Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

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Joe Biden made the commitment as he hosted a virtual meeting of world leaders on Thursday to spur high-level leadership to limit global warming to 1.5C.

This is the first time since 2017 the US has pledged cash to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which supports developing countries to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

The move was part of a broad call to action to the Major Economies Forum on energy and climate, a group of more than 20 high-emitting developed and developing countries which account for around 80% of global greenhouse gases.

US brings cash

Biden promised to ask Congress to approve an additional $500m over five years for the Amazon Fund to end deforestation by 2030.

He pledged to raise $200m from public, private and philanthropy sources for cutting methane emissions in developing countries and urged nations to scale up carbon capture and removal technologies.

The US president called on leaders to join a collective pledge for half of all car sales and at least 30% of medium and heavy-duty vehicles to be zero emissions by 2030.

UN’s Green Climate Fund too scared of risk, finds official review

“It’s a really big deal,” Joe Thwaites, a climate finance campaigner at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Climate Home News of Biden’s pledge to the GCF.

“Over the last few years, the fund has been right up against the limits of its resources. It has been approving money to projects as soon as it is receiving it from donors and has had to hold back projects because of a lack of money,” Thwaites explained.

“This $1bn is significant because it will allow the GCF to unlock more money for communities in need,” he added.

The move, he said, will boost US credibility at the fund, after its ability to provide climate finance had been put into doubt.

As I address the Major Economies Forum on our climate challenges, let me make a few things clear:

We are committed to following the science.
We are determined to strengthen our actions.
We will do what it takes to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

— President Biden (@POTUS) April 20, 2023

Climate finance laggard

However, as the GCF is calling on countries for a third round of funding pledges to replenish the fund, the US is yet to deliver on its first commitment.

The $1bn announcement only accounts for half of the $2bn the US owes the fund after Donald Trump reneged on a $3bn pledge made under Barack Obama almost a decade ago. Since then, European and other donors have doubled their pledges to the fund.

“The question is: can the US clear another billion dollars and finally deliver on the pledge?” Thwaites said. Other donor countries will closely watch what the US will bring to a GCF pledging conference in October, he added.

Keeping 1.5C within reach

The leaders’ meeting was framed by the findings of a report by the International Energy Agency which outlined steps to take to keep the 1.5C goal within reach.

It highlights four key pillars: decarbonising the energy sector, ending deforestation, tackling non-CO2 emissions such as methane, and accelerating the deployment of carbon capture and storage and removal technologies.

UN: World set to blow through 1.5C carbon budget in 10 years

Alden Meyer, senior associate at think tank E3G, told Climate Home that the US was seeking to create more coalitions of the willing to advance action in key sectors – a model which has proved successful in galvanising support to cut methane emissions under the Methane Pledge.

“There are some good pieces,” said Meyer, “but it’s not comprehensive,” citing the lack of initiatives to decarbonise the energy sector.

That’s a gap the EU intends to fill. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed to launch an initiative for setting global targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy by Cop28. “These targets would complement other goals,” she said.

Betting on carbon capture

Biden called on countries to speed up the deployment of carbon capture and removal technologies by joining the ‘Carbon Management Challenge’.

This includes capturing carbon from specific polluting plants or directly from the atmosphere and storing it in geological formations, in the oceans or in products.

The White House said the initiative will develop a suite of announcements and goals that will be unveiled at Cop28.

US bets big on carbon-sucking machines

Meyer said US officials are considering setting a collective target for the amount of carbon being stored annually. The EU Commission has already proposed a binding target for the union to store 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030.

Scientists say carbon capture and removal technologies are needed to limit global warming to 1.5C by counter-balancing residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors. How much of it is needed depends on how quickly countries reduce emissions and reach net zero.

The IEA estimates that projects are needed to capture around 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to meet global climate goals – a 30 fold increase on 2021 levels.

However, such technologies remain underdeveloped and face technological, economic and environmental barriers. There’s also uncertainty on the risks of deploying carbon dioxide removal at large scale.

Saudi Arabia, Russia push for more World Bank money into carbon capture

Campaigners have warned that focusing on techno-fixes risks distracting from pressing carbon-cutting action and impede the transition to clean energy sources.

Steven Feit, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home it was “very concerning” that carbon capture was increasingly being used “to justify the construction and expansion of the fossil economy” ahead of Cop28 hosted by oil and gas producer UAE.

Feit cited a major scientific report showing that carbon capture was one of the most expensive technologies with little mitigation potential.

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Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.

Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by think-tank IISD.

Africa and small island developing states (Sids) were nearly cut out of one section on vulnerabilities, the IISD report says, and replaced by a reference to “developing and least developed countries”.

UN tells governments to ‘fast forward’ net zero targets

But there was a strong push from many delegates to retain them, particularly as most of those regions’ representatives had already left the talks to approve the report, as they had to catch flights home from Switzerland.

Mexico and Chile wanted to add Latin America to the list of regions that are particularly vulnerable while India wanted Asia included, according to IISD’s report.

The final document lists Africa, Sids, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

The benefits of vulnerability

What makes some communities more vulnerable than others is not just physical factors like sea level rise but also social factors like poverty, governance, building standards and infrastructure.

This makes naming specific parts of the world as vulnerable a politically sensitive topic.

The inclusion of the Arctic as one of the most climate vulnerable places in the world, for example, was significant because it came just days after the US approved the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope.

There are various reasons for wanting to be named as vulnerable, including global recognition and better access to climate finance.

Last year’s Cop27 climate talks agreed that a new fund for climate victims should be targeted at countries who are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

Loss and damage committee ready to start talks following Asian nominations

Samoan ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru, who chairs the alliance of small island states (Aosis), said making specific note of the risks to these islands was “imperative in the context of climate justice”.

“The fact is that we are already facing devastating losses and damages of great magnitude, and funds we should be investing into sustainable development initiatives must be diverted to help us cope with climate change impacts,” he said.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

But recognising growing impacts also gives states the responsibility of acting on them.

Jörn Birkmann researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was coordinating lead author of one of the underlying IPCC reports.

He told Climate Home: “It seems like governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they could receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds),”

He added: “Or vice versa; if they are mentioned it might lead to a stigmatisation or might raise questions about the role of governance.”

Measuring vulnerability

Birkmann said studies on human vulnerability all point to the same global hotspots, particularly Africa.

But even though many governments acknowledge this, there are significant tensions when measuring and mapping human vulnerability.

“It is still difficult in [a summary for policymakers report] to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others,” he said.

“The synthesis report is mentioning some regions, but it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on general sentences, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident.”

Green Climate Fund credibility hangs over response to violence in Nicaragua project

Although it misses a lot of nuance about who is vulnerable, Birkmann welcomes the fact that the report recognises global hotspots, “since the success of adaptation and resilience building also depends on the starting point communities and countries have”.

He believes adaptation strategies should not just focus on physical phenomena and climatic hazards such as storms, but also on structures and interventions that reduce human vulnerability, such as poverty reduction, education or fighting corruption – the latter being “a very controversial topic in the political arena”.

Furthermore, when new financial mechanisms for loss and damage agreed at Cop27 are being put into practice, he said it would be helpful to define adaptation goals, not just those on emission reduction.

“These goals should also take into account the very different starting points of regions/countries/communities to build resilience,” he said.” The level of human vulnerability might be such a benchmark of the different starting points.”

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Concerns were raised because Beijing rapidly accelerated plans for new coal power plants in the second half of last year in a bid to increase its energy security.

According to a report by think-tank E3G, published today, China’s coal project pipeline grew by nearly 50% in the last six months of 2022 taking the total to 250GW. It says developments in China diverge sharply from the rest of the world, where combined coal power plans shrank to 97GW over the same period – the lowest level in modern history.

China is still a global leader in the rollout of renewable energy. The country is adding clean energy projects to the grid almost as fast as the rest of the world combined.

But Leo Roberts from E3G’s coal transition programme believes China’s coal expansion is a “direct threat” to the Paris Agreement goal.

Increasing scale of the challenge

In 2015, nations agreed to pursue efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Crossing that threshold would make climate impacts increasingly harmful to people and the entire planet.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says no new unabated coal-fired power stations can be built if the world wants to reach that goal.

“Every new coal power station that comes online increases the scale of the challenge to decarbonise the global economy,” Roberts told Climate Home News. “China’s coal boom is actually undermining significant progress away from coal in all other parts of the world.”

The rapid expansion of China’s coal power plans comes as Beijing seeks to strengthen its energy security. Geopolitical tensions affecting global energy prices and domestic supply issues have made policymakers reconsider previous intentions.

After blackouts, China’s green goals take back seat to energy security

At a climate summit in April 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping vowed the country would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects, and strictly limit the increase in coal consumption”.

At the time his words mirrored the central government’s successful attempts to curb new coal projects. E3G analysis shows that new coal power proposals in China collapsed by 75% between 2015 and July 2022.

China’s rapid U-turn

The recent coal boom has reversed this trend and China is now a clear international outlier. It currently accounts for 72% of total global planned coal capacity, with India, Turkey and Indonesia following far behind.

The aim of China’s coal push is to prevent a repeat of the power outages that affected homes and industries last year. Heatwaves increased electricity demand for cooling, while drying up water reservoirs necessary for hydropower generation in the country’s southwestern provinces.

Meteorological agencies predict another round of record high temperatures and more droughts this year.

Preventing power outages

Many of the new coal-fired power plants are expected to meet peak summer demand driven by energy-hungry air conditioners, which last year resulted in the highest recorded momentary load.

Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), says solar energy is able to tackle daytime power needs, but meeting night-time peak demand requires a more nuanced approach.

Still, he believes betting on coal is a suboptimal and costly strategy. “Building coal power capacity to cover peak demand just some days or weeks per year is very expensive. There is still a lot of potential to deal with peak loads with better grid management."

E3G’s Roberts said it looks as if the Chinese government’s claim that it is new building coal capacity to support peak demand is being used as a cover to push through projects. “The reality is that most of the permits handed to new coal power stations would allow them to provide baseload power, which slows down the transition from coal-to-clean."

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As oil and gas companies rake in record profits, a team from Oxford University in the UK is making the case governments should force them to capture and store a share of the emissions from burning their products.

Myles Allen, director of the Oxford Net Zero initiative, has been developing the Carbon Takeback Obligation (CBTO) proposal for a number of years. He argues this will “decarbonise” fossil fuels, accelerate their phase out and develop the capture and removal technologies scientists say are needed to limit global warming to 1.5C.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine wreaks havoc with energy markets, his team is trying to get the idea off academic shelves and into policymakers’ hands. Their aim is to build a club of producer nations to take this forward by next year’s Cop28 climate talks in the United Arab Emirates, at the heart of the world’s top oil producing region.

Critics argue the plan gives companies a licence to keep extracting more climate-harming coal, oil and gas, when the focus should be investment in alternatives.

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The proposal is based on the principle of producer responsibility, which requires companies to account for the environmental costs of a product throughout its life cycle.

In practice, this would mean that for every tonne of carbon generated by the continued use of fossil fuels, a tonne of CO2 is permanently stored in geological formation.

Yet, the technology remains expensive and unproven at large scale despite the fossil fuel industry’s repeated claims it has the expertise necessary to make it happen.

Calling the industry’s bluff

“It’s a giant bluff call,” Allen told Climate Home News. “The industry says it can do it. So fine, do it.”

Under the proposal, oil and gas companies and their supply chain would be asked to provide certificates proving that carbon has been permanently stored either by carbon capture and storage at refineries or cement plants, for example, or through direct air capture. These certificates could be traded.

The obligation could start at 5% of a polluter’s emissions, rising to 10% by 2030 and eventually reaching 100% in line with net zero targets.

Ingrid Udd Sundvor, a researcher at Oxford University working with Allen, said the policy was “ambitious” because it confronts producer countries with the impacts of burning the oil and gas they export. This, she added, could complement other supply-side measures to restrict fossil fuel production.

Comment: Corporate pushback against climate action is getting desperate

Despite soaring energy prices, advocates say the obligation would be initially cheaper than a carbon tax, even if the price increase was passed on to consumers.

That’s because the initial costs would be spread across all fossil fuels being sold. Last year, the research team estimated that an obligation to sequester 10% of emissions would add just £0.7-1.8 ($0.8-2.0 at today’s exchange rate) to a barrel of oil. Over time, investments would bring down the costs of emissions capture and storage.

Eventually, the cost of compensating for every tonne of emissions generated from burning fossil fuels would make the industry unprofitable, Sundvor said, leading to its phase out.

First-mover club

The proposal was briefly included as an amendment to the UK’s 2015 energy bill, before being scrapped.

Now there is fresh momentum behind the idea. Allen’s team is aiming to build a club of first-mover producing countries that could implement the proposal together. It is engaging with the industry and civil society groups to find out what it would take.

The Dutch government is the most actively engaged to date. The ministry of economic affairs and climate policy co-financed a feasibility report to understand “possible application as part of a transition plan for the Dutch oil and gas sector”. A spokesperson told Climate Home the cabinet is reviewing it and will soon inform parliament about possible next steps.

In the US and Canada, Producer Accountability for Carbon Emissions (Pace), a group co-founded by former ExxonMobil employees, is advocating for the policy.

The UK and Norway are also on the target list. The idea is one option proposed by the UK government for accelerating investments in carbon removals. However, consultation documents argue the policy would be difficult to implement in the short term because of a lack of supply of negative emissions certificates.

