Delta and how it will affect farmers and the surrounding area.
My colleagues are attending COP27 and delivering a presentation on the Water Day, 14 November. We cannot change policies because we are only doing research. To see actions not just words, we would like to hear about an agreement to reduce emissions by the end of COP 27. We have heard enough promises in previous COP meetings.
My research focuses on finding strategies to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change and sea-level rise in the Nile Valley. I collaborate with plant-breeding scientists at the University of Florida to find plant genotypes that can tolerate droughts and a high level of salinity.
The biggest challenge for me is knowing that although something can be done to prevent economic and agricultural losses, nothing can be done instantly. Funding and profits are some of the key factors to consider when applying the outcomes of climate studies.
Even though our research proposes solutions, I do not think it’s up to the scientists to translate their work into effective adaptation projects. So, I hope that with COP27, we can see immediate action to initiate the implementation of such projects before it’s too late.
I spoke about my start-up at the youth and future generations day at the COP 27 conference, as well as a session on climate- change adaptation, loss and damage.
The company I co-founded, Recyclizer, collects plastic waste from the streets and recycles it into a mulch film that can be used to cover soil, protecting it from damage and reducing the amount of water needed for irrigation.
What have governments really been asking for in the last COP27 climate change conference? A conversation with Sunita Narain, director-general at the Centre for Science and Environment
In my academic research, I focused on how the decision-making process in the public and private sectors affects the implementation of sustainability and development goals and tackling climate change in Egypt.
Poor access to data has been the greatest challenge for me. As a researcher in a developing country, paying fees to access multiple international journals for access to research papers is an issue.
The final 10-page summary document, which was agreed on 20 November, says that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels requires “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” by 2030.
The pace of decarbonization was hard to find as calls to phase out fossil fuels were blocked by oil- producing states. Many blamed the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the lack of progress on fossil fuels.
A record number of people are expected to attend COP 27, leading some to question whether the format is appropriate for tackling a planetary emergency. “The negotiations that are happening are completely devoid of reality,” says Sunita Narain, director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment, an environment research organization in New Delhi.
She is concerned the core purpose of the meeting has been lost and that the meeting is no longer about pushing world leaders for stronger action and hold them accountable. “I have never seen anything like this. She says that they have reduced the whole thing to a spectacle.
For the first time, activists and researchers went to the talks for the first time and described disbelief as government negotiators constantly went back and forth over single words in the document.
If governments want its advice they must make a formal request. That request is now overdue. In an interview with NATURE, the co-founder of Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy said that it was hard to understand how negotiations over the text lasted so long and how little evidence they had before making their decisions. Research must start getting match fit now, before the next round in Dubai.
Representatives from LMICs and China were quietly confident that COP27 would lead to the creation of a new ’loss and damage’’ climate fund when this was added to the agenda at the start of the conference.
The amount of money for food systems from governments was very little. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, said they would spend more than a billion dollars to help farmers in developing countries address the effects of climate change. “Every moment the world delays action, more people suffer, and the solutions become more complex and costly,” the foundation’s chief executive Mark Suzman said in a statement.
The European Union was also sceptical initially, but eventually changed its position, which put pressure on the United States to follow. The fine print — including how much will go into the fund and who will contribute — will have to be discussed at next year’s conference.
The final document supports reform of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in a first for a climate COP. The IMF has $1 trillion available to lend to countries in financial distress, but only a small fraction of this is for climate finance. Sarah Colenbrander, who studies climate finance at the Overseas Development Institute, says this endorsement of reform is significant. That’s because it comes from countries that are also shareholders in these institutions, and can make change happen.
The European push for natural gas was a major topic of debate at the conference, despite the fact that negotiations received a boost from the G20 summit in Indonesia where wealthy countries pledged to help Indonesia wean itself off coal.
Germany has signed a deal with Egypt to make green hydrogen and exports of liquified natural gas as well as other projects in that country.
Narain says that European leaders like to say that these are short-term fixes that won’t detract from their long-term commitments. She says the high-income countries used to say nobody was going to fund fossil-fuel projects in low-income countries. “But now everybody is asking us to increase supply.”
The negotiations at COP 27 were affected by the tensions. Language calling to phase out of fossil fuels was jettisoned from the final text, while new wording was added proposing accelerated development of ’low-emission’ energy systems, which many fear will be used to justify further natural-gas development.
Mohamed Salem Nashwan, who studies construction engineering at the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Cairo, is not confident that there will be much progress on fossil fuels at COP28, which is due to be held in Dubai next year. He says the host is linked to the fossil-fuel industries.
Climate finance and land-use: a new perspective on the food crisis and the impact on low and middle-income countries and the Middle-East
The new additions are good, but the text on the food crisis isn’t supported by actions that need to be taken, according to the executive director of the global network of agricultural research centres.