Hurricane Ian could cost US $67bn in economic damages

Allen acknowledges that many green groups are sceptical. “It sounds like putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” he said.

But he argues there is a rationale for prolonging the fossil fuel industry’s life: “If they still exist, they can pay for the clean-up” and for the carbon removal technologies the world needs.

In fact, Allen suggests that fossil fuels should be used in the second half of the century to suck carbon out of the air with direct air capture – an energy intensive process.

‘Get-out-of-jail-free card’

Climate campaigners agree the fossil fuel industry should bear the responsibility of the climate harm their products cause. But most don’t believe it is part of the solution to the climate crisis, which it caused.

Tessa Khan, founder and executive director of Uplift, which campaigns to transition to a fossil-free UK, told Climate Home it risks “handing the industry a get-out-of-jail-free card for further extraction”.

It “would be dangerous if seen as an alternative to a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, including scaling up of clean alternatives,” she said, adding that it failed to address the environmental consequences and health and social of fossil fuel extraction on local communities.

Lili Fuhr, deputy director of the climate and energy programme at the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home the idea was “crazy” and would only increase “the scale and power” of the industry that caused the problem.

Carbon capture and storage, she said, is “the big escape hatch” pitched by the industry to continue to pollute. Instead, she added, the future should be built around renewables.

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The Climate Overshoot Commission launched on Tuesday with a majority of members from developing countries.

It will address sensitive questions around the ethics and feasibility of ways to reverse warming. These include large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and geoengineering technologies that could cool the planet by reflecting sunlight for example.

In a press release, the commission said that research indicates that “if these options supplemented emissions cuts and were governed well, they could help ward off harms to people and the planet”.

Commissioners will also consider the extensive adaptations needed to protect the vulnerable in a hotter world.

“All of us would prefer not to confront the consequences of insufficient action. To be clear, the primary strategy is and should remain the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” said the group’s chair Pascal Lamy, president of the Paris Peace Forum and former director general of the World Trade Organization.

“But we also have an overriding responsibility to be prepared, in case we do not succeed. That means considering and anticipating all potential responses that could minimise the damage and suffering, especially of the most vulnerable.”

The chances of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C and "well below 2C" are slipping away without deep and rapid emissions cuts this decade.

At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that a temporary overshoot of climate goals is dangerous for human societies and ecosystems.

"Countries’ pledges to date only put us on track for 2.7C warming by end of this century. It is high time to brace ourselves for this worst eventuality," said commission member Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's minister of state for foreign affairs.

The commission said it will focus on ways to minimise climate risks from overheating that are evidence-based, resilient, just and equitable. It will consult a wide range of stakeholders, including civil society and youth groups with the assistance of scientific advisors.

The group is expected to present its first strategy on additional options to prevent catastrophic climate change and how to govern them ahead of the Cop28 climate talks in 2023.

The commission will initially be hosted by the Paris Peace Forum and is supported by Open Philanthropy, The Rockefeller Foundation, Cohler Charitable Fund, and LAD Climate Fund.

It will hold its first meeting in early June at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.

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Yet there has been little discussion at an international level on how to handle “overshoot” of those goals. A high-powered commission due to launch in May aims to break the silence.

Climate diplomats are finalising a 15-strong lineup of former presidents, ministers and representatives of international organisations to explore options for deep adaptation, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and geoengineering, Climate Home News can reveal.

The Climate Overshoot Commission will address sensitive questions around the ethics and feasibility of potential ways to reverse warming that are problematic or unproven at large scale.

“The primary strategy to combat climate change should remain reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also become necessary to explore additional strategies,” Jesse Reynolds, executive secretary of the commission, told Climate Home.

France’s Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organisation between 2005 and 2013, has been appointed as chair. He is president of the Paris Peace Forum, which will host the commission.

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The idea for a commission to assess climate engineering options was floated in 2017 by Edward Parson, professor of environmental law at the University of California.

Parson became one of 11 on a steering committee of politicians, policymakers and academics to shape what the commission should look like. Among them, five were from developing countries, including Cop27 host Egypt’s environment minister Yasmine Fouad, former Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine and Youba Sokona, vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Paris Agreement architect Laurence Tubiana and Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative, were other members.

“How will the world manage the risk of temperature overshoot? That is the question that nobody is talking about,” Pasztor told Climate Home. “There isn’t enough attention paid to the magnitude of the risk for removing the huge amount of carbon dioxide that will keep us to 1.5C.”

With the latest science showing overshoot of 1.5C, if not 2C, is highly likely, the moment for that conversation may have arrived.

Pakistan’s tree-planting ambition in doubt after Imran Khan’s exit

A paper published in Nature last week gives a 6-10% probability of reaching without exceeding the 1.5C threshold, even assuming all climate commitments to 2030 and mid-century are met.

In theory, global temperatures can be pulled back by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through biological solutions such as reforestation and technological ones like direct air capture. But tree planting competes with food production for land and carbon capture technology is energy-hungry and expensive.

The latest report from the IPCC concluded sucking carbon dioxide from the air is “necessary” to achieve net zero emissions and “an essential element” to limit heating below 2C by the end of the century.

While no substitute for deep and urgent emissions cuts, carbon dioxide removals are needed to counterbalance residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, agriculture and some industrial processes.

Five billion tonnes of CO2 would need to be removed each year by 2050 for a 66% chance to limit warming below 2C, under one IPCC scenario, scaling up to 13bn by the end of the century. Any delay to cutting emissions will further increase reliance on removals to stabilise the climate.

A temporary overshoot of climate goals is dangerous for human societies and ecosystems. “Many human and natural systems will face additional severe risks, compared to remaining below 1.5C,” the IPCC’s impact report warned. Some impacts, such as ice sheet and glacier melt and sea level rise, “will be irreversible”.

Brazil accused of backsliding in updated climate pledge to UN

Despite the presence of CDR in all IPCC scenarios, efforts to scale up the technology are barely getting started.

An initiative co-led by the US, Canada and Saudi Arabia aims to enable a net reduction of 100 million metric tons of CO2 per year globally by 2030. And there are some efforts to support research in the US and in the UK, and develop methodologies to include removals in carbon accounting in the EU.

Silicon Valley is getting in on the act. Earlier this month, online payment processing platform Stripe launched a $925m fund to buy offsets from start-ups that permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2030.

The Frontier fund is financed by Stripe together with Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey. It aims to send a signal to researchers and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, Stripe’s climate research lead, told Climate Home that understanding what removal technologies could work at scale and driving their cost down was necessary if they are to be used in decades to come.

Elsewhere, Venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital launched a $350m fund in invest in carbon removal start-ups and Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks raised $650m from institutional investors earlier this month.

“But the private sector can only push things so far,” said Hausfather, suggesting governments help fund research and development of CDR approaches.

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The issue has been largely ignored at UN Climate Change talks.

For Oliver Geden, a lead author of the IPCC report on mitigation and senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, that’s unlikely to change “until there is an acceptance that overshooting 1.5C is unavoidable”.

While “not a magic bullet,” Geden said countries have already said yes to CDR by adopting net zero emissions targets – the “net” being achieved by balancing sources and sinks of emissions.

“I’m of that bottom-up view that countries have a net zero target should and can explore CDR,” he told Climate Home. The alternative top-down approach of sharing out between nations the delivery of removals needed to meet global climate goals brings about considerations of equity and historic responsibility that many wealthy economies are seeking to avoid.

That conversation is uncomfortable for many climate campaigners, who are concerned that a focus on removals is at best a distraction from the need to phase out fossil fuels and roll out clean energy – and at worse a fig leaf for climate inaction.

“We urgently need the weight of global financing to invest in a radical overhaul of our polluting energy, food and industrial systems. But tech bros prefer to throw good money after bad into the carbon removal pipedream, letting polluters continue business-as-usual while appearing green,” Teresa Anderson, climate justice lead at Action Aid International, told Climate Home.

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For MJ Mace, a climate negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, there is “a real fear that the pressure comes off emissions reductions” if the issue of removals is pushed too forcefully in the public consciousness.

And yet, if emissions cuts are still lagging behind targets at the end of this decade, “we are going to end up having to rely on CDR on such a huge scale to meet these goals that we are not going to be able to pull it off” unless investment and planning start now, she said. “It’s such a dance.”

If removing carbon from the atmosphere is a sensitive subject, solar radiation management, or geoengineering, is even more so. Still largely in the realm of science fiction, the potential to block the sun’s warming effect by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere is part of the commission’s mandate.

Pasztor said solar geoengineering is “unbelievably controversial” but leaders have to consider what risks they are willing to take to meet the 1.5C goal.

The Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative, which he heads, is hoping to push a resolution on addressing the risks of overshoot at the UN general assembly by 2023.

The post As 1.5C overshoot looms, a high-level commission will ask: what next? appeared first on Climate Home News.

This is the last of three instalments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report. Together, they provide a complete picture of the causes, consequences and solutions to human-induced climate change. The previous two reports focused on the physical science of climate change and societies and ecosystems’ capacities to adapt and their limits.

This latest report provides a roadmap for how to rapidly reduce emissions in the next three decades under scenarios that put the world on track to limit global heating to below 2C and 1.5C – the Paris Agreement goals.

Here are the key takeaways.

1. We are set to overshoot 1.5C

Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in the last decade, albeit at a slower rate than the previous one. That means that the likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5C has declined on average compared to scenarios previously identified by the IPCC.

The world has used more than four fifths of the total carbon budget for a 50/50 chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C.

Without immediate action to cut emissions, that chance is slipping away. Global greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak before 2025 and that is not happening. Based on national climate plans announced prior to the Cop26 summit in November 2021, emission projections for 2030 “make it likely that warming will exceed 1.5C during the 21st century”.

Global temperatures could be reined back by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through biological solutions such as reforestation and technological ones like direct air capture. But many of these techniques are unproven or problematic at large scale.

Limiting warming below 2C would then rely on “a rapid acceleration of mitigation efforts after 2030”.

Since Cop26, a number of countries have come up with 2030 carbon-cutting plans, but these haven’t significantly changed the global picture. Commitments made by China, Japan and South Korea, announced prior to Cop26, are included in the tally.

“The conclusion remains clear that all [2030 climate plans] together by no means are sufficient for 1.5C and also not for 2C,” Niklas Höhne, of the New Climate Institute, told Climate Home. “ This is why Cop26’s call for countries to update their climate plans in 2022 is so important.”

2. Coal, oil and gas infrastructure has to go

The Afsin-Elbistan lignite-fired power station in Turkey (Photo: Umut Vedat / Greenpeace)

Leaving coal, oil and gas in the ground is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

By 2019, carbon emissions from fossil fuels and the industry sector were responsible for the largest growth in emissions and 64% of all anthropogenic emissions.

Cutting emissions from the energy sector requires “major transitions” away from the current system, including “a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use”.

Existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure will emit enough over its lifetime to blow past 1.5C warming and push temperature rise to 2C. Replacing fossil fuels with very low or zero-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power is one of the biggest ways to prevent further warming.

For 1.5C, the use of coal must be virtually eliminated by 2050. Unabated oil consumption falls 60% and gas by 70% compared with 2019. Even with carbon capture and storage, oil and gas consumption is projected to decline 60% and 45% respectively by 2050.

Meanwhile, the expansion of unabated coal, oil and gas must stop. “The continued installation of unabated fossil fuel infrastructure will ‘lock-in’ greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states, making it more difficult to reach global climate goals.

Conversely, in a scenario where warming is held to 2C, $1-4 trillion will be wiped off the value of fossil fuel reserves and associated assets by 2050. Depending on its availability, carbon capture and storage “could allow fossil fuels to be used longer” and reduce stranded assets.

Options to wind down the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure and align the power sector with limiting warming below 2C include decommissioning, retrofitting plants with carbon capture and storage and cancelling new unabated coal installations. Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies could reduce emissions by up to 10% by 2030.

3. Solutions are getting cheaper

Carbon-cutting and low-emissions technologies are becoming cheaper. The cost of solar, wind power and lithium battery technologies have fallen significantly since 2010.

In fact, the economic benefit of limiting warming to below 2C is higher than the cost of action.

Mitigation options costing $100 or less for a tonne of CO2 could reduce emissions by at least half between 2019-2030. These include rolling out solar and wind energy, energy efficiency improvements, reducing deforestation, sequestering carbon in soil and cutting methane emissions.

Half of that potential could be achieved with measures costing less than $20 for every tonne of CO2 cut. These include fitting buildings with efficient appliances, improving energy efficiency in shipping and aviation, shifting to electric vehicles and promoting public transport and cycling.

Some of these measures have economic benefits that outweigh their costs, such as promoting wellbeing and improving living standards.

Options like carbon carbon capture and storage and some forms of ecosystem restoration remain expensive.

The take-up of low emissions technologies is uneven across the world and lags in most developing countries, particularly the poorest.

4. Carbon dioxide removal is ‘unavoidable’

CO2 captured from an incineration plant in Switzerland is being used to boost the production of vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers (Photo: Matjaz Krivic / Climate Visuals Countdown)

To achieve net zero emissions, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is “unavoidable”. Removals are needed to counterbalance residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, agriculture and some industrial processes.

Carbon capture and storage technology is needed for the industrial sector to reach net zero CO2 emissions. If done right, this could store carbon dioxide permanently in geological formation. But the technology remains underdeveloped and is facing technological, economic and environmental barriers.

And there are risks and uncertainty associated with deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at large scale. A rapid and deep decline of emissions over the next two decades will help reduce the likelihood of overshooting warming limits and the need for removals.

Reforestation, improving forest management and soil carbon sequestration are the only widely deployed CDR methods. But carbon stored that way is vulnerable to being released by human interventions, such as trees being cut down, and natural disturbances such as fires, which can be exacerbated by climate change.

If sustainably managed, forestry and the restoration and protection of ecosystems can deliver large-scale emission reductions as well as co-benefits for biodiversity, food and water security and livelihoods. But competition for land also creates trade-offs which increase with the scale and pace of deployment. These can be avoided through national policies.

To be consistent with limiting warming to below 2C, forest-related mitigation requires annual investments of $400bn a year by 2050.

Carbon dioxide stored underground or removed from the oceans by geochemical processes to reduce acidity is less likely to be released back into the atmosphere, but comes with other risks. The impacts of ocean-based CDR on ecosystems and biodiversity are not well understood.

5. Lifestyle change is part of the solution 

An e-waste recycling and dismantling facility in Rwanda (Photo: Rwands Green Fund/Flickr)

One cost-effective way of reducing emissions is to reduce energy demand. Strategies to do so across all sectors by 2050 could cut emissions 40-70% compared with projections based on current policies.

For policymakers, that means finding new ways to provide citizens with basic services like transport, homes and jobs. These measures can help improve wellbeing and living standards.

For example, investments in public transport, changes in pricing and spatial planning that provide services closer to people’s homes could reduce travel demand in developed countries and slow growth in developing ones.

In the industrial sector that means adopting processes that use low or zero-emission electricity and fuels, preventing waste and establishing systems for recycling, repurposing and reusing materials such as metal, plastic and glass.

Behaviour and lifestyle changes can reduce global emissions of end-use sectors by at least 5% “rapidly” with policy support and enable deeper cuts if supported by improved infrastructure design, particularly in wealthy nations. These include shifting to healthy diets based on plants, reducing food waste and overconsumption, supporting longer-lived and repairable products, turning the heating down, teleworking and car sharing.

The post Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s official climate advisory body, said that the UK’s 2030 carbon-cutting goal is already in line with the Paris Agreement.

In a 33-page assessment of what the UK should do at home and internationally to deliver on Cop26 promises, it said that the government should instead focus on delivering on its commitments and “reinvigorate” its diplomatic efforts to support other countries in raising ambition.

The Glasgow deal “requests” countries to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 targets to align with the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global heating well below 2C and pursuing efforts to 1.5C by the end of 2022 in a bid to put the world on track to meeting the goals this decade.

But the UK’s efforts should be focused on delivering its net zero strategy rather than “inflating the gap between ambition and implementation,” the CCC found.

Commenting on the findings on Twitter, the committee’s CEO Christ Stark said some have called for the UK to put forward a tougher 2030 NDC.

“In our view the UK already has one of the most ambitious 2030 emissions targets in the world, designed on a 1.5C pathway. What the UK *doesn’t* have is all the steps in place to deliver it,” he said.

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Climate Action Tracker judges the UK’s domestic carbon-cutting target to be in line with a lowest-cost global 1.5C pathway, but agrees that its policies and actions fall short.

Under an alternative model that gives more weight to historic responsibility for causing the climate crisis, CAT finds the UK’s plan is “insufficient” with “inadequate” climate finance provision to the developing world.

Earlier this year, the CCC warned the UK was not on track to net zero and that it needed to “get real on delivery”.

In its post-Cop26 report, it said it was “important for the UK to demonstrate its support for more global action to 2030 by strengthening its policy to deliver its existing 2030 target”.

This could mean setting stronger adaptation commitments backed by quantitative targets, developing sectoral net zero plans and ruling out the use of international carbon offsets.

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Citing CAT analysis, the CCC singled out Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey as G20 countries with 2030 targets that are not aligned with the Paris goal. They are the ones that should come back with more in 2022, it said.

Australia and the EU have already said they won’t strengthen their targets next year.

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Internationally, the CCC urged the UK to continue to encourage ambitious action to rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions this decade and strengthen adaptation by using all its diplomatic channels.

“The UK must not walk away after Cop26,” said the committee’s chair Lord Deben. It recommends the government:

• Maintain a Cop team with high-level leadership throughout its presidency and “build on, rather than dissolve, its international climate diplomacy and activities”
• Explore diplomatic and trade levers, such as carbon border taxes, trade agreements and encourage stronger corporate action to decarbonise supply chains, to push others to step up their ambition
• Champion sectoral pledges on coal, methane and deforestation and clarify the governance and delivery mechanisms for each of these commitments
• Review its tax system and increase carbon prices to phase out fossil fuel subsidies
• Ensure donor countries deliver on their adaptation finance pledge and review its own contribution to ensure a 50/50 adaptation split
• Restore its aid spending to 0.7% of GNI “as soon as possible”.

UK lead climate negotiator Archie Young said the focus of the Cop26 presidency over the next year would be on implementation and helping others step up their ambition.

While Cop26 has laid out “ground for optimism… the proof will really be in whether parties and all actors across society step up to deliver,” he told Climate Home News in an interview.

“The important task for everybody is to look at what’s been agreed in the Glasgow climate pact: that people look at how they can strengthen all of their climate plans. That will look different in different places. But that has to be one of the focuses for the next year,” he said.

Part of the job will be transposing sectoral commitments made in Glasgow, on cars, coal, methane and ending deforestation, into national climate plans. “Hopefully that can then lead to enhanced ambition,” he said.

All of the UK’s diplomatic missions are engaged with this effort, Young said.

He added that the UK was “determined” to support Egypt as the incoming Cop27 presidency, including by “giving them the support and the space also to determine how they will take forward the negotiations for Cop27”.

The post UK needs to deliver on climate, not set higher 2030 target, say advisers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Delayed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, heads of state, diplomats, business leaders, campaigners and journalists are due to meet in person in Glasgow, UK, from 31 October to 12 November.

The hosts are aiming to mobilise a step up in climate action and keep hope alive of meeting the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement: limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C.

That means curbing emissions deeper and faster, adapting to a new era of climate impacts and scaling up the financial support developing nations need to build low-carbon and resilient economies.

Here is what you need to know about the conference.

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First things first. What is a Cop? 

“Cop” is short for Conference of the Parties, which refers to the meeting of the 197 members to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as UN Climate Change.

The talks are hosted every year by a different country and bring together delegates from every national government to advance global efforts to prevent dangerous climate change.

Cop1 was held in Berlin, Germany, in 1995. This year, the 26^th session of the talks is known as Cop26.

At the core of the Cop are negotiations on the legal mechanisms for governments to hold each other accountable. Orbiting that core are politicians, business leaders, campaigners and journalists, engaged in a lively discourse on what climate action means in the real world.

Who is in charge at Cop26?

The UK and Italy are joint presidents of Cop26. As host of the main event, the UK government has the bigger role, in coordination with the devolved administration in Scotland. Italy is due to hold some pre-Cop meetings in Milan.

Alok Sharma, a politician with the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, was appointed Cop26 president in February 2020. For nearly a year, Sharma also served as business and energy minister before dropping ministerial responsibilities to focus exclusively on Cop26 preparations.

UN Climate Change is responsible for keeping the climate negotiating process running year to year, led by Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa.

Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma of the UK meets China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in Tianjin, China (Photo: Alok Sharma/Twitter/Flickr)

How is ambition measured at Cop26? 

A key responsibility of the Cop26 presidency is to mobilise greater ambition from other nations. This is primarily measured against the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

In 2015, in Paris, 197 countries agreed to collectively cut emissions to limit global temperature rise “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C. To meet this goal, every country was asked to contribute emissions reductions and set out targets for doing so by 2025 or 2030. These plans are known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

This bottom-up approach means governments decide how fast to decarbonise their economies. But the plans submitted so far will lead to a lot more than 1.5C of warming by the end of the century – 2.4C if implemented in full, according to analysis published by Climate Action Tracker in May.

UN Climate Change found that updated plans by the end of 2020 put the world on track to stabilise emissions by 2030. To halt heating at 1.5C, scientists say global emissions need to fall 45% from 2010 levels in that time.

Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)

What needs to happen now? 

Under the Paris Agreement, every country agreed to update their NDCs every five years, with each plan more ambitious than the last and reflecting their “highest possible ambition”.

Cop26, which was due to take place in 2020, is the first test of this “ratchet mechanism”.

The US, Canada, the EU and the UK are among 110 countries, largely developing economies, to have formally submitted improved plans to the UN by the end of July. But many of the world’s largest emitters missed the repeatedly extended deadline. China, India and Saudi Arabia’s plans are notably absent from the list.

Others like Australia merely reaffirmed old targets with no increase in ambition. Brazil even weakened its commitment by changing its baseline.

Ahead of Cop26, the UK will need to use its diplomatic clout to get Beijing, New Delhi and others to commit to stronger targets.

What else are the organisers trying to achieve? 

UK prime minister Boris Johnson has summarised the host nation’s agenda for the conference as: “coal, cash, cars and trees”. Let’s unpack that.

Coal: The UK wants to make Cop26 the summit that “consigns coal to history”. The G7 agreed in May to end new direct government support for unabated coal power by the end of 2021 – but avoided setting an exit timeline for burning the fuel. Italy is trying to orchestrate a similar pledge from the G20, against resistance from members like China, Russia and India.

Cash: Developed countries agreed in 2009 to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020. At the last count, they were $20bn short. Germany and Canada have been tasked with making a plan to plug the gap ahead of Cop26. This is critical to trust in the process for recipient nations. Negotiations are due to start on what the next collective finance goal beyond 2025 should look like. Then there are various initiatives to “shift the trillions” of private sector cash towards achieving global net zero emissions by mid-century.

Cars: The UK is hoping to speed up a switch to electric vehicles, proposing a 2040 deadline for selling the last petrol cars. It established a Zero Emission Vehicle Transition Council bringing together ministers and representatives of major car markets – although China was not on the list.

Trees: “Calling time on deforestation” is another Cop26 goal. Together with the US and Norway, the UK launched the Leaf Coalition, which aims to mobilise $1 billion of public and private finance in 2021 to cut emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Did they miss anything?

That four-word soundbite does not cover everybody’s priorities. The world’s poorest countries, which don’t have too many cars or coal plants to worry about, want to see more action to address the impacts of climate change they are already experiencing.

The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation to climate impacts, but six years later it is still unclear what that means in practice. The agreement has a section on loss and damage, in recognition that people are already losing homes, lives and livelihoods to extreme weather turbocharged by the fossil fuel burning of the industrialised world, but practical support has been slow to follow.

With those climate vulnerabilities compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, the least developed countries are calling for a solidarity package that includes progress on these neglected topics.

It remains to be seen how progress on any of these elements will be packaged into a meeting outcome. Some climate thinkers are proposing a Glasgow PACT.

UN talks in Copenhagen in 2009 (Photo: UN Climate Change/Flickr)

What do negotiators need to agree on?

There are technical issues negotiators in Glasgow will need to address.

The Paris Agreement rulebook was due to be finalised three years ago at Cop24 in Katowice, Poland, but a number of contentious items remain unresolved.

These include the rules of a new global carbon market, under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. How to avoid double counting emissions reductions, the role of old credits from the Kyoto climate regime under the new system and whether to allocate a share of proceeds from the market to the Adaptation Fund are among the stickiest issues.

Negotiators will also need to find agreement on the transparency rules for reporting emissions reductions and whether countries’ future climate plans should all cover the same time period of 5 or 10 years.

A passenger has his temperature checked at Incheon airport, South Korea (Pic: Jens-Olaf Walter/Flickr)

What about the Covid-19 pandemic? 

The organisers are planning for around 20,000 people to attend Cop26 in person, despite the ongoing threat of Covid-19 infections. They insist the health and safety of participants and the host community is paramount.

But stark inequalities of the vaccine roll out between rich and poorer nations have raised serious concerns about participation from developing countries. As of 4 September, 64% of the UK population had been fully vaccinated. For many African countries, the figure was less than 5%.

While vaccines are not mandatory to attend the summit, the UK host “strongly encourages” all delegates to be vaccinated. With the UN, the UK government set up a Cop26 vaccination programme to provide jabs to delegates who aren’t able to access vaccines in their home country. The first doses are expected to reach delegates in September.

There are other financial and logistical barriers to participation. Delegates travelling from countries on the UK’s “red list” will need to isolate in a quarantine hotel facility for five days if they are vaccinated and 10 if they aren’t. The UK government has offered to foot the bill.

A Covid-19 protocol is also being put in place for the conference with regular testing, masks and social distancing.

The post What is Cop26 and why does it matter? Your guide to the Glasgow climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Countries had until midnight central European time on Friday to submit their plans to UN Climate Change, with emissions cutting targets for 2030.

Just over half of all parties to the Paris Agreement, 110, made the deadline with an estimated 40% of them from climate vulnerable nations – a tally UN Climate Change described as “far from satisfactory”.

There was a rush of submissions this week with Guinea, Israel, Oman, Zambia, Tanzania, Seychelles, Namibia, Nigeria, Malawi, Sri Lanka, Samoa, Malaysia, Barbados, Sao Tome and Principe, and Sierra Leone getting their plans in. US and Canada are among the major economies to have submitted since the last count.