The text does not mention the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s estimate that between 21% and 37% of global emissions are from food systems. Von Braun says that opportunities for carbon farming and land-use change are ignored.
Arguments over money resurface at every COP. Doubtless they will return at COP28, which is due to be held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in a year’s time. The countries that will benefit from the loss-and-damage fund have not yet been decided.
A novelty of the approach is that researchers who are employed by participating governments are part of the review teams. Scientists representing governments sign off the ‘summary for policy-makers’, which synthesizes the research into a booklet using language that can be understood by non-experts.
Money that is pledged or promised for investment in flood defences or wind energy are counted by donor countries. But low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) would prefer to count only money that has actually been received by projects on the ground, often a much smaller amount. Loans account for the lion’s share of climate finance, but LMICs prefer to count only grants and other funds that aren’t repayment related. There is a question of scope. Some would like to count the whole development as climate finance when it is fitted with a cool roof, while others would only consider the roof part.
What Did I Learn When I Was Born on December 15, 2010? Overpopulation of the Planet and the Implications for Human Lives and Climate Change
On November 15, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born. Well, more or less. The United Nations demographers chose that date as the moment when the world crossed its latest population milestone. There are more humans alive today than there were 11 years ago and the exact date is probably incorrect.
I hadn’t been paying attention to the Day of 8 Billion. The world has changed since there were just 7 billion of us, so it’s important to remember a few big numbers, but not to forget about other trends. There are two examples. Over the last 10 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has declined. (In 2010, 16.3 percent of the world lived on less than $2.15 a day, while today only 9 percent of people live on such a paltry amount.) And in India and China—which contributed the most new births in the past decade—GDP per capita and life expectancy have risen even while populations boomed. People are living better lives than at any other time in human history.
We need to tread carefully when we talk about population and climate change. It’s easy to conclude that there are too many people on the planet after looking at a world of 8 billion. But who do we really mean when we talk about overpopulation? Someone living in the United States is responsible for about 15 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. But in the eight countries where the majority of population growth by the year 2050 will be concentrated, per capita emissions are just a fraction of US levels. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is projected to grow by more than 120 million in the next 20 years, each person produces just 30 kilograms of CO2 each year. Emissions are a consequence of consumption, not just population.
The world’s wealthiest people are some of the biggest contributors to climate change. The top 1 percent in the world have seen their emissions rise by more than 100 percent due to the fall in middle class emissions in rich countries. The University of Bath psychologist says rich people with large families do not have the ability to support more rich people on the planet. Reducing consumption in the developed world is the best way to reduce emissions.
Four and a half years ago, she began “striking” outside of Swedish parliament — a single teenager with a single sign. She was 15. She spoke at the United Nations climate conference in Poland and told the assembled diplomats and Negotiators that they are not mature enough to tell it like it is.
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBS) is a similar network of researchers that is less well-known. The studies established in 2012 helped to underpin the Kunming–Montreal Global biodiversity framework which aims to stem our destruction of nature. There is no advisory research body of a similar scale or impact for other great global challenges, like inequality, water or food security. And this is not for want of trying. So why has the model proved so difficult to replicate?
Scientists who worked for governments were involved in climate science and were able to help form the world’s leading scientific research group. These were the workers of the official weather-data centres. They were among the first researchers to have access to the kind of computing power needed for climate simulation studies — which governments tended to have. This meant that they could be included on assessment teams working with researchers at universities.
Many of these government scientists have strong links to departments for defence and, through that, they had access to some of the most senior people in government. In the United Kingdom, the first assessment report of the Ipca was presented to the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Some scientific networks do not have the same level of access. Even if they did, such involvement would be more complicated to navigate now than in the 1980s. Government representatives from oil-rich states interfered in the scientists’ discussions at the beginning of the 19th century as the IPCC meetings became more politicized.
The report notes there is a rapidly closing window to secure a sustainable future. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
Those choices include straightforward, immediate solutions such as quickly adopting renewable sources of electricity and clamping down on new oil and gas extraction. They are also more aspirational ones, such as investing in research that could one day allow technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
The Rise and Fall of Human Mortality in Highly Vulnerable Neighborhoods: The Hsiang-Chebyshev Report
The hope is that the new report will serve as a shared scientific foundation for those negotiations, as well as a menu of solutions available to world leaders.
“When we talk about climate change it’s often really easy to focus on the bad outcomes, the things that are really scary,” says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who has worked with the IPCC.
For example, investing in low-carbon public transit, designing communities to support walking or biking, building homes and other buildings to be resilient and building cleaner power plants can reduce air pollution and save lives in low-lying and low-income neighborhoods that are currently suffering disproportionate damage, the report notes.
The authors write that between 2010 and 2020 there was a 15-fold higher rate of human mortality from floods, droughts and storms in highly vulnerable regions.
The most vulnerable communities are those who live in low-income countries and are prone to flooding, according to the report.