But some of the world’s largest emitters, including China, India, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, have remained silent.

Alex Scott, think tank E3G’s climate diplomacy lead, told Climate Home News that leadership on 2030 emissions reductions plans was still coming from small island developing states and developing nations “whose emissions are towered by G20 countries”.

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Under the Paris Agreement, 2020 was the year countries were expected to present improved climate plans to UN Climate Change as part of a ratchet mechanism to meet the accord’s goals. But the coronavirus pandemic derailed the process.

A UN synthesis report published in February, which took into account updated plans submitted to the UN by the end of 2020, found that collective ambition was “very far” from putting the world on track to limit global heating to 1.5C.

At the time, only 75 countries covering around 30% of global emissions had submitted updated plans, including the EU and UK. Their pledges were estimated to reduce emissions by just 0.5% between 2010 and 2030.

Scott said the findings had come as a “reality check” and had helped “build a stronger political narrative for the outcome at Cop26 to be a pathway for how countries are going to act faster to keep 1.5C within reach”.

A backdrop of extreme heat in Northern America, devastating flooding in Europe and China and intense wildfires in Siberia and Turkey have further underlined the urgency for major emitters to curb emissions.

Around the world, climate change committees are steering government action

But despite some renewed political momentum, the picture isn’t likely to change much without enhanced action from emerging economies.

Niklas Höhne, a climate policy expert at the NewClimate Institute, told Climate Home News there remained a “gigantic gap” between current levels of emissions and the action needed by 2030.

Commitments made as of April would still lead to 2.4C of warming by the end of the century if implemented in full, according to Climate Action Tracker. 

“With all the pledges on the table we are basically stabilising global emissions by 2030 when we should be cutting them by half,” said Höhne.

Leading scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said emissions should fall 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to limit temperatures to 1.5C by the end of the century.

The picture for long-term goals is slightly better. NewClimate Institute’s latest estimates found that if all net zero emissions goals are met, the world could limit temperatures to 2C, in the most optimistic scenario, by the end of the century, said Höhne.

“The long-term ambition has improved significantly in the last six months but it has not propagated to short-term ambition and short-term action,” he added.

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During a meeting of climate and ministers last week, all G20 countries agreed to “update or communicate ambitious NDCs by Cop26”.

Among those to have already submitted, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Russia put forward emissions targets to the UN identical to or weaker than their previous versions, Climate Action Tracker found. Earlier this month, Indonesia updated its NDC, with unchanged headline targets but plans to peak emissions by 2030 and strengthened sectoral policies.

UN Climate Change head Patricia Espinosa said the UN had called on countries that have already presented their plans “to look at them again, and if possible, come up with revised NDCs”.  

China, which is responsible for around 27% of global emissions, is only proposing an incremental strengthening of its 2030 climate plan, which Climate Action Tracker rates as “highly insufficient” to meet the Paris goals.

“Cop26 is the good faith actor test for China,” Li Shuo, of Greenpeace East Asia, told Climate Home News.

“Ultimately, there is going to be nowhere to hide at Cop26. Each of us will be in the spotlight,” warned Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma during a press conference on Monday.

The post China, India miss UN’s extended deadline for climate pledges appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the International Energy Agency’s first comprehensive scenario to align the energy sector with limiting global heating to 1.5C is a major turning point.

It found that all new oil, methane gas and coal exploration projects must stop now if the energy sector is to reach net zero emissions by 2050, precluding gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ in the energy transition.

The message itself is not novel, researchers have warned of the need for a fossil fuel phase out for years. Last year, a UN-backed report found that global fossil fuel production would have to decline by 6% per year between 2020 and 2030 to be consistent with a 1.5C pathway.

But coming from the IEA, which is funded by oil-producing nations, the report is a call to action for investors and policymakers to face the inevitability of a managed decline of dirty energy.

It was awkward timing for Shell. The oil giant asked its shareholders to support its climate strategy, which includes the expansion of gas production, on the day of the report’s launch.

Total is likely to feel the heat next week as it faces its shareholders while scrambling to secure the funding it needs to exploit and export Uganda’s oil.

The IEA’s net zero scenario certainly puts pressure on the G7 group of rich nations to agree strong language on the need to phase out fossil fuel financing as they meet in Cornwall, UK, next month.

Spain has joined a small group of nations already taking the lead. Its new climate law bans all new coal, gas and oil exploration and production permits and sets a 2042 end date for the production of fossil fuels. Major fossil fuel producers are yet to follow.

Meanwhile, Cyclone Tauktae has left a trail of devastation in western India this week as rising temperatures fuel more intense cyclones in the Arabian Sea.

This week’s news…

• Germany launches $1 billion biodiversity fund after world misses targets
• Cyclone Tauktae leaves trail of devastation in western India, fuelled by a warming sea
• IEA: End fossil fuel expansion now for net zero energy emissions by 2050
• Spain to end fossil fuel production by 2042 under new climate law
• Women and youth are leading Kenya’s coral reef revival

and comment….

• What the IEA net zero roadmap means for businesses and governments
• Shell’s net zero plan will be judged on science, not spin

The post Fossil fuels on notice – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Patricia Espinosa warned that the collective ambition of national plans by the end of 2020 was “very far” from putting the world on track to meet its Paris Agreement goals of limiting global heating to “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C.

Her comments were based on analysis published by UN Climate Change on Friday of national climate plans submitted before 31 December 2020. Only 75 countries, including EU member states, met the deadline for updating their plans, accounting for about 30% of global emissions.

Their combined plans achieve less than 1% emissions reductions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, Espinosa said. “And that simply is not good enough”.

“The message is extremely clear,” she told reporters. “We are collectively wondering into a minefield, blindfolded. The next step would mean disaster.”

Espinosa urged major emitters to “step up” and commit to “much more radical” emissions reductions cuts this year. China, the US and India – the world’s top three emitting countries – have yet to reveal their plans.

“I call on all parties, even on those who have submitted already their new updated [climate plans], to look at how they can increase their ambition. If this task was already urgent, it is crucial now,” she said.

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The report found that new commitments would shave off 2.8% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with previous pledges.

The projected impact of these new plans is an emissions reduction of just 0.7% compared with 1990 and 0.5% from 2010 levels. In the shorter term, emissions would rise by 2% between 1990 and 2025.

Leading scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said emissions should fall 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to limit temperatures to 1.5C by the end of the century.

“This report confirms the shocking lack of urgency, and genuine action,” said Aubrey Webson, of Antigua and Barbuda, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. “We are flirting dangerously with the 1.5C warming limit that the world agreed we need to stay within. It is small island developing states like ours that will pay the ultimate price if we do not.”

UN chief António Guterres described the report as “a red alert” for the planet and urged nations to match their long-term ambition with short-term action. Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma, of the UK, backed the call for major emitters to submit ambitious 2030 targets this year.

Despite the opportunity offered by the Covid-19 recovery to put climate action at the heart of stimulus packages, “many nations are sticking to their business as usual approach,” Espinosa said. “It is a rare moment that cannot be lost.”

Fragile countries call for investment in rooftop solar to expand energy access

While countries were expected to submit improved national contributions to meet the Paris goals – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – before the end of 2020, fewer than half did so. Many nations experienced delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In total, 113 countries are yet to submit updated climate plans.

Among large emitters, the EU, the UK and Argentina stepped up their climate ambition last year. And overall, the report points to an improvement in the quality of countries’ climate goals.

More countries are adopting absolute emissions reduction targets, with most climate plans covering all sectors of the economy.

But a number of big emitters have failed to improve their plans. Brazil and Mexico even backslid on their commitments, with emissions set to rise compared to their previous plans, according to Climate Action Tracker.

Its analysis found that Australia, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland and Vietnam have submitted plans that do not add up to deeper emissions cuts.  Japan and New Zealand did not improve on their plans either but both promised to increase ambition ahead of Cop26 this year.

Meanwhile Indonesia has said it would not strengthen its ambition this year.

“Science-based” corporate climate targets are no such thing, says former advisor

A host of new climate plans could be announced on the 22 April, when the US is hosting a leaders’ climate summit as it revives the Major Economies Forum, a group of 17 large emitters.

Joe Biden reiterated this week that the US would have an improved 2030 climate plan “ready in advance of the summit” and he is under pressure to ensure the US does its fair share. Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau also said he would announce increased ambition by the meeting, according to a White House readout.

China provided a glimpse of its updated climate plan during a climate summit in December. Climate Action Tracker said the proposals would result in a modest increase in ambition compared to current policies.

Despite international pressure, it remains unclear what India is preparing to bring to Cop26.

With new plans expected during the course of the year, UN Climate Change will publish an updated report ahead of Cop26. It is expected to compare countries’ collective level of ambition with scenarios for meeting the 2C and 1.5C temperature goals.

In the meantime, climate campaigners have said the situation was alarming. Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, described it as “a nightmare” and urged governments to “come back with a better offer”.

“With their woefully weak climate targets big emitters like Japan, Australia and Brazil are weighing down overall global ambition when in fact they should be leading,” said Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network.

The story was amended on 26/02/21 to reflect the fact that updated climate plans submitted by 31 December 2020 would reduce emissions by less than 1% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. Not the combined climate plans of all countries. 

The post China, US urged to step up as UN warns world ‘very far’ from meeting climate goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

Bill Baue was among half a dozen people to start developing the concept behind the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2012 and served on its technical advisory group until recently.

Last week, he submitted a formal complaint to the initiative’s executive board and published it on Medium, with a detailed critique of the framework used for major corporations to set climate targets.

“Science-Based Targets is not a science-based approach,” Baue told Climate Home News. “I believe in this instance that SBTi… are putting their own interest above the interests of the public.”

The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was launched in 2015 to set the standard for companies to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change and vet targets set by businesses.

More than 1,000 companies across 50 sectors are working with the SBTi to reduce their emissions, according to the initiative’s latest progress report. This includes household names like Siemens, Heineken and S&P Global.

These companies represent nearly 20% of global market capitalisation, or about $20.5 trillion. In recent months, the number of businesses joining the initiative has surged.

As companies trumpet their climate ambition, there is growing scrutiny of their plans and actions — and the opaque vetting process for the coveted “science-based” label.

“To quell the great public skepticism about this initiative, what’s needed is an additional emphasis on transparency and accountability, using the latest science to guide these targets, and for these companies to back up their targets with their investment plans,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace International.

Central America: Hit by hurricanes and Covid, millions go hungry and plan to migrate

SBTi’s proposition is that it works with companies to develop and approve targets and strategies to cut emissions in line with 1.5C  — the toughest Paris goal.

That involves a number of hidden assumptions. The size of the global carbon budget for 1.5C depends on how much carbon dioxide you expect to remove from the atmosphere and the temperature “overshoot” tolerated mid-century. Then there are judgement calls about how to share the shrinking carbon budget between sectors and geographies.

Baue accused SBTi of “potential self-dealing and conflict of interest” for recommending two ways of calculating corporate targets that were developed by the initiative’s partners and excluding a method that could yield more robust emissions cuts.

There was no transparency over which route the companies chose, he added.

“[SBTi] are basically asking us, the world, to trust them to do this assessment and they are not going to reveal even the methodology that these companies use,” he said. “They are the lawyer, the judge and the jury in this situation.”

After raising these concerns internally for the past two years, he escalated them to the executive board, which is constituted of the heads of the UN Global Compact, of the World Resources Institute, of WWF and of CDP.

At the time of making his complaint, Baue still believed himself to be an advisor to SBTi. He only found that following publication of his concerns that the initiative had reconvened a new advisory group in October 2020 to improve gender, geographical and sectoral diversity – excluding him.

SBTi acknowledged that it failed to inform previous advisors of their expired membership “due to an internal miscommunication” and “greatly regret this lapse”.

Samoa: Concerns raised about Green Climate Fund flood defence project

Responding to Climate Home’s questions, the steering committee of the Science Based Targets initiative said: “A rigorous, science-based approach is at the very core of the SBTi’s work and we take extremely seriously our role in upholding this. This is why our methodologies undergo strict evaluation each year, to ensure they are in line with the latest climate science.

“Our mission is to drive down corporate emissions for a net-zero, 1.5C world, and this goal ultimately is at the heart of our decision-making.”

SBTi denied that it or partner organisations derived any benefits from the use of the methods it recommends. “It is not clear to us what other ‘interest’ this supposedly conflicts with.”

Baue’s complaint followed the publication of an independent study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The study assessed seven methods for setting corporate climate targets. It found that a target-setting methodology developed by the US-based Center for Sustainable Organizations (CSO), was aligned with the latest 1.5C climate science and offered the lowest risk of an under or overshoot of the global carbon budget.

While initially endorsed by SBTi, the CSO methodology was dropped from its toolkit in recent years.

“SBTi now finds itself in what we might call an ‘inconvenient’ position of recommending against the very methodology that is the most robust!” Baue wrote in his complaint.

SBTi said its reason for dropping the CSO methodology was its reliance on economic intensity as an input. That decision was based on concerns that economic performance indicators have “a weak and unstable link” to emissions at the company level.

The steering committee said it had intended to present these concerns formally in a research paper but this had been delayed because of resource constraints and competing priorities.

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Instead, SBTi recommends companies reduce emissions in line with 1.5C in a straight downward trajectory, known as the Absolute Contraction Approach (ACA).

The study in Environmental Research Letters found this method had a much larger risk of overshoot of the carbon budget to 2050 than other methods. SBTi said it used the method to help companies set 5-15 years targets, for which the method shows no or limited overshoot.

The second method recommended by SBTi, known as the Sectoral Decarbonisation Approach (SDA), only aligns with holding temperature “well below 2C” rather than 1.5C. Only power utilities can align with 1.5C using this method.

That is because the sectoral approach was initially developed using scenarios from the International Energy Agency aligned with 2C. The IEA has yet to release its 1.5C-aligned scenario, which is expected in May.

SBTI’s steering committee said the lack of 1.5C-aligned SDA pathway was an issue it took “very seriously” and described the delay in updating the model as “frustrating”. It said it did not rely solely on IEA data and was working to update the methodology.

Study: EU spent €440 million on failed gas projects since 2013

Anders Bjørn, co-author of the recent study from Concordia University in Montreal, told Climate Home he was “puzzled” by SBTi’s decision to only recommend two methodologies and that its rationale for doing so “lacked transparency”.

Bjørn called on SBTi to require more transparency from companies. Companies setting climate targets under SBTi don’t usually disclose what methods they have used to set their goals — something that should change, Bjørn said.

“There is not even a mention that there is a choice in the method,” he said, adding that companies should be honest about the fact their targets reflect a value judgment on how to share the global emissions budget.

Jed Davis, director of sustainability at Cabot Creamery Co-operative and a former SBTi advisory board member, told Climate Home: “There needs to be a deeper valuing of transparency in the process. This won’t serve anybody if it is a black box process.”

The post ‘Science-based’ corporate climate targets are no such thing, says former advisor appeared first on Climate Home News.

The report by the Climate Change Commission said the country was set to miss its long-term goal by 6.3 million tonnes of CO2, roughly the emissions of Paraguay or 13% of New Zealand’s current emissions.

The commission said New Zealand’s 2030 target of reducing its net emissions by 30% from 2005 levels was “not compatible with global efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5C – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

To align with a 1.5C pathway, the report said New Zealand should cut emissions by “much more than 35%”. The commission chair Rod Carr said the advisers will now consult New Zealanders on “whether they think ‘much more than 35%’ is 38% or 42%”.

According to Climate Action Tracker, New Zealand should reduce emissions by at least 44% between 2005 and 2030 to do its fair share to keep the world within 1.5C of warming. To be considered a “role model”, it should aim for at least 70% of emissions cuts. These figures do not include land use, land use change and forestry.

A recent Oxfam report said that, to do its fair share, New Zealand should reduce emissions between 67% and 102% by 2030 – depending on the methodology used.

US plans to end fossil fuel finance overseas, threatens billions in support for oil and gas

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who commissioned the report, said the government would revise its 2030 target. The government’s response is expected in November 2021, ahead of Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK.

#breaking The @ClimateCommNZ draft advice to Govt says:
Emission targets are achievable
Meeting them will make our communities cleaner & healthier
We have the tech, just need to get it in place
We are not on track, but can be if we act now
Next 5 yrs are crucial

— James Shaw (@jamespeshaw) January 31, 2021

Professor Bronwyn Hayward, who researches environmental policy at the University of Canterbury, called for urgency, tweeting: “We’ve had 30 (nearer 40) years of climate inaction by successive governments-so I’m underwhelmed to hear there will be a year for government to respond to #nzpol climate report-then presumably a year to implement action on the ground- let’s move faster!”

Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, according to government data, with methane from livestock accounting for almost three quarters of the sector’s emissions.

To align with a 1.5C pathway, agricultural methane emissions would need to be cut by 11-30% by 2030 and 24-47% by 2050, the commission said. It found this could be achieved by adopting “farm management practices” that reduce the amount of animal feed being used.

Technological solutions such as selective breeding and the use of chemical compounds in feed to inhibit cattle’s methane production could help make “significant contributions to global emissions reductions,” the report said.

Greenpeace New Zealand campaigner Steve Abell said that although he welcomed much of the report, the section on dairy “seems more anxious about maintaining the status quo than biting the bullet in the existential crisis of our time”.

“It effectively says ‘we can only save the planet so long as we don’t have to produce one kilo less milk or meat by 2035’. That ain’t transformation,” he said.

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The report called for the food processing sector to stop using coal boilers by 2037 and to use biofuel or biomass instead. The dairy industry currently burns coal to dry milk into powder, where heat from biomass and electricity could be used instead.

Cindy Baxter, of Coal Action Network Aotearoa, said the 2037 deadline “should be brought forward”. “The world needs to get out of coal,” she said.

Baxter welcomed the commission’s recommendation that the 500 MW gas and coal-fired Huntly power station should shut down “in the 2020s”.

She added all coal mining in New Zealand should end by 2027 and the proposed expansion of the Canterbury Coal mine outside Christchurch, which produces low sulphur coal for the dairy industry, should be blocked.

The commission urged the government to set emissions reductions goals that it can meet with domestic action. Buying emissions reductions achieved overseas through carbon markets should only be used as a “last resort” in response to an unforeseen disaster, it said. For example, if a fire destroyed the country’s power lines, forcing it to turn back to fossil fuels temporarily.

The report said that while forests “have a role to play” the country “can’t plant our way out of climate change”. Instead, it must focus on reducing emissions at the source.

This article was amended to clarify that Huntly uses both gas and coal rather than just coal.

The post New Zealand urged to accelerate emissions cuts in line with 2050 net zero goal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The stakes could not be higher. The aim of the talks was to agree a global accord to limit global warming by the end of the century and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This was the opportunity to demonstrate that multilateralism was the way to provide solutions to global problems.

It was my first time attending a UN climate conference. Although I had been involved in the climate diplomacy process before, the Paris conference was overwhelming with information and people.

More than 45,000 people participated in Cop21. The city was heavily policed not only because of the climate summit, but because two weeks before 130 people were killed in a terrorist attack, plunging the city of light into sadness.

It was an honour to support the Costa Rican delegation in the decisive negotiation that followed. Not only was I proud to support my country’s voice, but humbled to witness a small group of developing countries raise their flags to ensure the Paris Agreement became an ambitious accord.

Agripina Jenkins Rojas in Paris for the Cop21 climate talks. (Photo: Agripina Jenkins Rojas)

Costa Rica, as part of the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC), had a clear mission: to defend climate ambition and work for the inclusion of human rights and gender equality in the text. Both were included in its preamble.

After long and intense negotiations, the ambition was stamped in the accord’s goal of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – a target on which depends the survival of populations and biodiversity in countries worldwide.

This was the end of six years of negotiations. Less than six months before the talks, we had nothing that looked like a multilateral agreement.

After five years, here are five things the Paris Agreement achieved — and didn’t

Back in Costa Rica at the beginning of November 2015, I was greatly concerned about how we would solve the global challenge in front of us in just two weeks of negotiations, with countries holding positions that, at times, had nothing in common.

In the final hours on 12 December, I was still concerned we may fail to have an agreement robust enough to respond to the call of science and be the starting point for the transformational change of the global economy that was needed.

Besides the intensive technical work, the conference was the first time I had to be away from my daughter for so many days. She was three years old at the time.

She was, and continues to be, my inspiration in the most difficult moments of the negotiations, those moments of doubts. Until Cop21 president Laurent Fabius’s gavel came down on the agreement, we didn’t have a deal. Because in the UN climate convention nothing is decided until everything is decided.

In December 2015, we had an agreement. Not everything we wanted was included but the most relevant elements were, we returned home and got to work implementing it.

‘Looking for positivity’: Parisversaire party to revive momentum on climate

Five years on from that moment, we reflect on how the negotiation process could be improved. It should take less time to reach decisions, but fundamentally we should be more effective in translating those decisions into global action.

In recent years, Costa Rica has made great progress on the climate agenda and worked to mainstream the issue in public institutions and setting out a long-term strategy.

We are in the process of improving the communication of our climate agenda to the people of our country.  This remains a challenge: transforming commitments for climate action into society-wide projects that benefit people.

Something that was clear to me from the first moments of working on climate change is that we must show people how every aspect of life is affected by climate change, and how everyone has something to contribute from their own areas of expertise.

Brazil sets ‘indicative’ goal of carbon neutrality by 2060

Five years on some things have worked. Negotiations and dialogue continue to be the way to address this global problem. UN Climate Change and campaigns such as the Race to Zero create a framework to transform the world’s economies. And the private sector has been invited to join this dialogue.

For someone who was born and lives in a country without an army, multilateralism remains the way to seek solutions together and not have them imposed by one nation or a group of countries. Every voice needs to count.

Now the process must deliver action at the speed that science requires, otherwise the credibility of the Paris Agreement will be put in doubt.

At the climate ambition summit on Saturday, on the day of the anniversary of the Paris accord, world leaders will present high-quality climate plans to generate political momentum that is needed to Cop26 in Glasgow next year.

But above all, the spirit of the Paris Agreement and a commitment to continue to raise ambition needs to be respected. That way, my daughter will one day know that the implementation of the deal was a decision made by us to prioritise the well-being of her generation, of the one before her and of all those that will follow.

Agripina Jenkins Rojas is an advisor for the Climate Change Office of Costa Rica.

The post I am proud to have negotiated the Paris Agreement, at my first UN summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Race to Zero “should be open for everybody,” Nigel Topping says in an online interview. “There should be no ideological exclusion.”

The goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 has become the benchmark for climate ambition. While a small but growing number of governments have formally adopted the target, a much bigger group of companies, investors and local governments are setting climate neutrality goals.

Launched in June, the Race to Zero campaign sought to galvanise climate action around the 2050 goal at a time when the world locked down to halt infections from Covid-19 and the global economy slumped.

Topping, officially the high-level climate action champion for next year’s Cop26 UN climate talks in Glasgow, UK, co-leads the campaign with Chile’s Gonzalo Muñoz.

Net zero: The inside story of the target that will shape our future

To join, companies, investors and local governments need to demonstrate they have set science-based targets in line with limiting global temperatures rise to 1.5C  — the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement. While a number of oil and gas companies have net zero targets, none are aligned with 1.5C.

With research on how to align oil and gas companies with the 1.5C target expected to be published early next year, Topping hopes some companies will be in a position to meet the 1.5C requirements and join the campaign before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021.

Last month, UK broadcaster Channel 4 News reported that consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group, which advises oil and gas companies on how to continue to generate growth, was supporting the high-level climate champions’ work.

Setting climate targets in line with the 1.5C temperature goal requires oil and gas companies to radically transform their business model. Previous analysis has found that to set a genuine net zero target, oil companies would need to cut absolute emissions by 100%.

Instead, oil and gas companies are relying on offsetting some of their emissions to meet the target. And so are other businesses in hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation and the steel industry, where technological solutions are not available for full decarbonisation.

As part of our new Net Zero zone, Climate Home News is looking for ambitious climate leaders to share their work. Enquire here about how you can gain access to our Net Zero zone, reach our audience and inspire others to follow your lead.

But poor quality offsets risk giving companies a free pass to continue polluting without actually reducing emissions – a red line for Topping and his team.

“Companies that are not committed to reducing emissions but are claiming to be climate neutral by buying lots of offsets won’t be part of the Race to Zero,” he says. “That is not a path for survival.”

Since the last climate talks in Madrid in December 2019, the campaign has seen a doubling of the number of net zero pledges, with 452 cities, 22 regions, 1,101 businesses, 45 investors and 549 universities signing up.

“It’s going well, it has lots of momentum and we will keep it going,” Topping tells Climate Home.

By the Cop26, the climate champions wants the number of commitments to have increased tenfold.

“Around the world people are frightened, angry, worried and desperate to help and feel a sense of urgency.” Publicly pledging to commit to climate neutrality “is a way to [help],” he says, calling for small and medium size companies, which account for 90% of businesses worldwide, to step up.

In an interview with Climate Home in February, Topping said he hoped 60% of world economic output would be generated in areas which have a 2050 goal of net zero emissions by the end of 2020. Things are going better than that.

Joe Biden’s victory in the US election on a net zero platform, following pledges from China, Japan and South Korea, brings the total to 74% of global GDP. (China’s target is 2060, but the destination is the same.)

Tracker: Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

Many climate events planned for this year have been cancelled, postponed or moved online – up to and including Cop26, which was originally scheduled to start 9 November 2020.

But webcast panel discussions have their advantages, says Topping: “Being forced to be virtual means we can reach more people.”

“I think you have cloned yourself because I’m seeing you everywhere for hours a day trying to promote your Race to Zero,” Dave Turk, of the International Energy Agency joked with Topping during an event at New York Climate Action Week in September.

With a team of around 50 people – with many seconded from businesses and civil society networks – the Race to Zero is hoping to shift the dial for climate action in the real economy.

In recent months, they have explored how non-governmental actors can support communities build resilience and adapt to intensifying climate impacts with the aim of setting up a new campaign in 2021. “We need more global collaboration to drive the solution,” Topping says.

Known for his former role as CEO of the We Mean Business coalition of companies working to accelerate the transition to a zero carbon economy, Topping previously made a career in optimising large-scale manufacturing systems. A job, he says, that has led him to think about achieving big systemic change.

The re-engineering of the global economic and social system towards net zero emissions is his biggest challenge yet.

“I spend a lot of my time acting as a bridge or a translator between different worlds,” Topping said in a TED interview earlier this year, as he works closely with both government officials in the Cop26 team and the private sector.

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If the net zero goal is clear, how to get there isn’t so. “What is a transition pathway to 1.5C or 2C ?” he asks. “That is what civil society wants to know.”

To try to answer this question, his team has worked to develop pathways for 23 sectors, from aviation and shipping to cement and steel, to ensure companies are taking action in the short term that is putting them on track to meet the 2050 goal.

Synthesising existing research, the pathways sketch out what needs to happen in the next 5-10 years to set the pace for net zero. They are due to be released during a 10-day series of events to take stock of the campaign’s progress starting 9 November.

“There is no agreement on a pathway” to decarbonise aviation for example, Topping says. He recalls telling the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) that without committing to net zero by 2050, they will “lose [their] licence to operate”.

In September, the oneworld alliance of 13 global airlines, including American Airlines, British Airways and Finnair, committed to carbon neutrality by 2050 – accelerating the need for viable technological solutions such as alternative fuels.

“We need to focus on the dynamics of exponential change,” Topping says, which means public investment to support emerging technology until the market locks in a solution. Then, “investments really take off because it’s safe. That is part of what we need to really get to scale.”

Working through “networks of networks of networks” of green groups, trade associations and company alliances, Topping hopes early pathway adopters will create “feedback loops” that drive ambition through entire sectors of the economy.

By Cop26, he hopes to reach “tipping points” where at least 20% of the main actors in each sector have committed to the pathway to net zero.

He doesn’t expect it to be easy. “We need to be clear about challenges and disagreements. For example, how much can we rely on carbon capture? That is a big conversation that we should not shy away from.”

The post UK climate champion: Oil majors can join the ‘race to zero’ – if they align with 1.5C appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, on Thursday, Guterres said the economic recovery to the coronavirus pandemic was a “make-or-break moment” for the planet. China’s actions, he said, could determine whether the world limits warming to 1.5C – the tougher target of the Paris goal on which the survival of vulnerable nations depends.

“As an economic superpower, the way in which China restores growth will have a major impact on whether we can keep 1.5C within reach,” he said during a lecture series titled “Climate governance in the post-pandemic world”.

Guterres, who has championed a green recovery to the economic fallout from Covid-19, said the trillions of dollars being spent on the economic recovery to the coronavirus pandemic could “either serve as a slingshot to hurtle climate action forward, or it can set it back many years”.

Governments have “a narrow window, but a vast opportunity” to rebuild a cleaner and fairer world, he said, urging them to end fossil fuel subsidies and the funding of coal.

“There is no such thing as clean coal, and coal should have no place in any rational recovery plan. It is deeply concerning that new coal power plants are still being planned and financed, even though renewables offer three times more jobs, and are now cheaper than coal in most countries.”

Poland bails out coal, yet wins access to EU climate funds

Coal consumption has bounced back in China, after a period of decline 2014-16. The amount of coal power capacity under development increased before the Covid-19 outbreak and the trend has since accelerated.

A province-led boom in coal planning means China currently has more coal-fired capacity under construction and in planning stages than the entire coal fleet of the United States. So far this year, the Chinese power industry has proposed to add more than 40GW of new coal plants – the equivalent of South Africa’s coal capacity.

According to data compiled by the Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China’s provinces approved more new coal-fired capacity between 1 January and 15 June this year than during all of 2018 and 2019 combined.

As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China’s coal capacity surge risks pushing emissions beyond pre-pandemic levels.

Last month, six Chinese ministries stated the need to prevent excess coal production and give priority to clean energy but no concrete actions were proposed to rein in the surge of new project approvals.

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Guterres warned “poorly coordinated policies risk locking in, or even worsening” a high emissions future.

To prevent this, countries need to cut emissions by 45% by 2030, achieve net-zero emissions “well before 2050” and submit tougher climate plans aligned with the 1.5C goal ahead of the critical Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, next year, he added.

Beijing has vowed to publish its long-term decarbonisation strategy before the end of this year. It also committed to enhance its climate plan but avoided providing a timeline for doing so.

Guterres said China has the capacity to lead on climate action. It deployed more solar and wind capacity than any other country in the past five years, half of world’s electric vehicles are sold in China and it produces virtually all electric buses.

By “seizing the mantle of leadership” and taking bold action quickly, Guterres said China could reap “vast competitive advantage” creating more jobs, boosting growth and providing cleaner air and better health to its citizens.

The post Guterres confronts China over coal boom, urging a green recovery appeared first on Climate Home News.

Covid-19, which has killed more than 180,000 people worldwide, is thought to have originated in animals, perhaps bats, before infecting people in Wuhan, China.

Global warming, a rising human population, pollution and destruction of wildlife habitats are among the factors raising the risk of such zoonotic diseases, which jump from animals to humans.

Zoonotic disease was mentioned in the last round-up of scientific knowledge by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013-14, but the pandemic potential was not a focus.

That will change in its next assessment report, due to be published in stages over 2021-22 as the main scientific guide for government action on global warming. Each section is likely to be delayed by a few months, IPCC scientists say.

“Pushing wildlife out of natural habitats, high density living and closer interactions between animals and humans… are a risky cocktail,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Climate Home News.

Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation

In an Earth Day presentation on 22 April, he noted a study finding that 96% of the weight of all living mammals are people and domesticated animals such as chickens and cows, with just 4% made up of wild creatures.

Many researchers reckon that human activities have become the overwhelming force of change on the planet, and qualify for a new geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene, based on the Greek word “anthropos”,  meaning “man”. It would succeed the current Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age about 11,700 years ago.

“This is a manifestation of the Anthropocene,” said Rockström of the coronavirus pandemic.

IPCC scientists say it is urgent to find out how far humans can influence the planet before ecosystems collapse, such as tropical coral reefs that are bleaching and dying in warming waters.

“Humans are exploiting natural resources and the world up to its limits. Knowing those limits would be very, very important. It’s a matter of survival,” Hans-Otto Pörtner, of the Alfred Wegener Institute and co-chair of the IPCC working group on the impacts of climate change,  told Climate Home News.

Climate activists form new tactics and alliances amid coronavirus lockdown

Before the coronavirus, the IPCC had already planned to explore links between climate change and biodiversity by holding a first joint workshop, in May, with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

That event will be delayed by several months, Pörtner said. More scientists were starting to look into the links between biodiversity, climate change and coronavirus and early findings will be included in the next IPCC report.

“There are similarities between the crises [of coronavirus and climate change] in the need for science-based policies – you see the same politicians failing on this [pandemic] as they are failing on the climate side,” Pörtner told CHN. “We need policymakers who have an understanding of the risks.”

He declined to single out any governments for criticism. IPCC scientists consulted for this article gave their personal views, not those of the IPCC.

The IPCC assessment report in 2014 had a chapter on health and climate change. It outlined health threats from heat waves and deadly wildfires, malnutrition because of less food production in poor regions and diseases such as malaria and dengue spread by mosquitoes expanding their ranges.

The publication of the first part of the next IPCC report looking at the physical science of climate change, including scenarios for future warming, is likely to be delayed by about 3 months from April 2021, said co-chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a climatologist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

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She and Pörtner paid tribute to IPCC scientists who are continuing work despite lacking access to laboratories or field work as countries are put under lockdown. Particularly in developing nations, many struggle with weak internet links and face extra stresses in taking part – IPCC work is prestigious but unpaid.

Masson-Delmotte said the world needed to find ways to plan for the future even when there was “deep uncertainty”, a phrase used in past IPCC reports about how, for instance, to predict the future of Antarctic ice beyond 2100. A major collapse of the ice sheet would raise global sea levels by several metres.

“A clear lesson from the pandemic is that there is a global failure in preparedness, and planning for managing a known risk,” she said.

The response to the pandemic could also inform efforts to cut emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to fall around 6% in 2020, as non-essential work and travel is put on hold to slow the spread of Covid-19. The UN estimates that emissions will have to fall 7.6% a year over the coming decade to limit temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, the tougher target in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

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Christiana Figueres, who headed the UN Climate Change secretariat from 2010 to 2016, urged governments, cities and citizens to halve world greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and cut emissions to net zero by 2050 to tackle what she called a “dire emergency”.

“This decade is the critical, decisive decade for the future of humanity and the planet,” she told Climate Home News of her book, “The Future we Choose”, which will go on sale on Tuesday.

It is co-written with Tom Rivett-Carnac, who also helped build the 2015 Paris climate pact.

Figueres, a former Costa Rican diplomat, said the UN summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in December will be a vital moment to chart the course towards a cleaner future away from fossil fuels.

UN Environment says that a goal of almost halving greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade works out at annual emissions cuts of 7.6% per year worldwide in the 2020s – rates previously associated with wars, recessions or slumps such as the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Emissions have risen in most recent years.

In a phone interview from Costa Rica, Figueres, 63, said it was not wide-eyed naivety to reckon such unprecedented cuts were possible and advocated an attitude of “stubborn optimism” for the 2020s to achieve a goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.

“We know there are going to be many stumbling blocks along the way. This is difficult. We cannot delude ourselves,” she said. “There is no guarantee of success but not trying is a guarantee of failure.”

‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change

Among hurdles to action are the United States, where Trump doubts climate change is a major problem and is seeking to bolster jobs in the fossil fuel industry.

Figueres said the US risked losing out to China and other nations which were investing heavily in renewable energies such as solar and wind.

“That is so short-sighted on the side of the federal government, to keep its [fossil fuel] industry in the 20th century,” she said. “It is similar to giving signals to the US communications industry to say ‘you know what, we don’t think cellphones are really the thing. Let’s go back to landlines’.”

In the book, she also criticises those who doubt mainstream scientific findings that climate change is primarily caused by human activities.

“President Donald Trump is the most prominent example,” the book says, adding: “Denying climate change is tantamount to saying you don’t believe in gravity.”

Trump is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement in a withdrawal that will formally take effect on 4 November – five days before the start of the climate talks in Glasgow. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Figueres’ remarks.

Figueres said she was encouraged that all the current Democratic candidates to take on Trump promised to rejoin the Paris Agreement if elected.

‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change

Her book portrays an imaginary 2050 scenario when the world suffers the impacts of inaction – people wear masks against pollution, crops are grown under cover to ensure stable conditions. Most coral reefs are dead, rising seas are forcing evacuations inland, and the European Union has disbanded under political strain.

An alternative imagines what could happen if governments act – the air is clean, trees have been planted almost everywhere. High speed electric rail networks in the US have replaced most domestic flights, fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

She said she took heart from a flattening of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency, that might be a hint that a peak in emissions was close after decades of steady growth.

Her book also points to breakthroughs long thought impossible – the US moon landing in 1969, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

“This is a revolution for the high road … at a global level,” she said, also noting that her father, late Costa Rican president José Figueres Ferrer, decided to abolish the national army in 1948, the only nation to have done so.

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And technology is helping – prices of solar panels have fallen 90% in the past decade. Pressure for action is also growing, for instance by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, as well as green commitments by more and more companies, investors and cities.

Figueres said individuals can play their part by making climate change a top priority in voting and changing their lifestyles. She said she had cut her own carbon footprint by dropping red meat from her diet and travelling by public transport when possible.

But she still has high emissions from travel – Figueres and Rivett-Carnac will unveil the book in New York on Tuesday, then go on a tour in places including Washington, Australia and Paris.

At a news conference in Bonn when she was appointed to the UN job in 2010, she was asked when she reckoned climate change would be solved.

‘Not in my lifetime,” she said, something she writes in the book was an error. Now, she said an emphatic “yes” to the same question. Barring accidents and illness, she will be 73 in 2030 and 93 in 2050. She hopes her genes favour longevity – and one of her grandfathers lived to 105.

The post World faces ‘decisive decade’ to fix global warming, former UN climate chief says appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s especially painful to acknowledge that my country, Australia, shares a lot of the blame for the outcome.

The current government’s insistence on using so-called “Kyoto credits” (carried over from my own period in office when we did take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) towards the implementation of their lacklustre Paris target, only sowed division and disharmony at the talks.

Australia’s climate change polarisation hampers long-term bushfire fixes

Such accounting trickery does nothing to fight climate change. It’s legally dubious. And it only opens the back door for other countries to do less at a moment we all need to do more.

And all while our country is suffering under the worst bushfire conditions we have ever seen with more than forty-six million acres burned, more than 2,000 homes destroyed and innocent lives lost.

The outcome in Madrid would have been worse if it weren’t for progressive nations, led by the tiny Marshall Islands, and Spain’s bold environment minister, Teresa Ribera, who worked feverishly behind the scenes to bring away some kind of outcome. History will be kind to them, if not to Cop25.

But now is not the time to simply reflect on what’s been done. We must quickly regroup in the knowledge that this coming year will be the most important year for climate action for a long time.

You see, a decade ago, in the wake of the Copenhagen talks in 2009, the usual suspects were eager to seize on the failure to agree substantial top-down emissions cuts.

Erosion crisis swallows homes and livelihoods in Nigeria

But, in the conference’s dying hours, some of us worked hard to cobble together from the ashes of Copenhagen a compromise (The Copenhagen Accord) that would let countries continue setting their own targets from the bottom up.

This accord was enshrined in international law at Paris in 2015, but came with the essential understanding that countries would come back to the table every five years with new, more ambitious targets.

The reasoning was that countries could periodically lift their ambitions because technological advances would make decarbonisation cheaper and easier over time.

Take, for example, solar power. When we were in Copenhagen, the average cost per watt of solar power in the US was around $8.50; today it is only $2.99. If countries set rigid national targets too far in advance, they risk doing so on quickly outdated projections of what was once technologically feasible, and veer towards low ambition as a result.

And the more political opportunities there are to raise national – and therefore global – ambition, the more likely world leaders are to actually seize them as new alternative energy and energy efficiency technologies become available.

Fast-forward to today. Whether countries now deliver on their core commitment in 2015 to raise their ambition is likely to be more consequential to the future of the Paris Agreement than even Donald Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from it.

Indeed, any such decision will almost certainly be swiftly overturned by a future Democratic president.

Climate change tops risks for world in 2020 – Davos report

The fact that every current Democratic contender has also vowed to aggressively and quickly ramp up the US’s own efforts to close the ambition gap, both at home and abroad, will help to reassure others contemplating their own next steps.

This includes China, which at present is under no pressure from the US administration’s current inertia to do the same.

Thankfully, the UK as the hosts of this year’s conference in Glasgow, will be in the driver’s seat. The British will have a clear focus, bolstered by their strong election result and the opportunity to put Brexit behind them.

Furthermore, the UK government is assured that support for climate action is not just bipartisan, it is the law of the land.

The UK’s vast diplomatic reach – one of the largest in the world – will also help, as will the personal energy of Boris Johnson who used his victory speech to reaffirm his commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

As one of the heavy lifters of the EU’s collective emissions reduction efforts, London will have no issue announcing a superior national target that will pressure the rest of the world to do likewise.

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Nevertheless, the scale of the task is still of biblical proportions. While more than 100 countries have now pledged to enhance their Paris targets by the end of this year and develop longer-term plans to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, this still doesn’t include enough of the world’s biggest emitters.

As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has rightly identified, persuading these big emitters is a top priority for 2020. His decision to convene an event to take stock of the summit of world leaders he hosted last September will help.

But everyone – from political insiders to ordinary citizens – has a role to play in helping him and incoming Cop president Claire Perry O’Neill ensure that every world leader understands the need to act, feels the weight to act, and trusts they have the support to act.

Above all, this means acting to keep global temperature increases below the 1.5°C guardrail that Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed and I first proposed at Copenhagen. And, as the science tells us, this year might be the last opportunity to do that.

Kevin Rudd is president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. He is a former Australian Prime Minister (2007-10, 2013) and Foreign Minister (2010-12).

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The agency’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is regarded as a reference for governments, companies and investors on the state of the world’s energy prospects and explores possible futures for global energy trends.

In the report, published on Wednesday, the IEA extended its Sustainable Development Scenario to achieve the tougher Paris Agreement goal of 1.5C.

Under this scenario, the IEA sets out what would need to happen for the world to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2C”: oil demand peaks within the next few years, universal energy access is achieved by 2030 and energy-related CO2 emissions fall 3.8% per year to less than 10 gigatonnes in 2050 to put the world on track to achieve net zero emissions by 2070.

On this trajectory, the IEA found the world would have a two in three chance of limiting global temperature rise to 1.8C without having to remove CO2 from the air by producing bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs), for instance.

IEA develops pathway to ambitious 1.5C climate goal

Under the same scenario, the IEA gives a 50% change of meeting the 1.5C goal by using negative emissions technologies after 2070 to absorb around 300Gt of CO2 – making-up for overshooting the emissions limits that would keep temperatures below 1.5C.

The IEA acknowledged there are “uncertainties” about the scale, impacts and costs of negative emissions, which require large amounts of land, potentially conflicting with food production. But its scenario is only modelled to 2050 and does not assess whether the deployment of negative emissions at scale in the last part of the century is feasible or sustainable.

Instead, the IEA argues its scenario would use less negative emissions than the average level of CO2 that needs to be removed from the air in IPCC scenarios, which give a 50% chance or more of limiting warming to 1.5C.

Source: IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2019

For Joeri Rogelj, a scientist at Imperial College and a lead author on the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 1.5C report, the comparison with IPCC scenarios is “a smoke screen” masking the IEA scenario’s lack of consistency with long-term sustainable development.

“The amount of CO2 removal needed after 2070 to meet 1.5C would go well beyond the sustainable limits that the IPCC has identified,” he said, describing it as “really problematic”.

Instead, the scenario “ends in 2050 with a world warming beyond a level science considers compatible with sustainable development of poor and vulnerable populations,” he told CHN.

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The WEO report does include a short and undetailed pathway for the world to achieve the 1.5C goal without negative emissions. Under this pathway, developed countries achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and developing countries by 2050 – a goal that is not currently being considered by large emitters such as China and India.

Rogelj said the IEA’s “hesitant” attention to the 1.5C goal was “a positive step” but also a “missed opportunity” to fully align the WEO with international ambition.

In June, CHN reported that the IEA was exploring options to develop a scenario aligned with the 1.5C goal after the agency came under fire in a letter from scientists, business leaders and campaigners for not considering the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target.

This opened a debate about the role of the IEA setting norms around global energy use. The agency’s business as usual scenario, which charts a world on track to at least 2.7C of warming, remains the WEO’s central reference for investors, rather than a scenario aligned to the Paris goals.

“It’s simply not enough to explore 1.5C in a couple of paragraphs if the bulk of the analysis remains focused on this default pathway that would put us on track for a catastrophic path of warming,” said Kelly Trout, senior research analyst at Oil Change International.

“By continuing to fall short on ambition, the IEA normalises disastrous levels of fossil fuel investment,” she added.

The post IEA World Energy Outlook outlines 1.5C scenario appeared first on Climate Home News.

Many fish, corals and other marine life are suffering in ever warmer waters, with more frequent underwater heatwaves, acidification caused by man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a decline in levels of oxygen, the world’s leading climate scientists said.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a special report about the oceans and the cryosphere – the world’s frozen regions. It was compiled by more than 100 authors from 36 nations.

The report is the most detailed look at the impact of climate change ranging from melting glaciers on the world’s highest mountains to the depths of the oceans that cover 71% of the Earth’s surface.

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“The open sea, the Arctic, the Antarctic and the high mountains may seem far away to many people,” said Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC. “But we depend on them and are influenced by them directly and indirectly in many ways.” Melting Himalayan glaciers, for instance, provide water to grow crops or generate hydropower before flowing into the oceans.

The report points to alarming signs of an accelerating melt of Antarctica that could herald an irreversible thaw from the world’s biggest store of frozen ice, ahead of Greenland.

Even so, sea level rise could be limited to 43cm by 2100, and around a metre by 2300, if the world sharply cuts greenhouse gas emissions in line with a goal set by almost 200 nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming to 2C above pre-industrial times, it said.

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But a future with no meaningful action and rising greenhouse gas emissions could push up sea levels by 84cm by 2100, about 10cm higher than estimated in the most recent IPCC global assessment in 2014 because of Antarctica’s quickening melt.

On that track, seas could rise by anywhere between 2.3 and 5.4 metres by 2300, it said. That would redraw maps of the world, make entire low-lying nations in the Pacific Ocean uninhabitable and swamp coasts from Bangladesh to Miami.

Lee said that there were worrying signs that the world was losing the race against climate change. “We need to take immediate and drastic action to cut emissions right now,” he said.

“Humanity is exacting a terrible toll on the ocean,” Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg and Palau president Tommy Remengesau Jr. wrote in CNN on Monday. “Global warming, combined with the negative impacts of numerous other human activities, is devastating our ocean, with alarming declines in fish stocks, the death of our reefs, and sea level rise that could displace hundreds of millions of people.”

Authors said those different futures for rising seas highlighted stark choices now.

“Although many of the messages may seem depressing … there are actual, positive choices that can be made to limit the worst impacts of climate change,” said Michael Meredith, of the British Antarctic Survey.

Nerilie Abram, of Australian National University, also said: “We see changes in all of these areas, from the tops of high mountain to the depths of the oceans and the polar region …We see two very different futures ahead of us.”

The report was published two days after leaders failed to match UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’ call for nations to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 at a summit in New York.

Global CO2 output continues to rise. Guterres said such immediate action was needed to get on track to limit warming to 1.5C, the toughest goal of the Paris Agreement. Global average temperatures are already up about 1C.

The UN asked for climate plans. Major economies failed to answer

Delegates to the IPCC said Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s top oil producer, had repeatedly sought changes at the Monaco meeting, partly to weaken links to an IPCC report in 2018 that examined ways to achieve the 1.5C goal.

Largely at Saudi insistence, Wednesday’s text, for instance, merely said it “follows” the 1.5C report and another about climate change and land issued this year. Many other delegates had favoured the word “complements” to underscore that the reports are part of a family of scientific studies.

Delegates said the Saudis pushed to water down any wording that would link this report to the IPCC’s 1.5 degrees report. In Katowice, the COP only “noted” the 1.5C report, under pressure from Saudis, Americans etc, stopping short of “welcoming” it. 

Saudi Arabia seemed to worry that the Santiago COP may “welcome” this new report. If so, it could implicitly endorse the findings in the 1.5C report if they were strongly connected in the text, so they wanted to loosen any links.

Some authors said wrangling over wording ended up helping because authors tightened the scientific findings.

Martin Sommerkorn, an author with the WWF conservation group, said that “the report ended up stronger because of a defence of the science.”

Delegates said the wrangling contributed to delay the meeting, with an all-night session lasting into Tuesday, from a scheduled finish on Monday.

They also said that the US delegation did not stand in the way of the science, even though US president Donald Trump plans to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

Climate science on 1.5C erased at UN talks as US and Saudis step in

Among other findings, the report said the maximum catch of fish in the oceans, already falling because of factors including over-fishing and pollution as well as warming waters, would fall by between 20 and 24% this century unless governments take strong action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

And fish stocks would be driven polewards or to the depths as the waters warm, perhaps causing conflicts over dwindling resources.

The report said extreme high tides or storm surges that historically happened only once a century could become at least annual events by 2100, exacerbated by rising sea levels. And a melt of permafrost could release methane and undermine infrastructure in mountains or polar regions.

“The impacts of human-made carbon emissions on our oceans are on a much larger scale and happening way faster than predicted,” said Taehyun Park, global climate political advisor with Greenpeace East Asia.

The post Dying oceans rising faster than predicted, UN warns in stark report appeared first on Climate Home News.

An annotated draft of the Pacific Islands Forum declaration, seen by Climate Home News, showed Australia trying to suppress references to the climate “crisis”, 1.5C, carbon neutrality, a ban on new coal plants and phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies.

Climate change is high on the agenda at the forum this week, putting small island nations vulnerable to sea level rise on a collision course with Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s pro-coal government. Morrison is due to arrive in the Tuvalu capital Funafuti on Wednesday.

Ahead of the leaders’ summit, governments were invited to comment on a draft declaration, to form the basis for a political statement to be negotiated over the next couple of days.

Pacific islands criticise Australia’s carbon accounting dodge

Fiji’s prime minister Frank Bainimarama, who presided over the 2017 UN climate talks, directly appealed to Australia to transition away from coal “to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change” during an informal meeting in Tuvalu on Monday.

Bainimarama said that while it was not for Fiji “to be prescriptive” over national affairs, he urged Canberra to appreciate “the existential threat” facing Pacific nations.

But in comments on the draft dated 7 August, Australia sought to wriggle out of its climate commitments and weaken language on limiting global temperatures to 1.5C of warming – the tougher target of the Paris Agreement that small island states say is essential to their survival.

Among suggested edits, Australia deleted references to the 1.5C goal being an “irrefutable red-line” for forum members, instead referring to limiting temperature rise “in line with the Paris Agreement”.

It also pushed back against efforts to bring national policies in line with the latest science on 1.5C from the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on 1.5C.

Analysis: Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

Australia agreed to “recognis[e] the information” in the report without endorsing its conclusion that global emissions must fall 45% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050 for a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5C. Indeed, Australia’s version excises any mention of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This is something only a handful of largely developed countries have committed to, with New Zealand indicating in notes that it would support achieving net zero carbon “around 2050”.

UN secretary general António Guterres has thrown his weight behind the issue, demanding every country start planning for carbon neutrality by 2050 ahead of his climate action summit on 23 September in New York.

Instead, Australia’s edits call on countries to “formulate and communicate long term [greenhouse gas] emissions development strategies by 2020” – a looser framework that allows for varying levels of ambition.

The draft statement echoes others of Guterre’s demands and calls for “an immediate global ban on the construction of new coal plants and coal mines” and the “urgent phase out of all fossil fuel subsidies”.

Guterres asks all countries to plan for carbon neutrality by 2050

On both instances, Australia suggested deleting the paragraph, asserting that the issue is “not a shared forum priority”.

The draft statement concludes on a call to all countries, “with no caveats”, to take decisive and transformative action – a likely dig at Australia for planning to use Kyoto-era carbon credits to meet its Paris Agreement pledges. Again, Australia pushed to cut the “no caveats” clause.

Morrison appeared to curry favour with small island nations on Tuesday, proposing to redirect AU$500 million (US$340m) from existing aid funds to boost investments in renewable energy and climate and disaster resilient infrastructure.

In a statement, Morrison said the measure highlighted Australia’s “commitment to not just meeting our emissions reduction obligations at home but supporting our neighbours and friends,” adding the country was “doing [its] part to cut global emissions”.

Australia has pledged to cut emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030 – a target it is yet not on track to meet.

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Pacific nations leaders were left unimpressed by the proposal.

Tuvalu’s prime minister Enele Sopoaga told reporters: “No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse to not to do the right thing that is cutting down your emissions, including not opening your coal mines.”

Sopoaga said the Pacific Island Forum declaration “must push forward and seek urgent actions, concrete actions by the global community” and expressed the hope “our Australian colleagues and others will take heat of this imperative”.

In a statement following Monday’s informal discussions, seen by CHN, the Pacific small island developing states said climate change represented “the single greatest [threat] to the security of Pacific island countries”.

The statement urged world leaders to “acknowledge that we are already facing a climate crisis”, “dramatically accelerate a global response to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement” and take action in line with Guterres’ demands for ramping up ambition.

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The post Australia seeks to water down climate declaration at Pacific summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Discussions came to a deadlock at the talks in Bonn after a small group of countries refused to engage in substantive discussions over how the report’s findings could be used to inform policies on increasing the pace and scale of decarbonisation.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out the differences between 1.5C and 2C of warming – a matter of survival for many vulnerable countries including small island states which pushed for the findings to lead to more ambitious carbon-cutting policies.

Wealthy countries resist global tax on carbon offsets

At the closing plenary, which took place amid soaring summer temperatures in the former west German capital, a five-paragraph watered-down agreement put an end to formal discussions on the report.

The agreed text expressed “appreciation and gratitude” to the scientific community for the report, which it said “reflects the best available science” and notes “the views expressed on how to strengthen scientific knowledge on global warming of 1.5C”.

It offers no way forward for the report to be considered further in formal negotiations.

In the final meeting of the talks, diplomats came together to express their disappointment. Franz Perrez, lead negotiator for Switzerland, wore a t-shirt with the message “science is not negotiable” and urged countries to use the report to inform their policies and “make the right decisions”.

A diplomat from Costa Rica said the IPCC report on 1.5C represented “a great triumph of science” and that “the quality of the work and the robustness of the conclusions are a tremendous achievement”.

“We recognise that many messages of the special report are difficult to accept,” she said, adding: “On climate change, listening to the science is not a choice but a duty. If we are asking the world to change, we also, as representatives, need to be willing to change.”

The meeting’s chair Paul Watkinson said science remained “at the heart” of UN Climate Change’s science stream and that it is “essential for all our collective and individual activities”.

Carlos Fuller, lead negotiator for the alliance of small island states (Aosis), told Climate Home News he was disappointed there would be no other formal opportunities for countries to delve into the science.

“When anyone is trying to discredit the science it is worrying, especially in the middle of a heatwave. We are the ones suffering if others reject the science,” he said.

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Fuller said the final version of the text “encouraged everyone to use the [report’s findings]” but prevented the science from being debated.

Following pressure from a group of large oil and gas producers led by Saudi Arabia, a previous version of the text aimed to cast doubt on the report’s scientific grounding. It stressed the “risks and uncertainties” of the report’s methodology and raised concerns that “the scientific knowledge gap” would “hamper the ability to inform decision making at national, regional and international levels.”

Gebru Jember Endalew of Ethiopia, negotiator for the group of least developed countries, told Climate Home News this previous version of the text was “unacceptable” because it “questioned and revisited the science”.

“We can’t negotiate science,” he said. “This is not our mandate.”

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Endalew said that although excluding the report from formal negotiations was “a mistake” it was a better outcome to “go without anything rather than having a shopping list of issues”.

Instead, he called on Chile, which is taking on the talks’ presidency, to organise events so that discussions can continue informally.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was commissioned by the UN on behalf of all countries, including those now objecting to its methodology.

Saudi Arabia, the US, Kuwait and Russia also refused to endorse the report’s findings at the last round of talks in Katowice, Poland, last year, despite support from almost the entire community of nations.

Alden Meyer, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described the agreed text as “very weak” and added little more than what had already been agreed.

“It shows a small group of large oil and gas producing countries have deep concerns about the implications of the report for their future revenue and are coordinating a strategy to try and block these implications to be more widely understood.

THREAD on why Saudi Arabia is so afraid of the @IPCC_CH's 1.5C report https://t.co/VX4RuRxz9W

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) June 27, 2019

“But no matter how hard they try, Saudi Arabia can’t put the message back into the bottle, the report is out there,” he said.

Eddy Pérez, international policy analyst at Climate Action Network Canada, warned against the “politicisation” of climate science.

In an op-ed in the Financial Times, ambassador Lois Young, of Belize and the chair of Aosis, said five years after all countries had agreed to the Paris Agreement, a few countries wished to “quietly use procedural measures to rip it up away from the public gaze” – a strategy she described as “a rejection of multilateralism”.

“The move essentially declares that small islands and low-lying coastal developing states like my home, Belize, are disposable global zones to be sacrificed amid unprecedented climate change,” she wrote. “This is a crisis that affects our security and we call on those blocking at the UN to step aside.”

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The post UN report on 1.5C blocked from climate talks after Saudi Arabia disputes science appeared first on Climate Home News.

Discussions came to an impasse in December last year when Saudi Arabia, the US, Kuwait and Russia – four big oil producers – refused to endorse the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That continued this week as climate talks resumed in Bonn, Germany, with countries deadlocked over how to use the report to inform their plans to fulfil the Paris Agreement. Saudi Arabia raised concerns the report could become a permanent item on the UN climate agenda.

Under what diplomats called a “gentlemen’s agreement”, which was struck before the Bonn meeting opened, negotiators agreed to work on a compromise. They also agreed to conclude discussions by next Wednesday, regardless of whether they have reached firm conclusions.

Five things to watch at UN climate talks in Bonn

The report, which provides evidence for what the world would look like under 1.5C of warming – the tougher target under the Paris Agreement demanded by vulnerable countries including small island states – has been hugely influential in shifting the narrative for urgent climate action.

But the terms of the deal could mean countries may “no longer have a dedicated space to discuss the findings of the report”, said Rueanna Haynes, a delegate for St Kitts and Nevis.

Haynes, who spoke passionately about the importance of formally recognising the report at a climate summit in Katowice, Poland, last December, said she hoped “this approach does not constitute a precedent” for future IPCC findings.

“If countries are not able to agree on welcoming the report’s findings or doing anything with them, it’s awkward,” said Carl Schleussner, head of climate science at the NGO Climate Analytics.

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Carlos Fuller of Belize, the lead negotiator of the alliance of small island states, took part in the backroom dealmaking. He said the agreement would allow countries to discuss the substance of the report “without offending the other side”.

“We believe that it was more important that we got to work rather than have an agenda discussion that would last for a week or two,” he told Climate Home News.

Fuller was optimistic the deal would allow countries to reach an agreement before the talks end next week.

“This is not a debate about the report. The report stands on its own. It does not require us to rubber-stamp it,” he said. “Science should infuse everything aspect of the negotiations to reach the 1.5C goal”.

For Eddy Pérez, international policy analyst at Climate Action Network Canada, the compromise is a “risk” at a time when countries are considering strengthening their national contributions to the Paris Agreement.

“We need to make sure that we give the appropriate space for science to inform policy-making,” he said.

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Besides reservations from Saudi Arabia and the US, discussions on the report have so far been constructive, according to Pérez. “This is allowing countries to express their views about the report and for some countries to say how they can use the findings to inform domestic policies,” he said.

The fact a compromise had to be found for the report to be discussed at all shows the limits of the consensus-based format of the negotiations, according to Jennifer Tollmann, policy advisor at think-tank E3G.

“This is a gentlemen’s deal that is not very gentlemanly,” she said. “It now puts the onus on countries to be creative and look for new spaces [inside the negotiation process] for the report to be discussed.”

Schleussner said the long-term impacts of the deal on the negotiation process would not become clear until the next climate meeting in Chile later this year. Some countries are already working to find other ways to incorporate discussion of the report.

A submission by Belize, Bhutan and Costa Rica on behalf of the alliance of small island states, least developed countries and Latin American and Caribbean countries proposes further exchanges and workshops between scientists and negotiators to help countries strengthen their understanding of the 1.5C goal and ramp-up ambition.

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The agency’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) came under fire in an April letter from business leaders, scientists and campaigners for not considering the tougher temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.

Since the letter, the IEA has canvassed outside experts on a new, 1.5C-compatible model. They include Joeri Rogelj, a scientist at Imperial College and lead author on a recent UN report on 1.5C warming.

He said there was “genuine interest” at the IEA and – in his view – the agency “definitely intend” to produce a new scenario.

Rogelj, a signatory of the April letter, said two options were being considered at the time he was consulted by the IEA. The first was a full pathway to reach global net zero emissions on a timeline that would fit with 1.5C.

Global energy agency asked to stop normalising dangerous climate change

“My understanding is that modelling the entire pathway is really challenging given the resources and the time constraints they have to produce the report this year,” Rogelj said.

That leaves a second option that charts a course to 2030. Rogelj said this would allow the IEA to do the modelling in time for the release of this year’s WEO in November. A draft is due in July.

A spokesman for the IEA did not deny a 1.5C scenario was under consideration, but stressed that work on the WEO was at a preliminary stage.

“We are currently in the review and analysis phase for the forthcoming World Energy Outlook 2019 [and] are considering new science, new technology costs, and new themes for the next edition. Until we complete the full analysis, we are not in a position to comment on the content of the WEO,” the spokesman said.

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The WEO is used by businesses, investors and governments as the global benchmark for modelling the energy industry. The outlook’s most prominent scenario is one that extrapolates current policies. The IEA and other international bodies have repeatedly warned that this path would send the earth’s climate into dangerous territory.

The April letter said most users saw this scenario as “guiding”, potentially leading investors and policymakers to align their plans to it. In 2015 in Paris, nations agreed to hold warming “below 2C” and stretch for a 1.5 limit. This lower, less destructive goal should be reflected in the IEA’s reports, they said.

This opened a debate over the IEA’s role in setting norms around global energy use. The agency responded that it produces a range of scenarios highlighting the huge gap between the current global trajectory and a safe climate. These include a scenario under which warming is held to 2C and “sustainable development” pathway, first published in 2017. Both of them require global emissions to peak this year. The IEA has already produced models that align to 1.5C, although it has not published them as a full scenario alongside these others.

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A source who has worked closely with the IEA said a 1.5C scenario for WEO 2019 was “definitely amongst the areas being looked at and assessed and thought about”.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, is also consulting on the 1.5C modelling work, according to the source. “He’s always been someone who is concerned about the climate and has been seeking to push a strong focus on climate risks.”

The IEA is an intergovernmental body with 30 full members, all drawn from the OECD. They represent a range of political perspectives and economic interests. In regular meetings at its Paris headquarters, the agency briefs governments on its research and the states communicate their priorities.

Some members are unlikely to be supportive. Cutting emissions in line with 1.5C is a deep challenge for all countries, but particularly economies tied to the production of coal, oil and gas. Last year the US, the largest contributor to the IEA budget, refused to join other countries in welcoming a UN scientific report on the impacts of 1.5C warming.

Other member states are lobbying the IEA in favour of a 1.5C scenario, according to Greg Muttitt, research director of Oil Change International (OCI). The NGO is coordinating a pressure campaign involving investors, pro-climate action governments and “influential climate experts”.

“This is a very live conversation in all three of those circles,” Muttitt said.

One of those climate luminaries is former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. She has an ongoing dialogue with Birol and the IEA on the issue of 1.5C. On Tuesday, she told CHN the agency had an “extraordinary opportunity now to step up its leadership and ensure the WEO meets its users’ needs in a rapidly changing world”.

“The timing is key,” Figueres said. National governments are bound by the Paris Agreement to update their climate pledges by the end of next year. Given it is released in November each year, the 2019 edition of the WEO has a chance to inform those plans.

“With the Paris goal of 1.5C as our clear, shared imperative, all nations will benefit from a robust 1.5C-compatible IEA scenario,” said Figures.

Rogelj said it was possible the IEA would conclude that holding below the 1.5C limit was not feasible. The agency typically considers political constraints when assessing targets. This would “highlight the real challenges you have to achieve” the goal, he said.

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It is undoubtedly the case that species go extinct. And sometimes large numbers of species disappear together in mass events caused by the same physical stresses. It is also true that at some point in the future the human species will go extinct, or at the least evolve into a new species partly of our own making.

Yet I resist the current mood of ‘extinctionism’ which pervades the new public discourse around climate change. Talking about the future in this way is counter-productive. And it does a disservice to development, justice, peace-making and humanitarian projects being undertaken around the world today.

A denier is a person who denies something, “who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.” If I do not believe that climate change will drive the human species to extinction, does that make me an extinction denier? For I do not believe that there is good scientific or historical evidence that climate change will lead to human extinction.

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And yet you would be led to believe that there is. Last September the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres made the bald claim, “We face a direct existential threat” from climate change. Jem Bendell at the University of Cumbria warns, “there is a growing community of people who conclude we face inevitable human extinction”. Bendell goes on to state that ‘Inevitable Near Term Human Extinction’ (INTHE) has become a widely used phrase for online discussions about climate-collapse. And Greta Thunberg frequently claims that climate change “is an emergency, this is an existential crisis”.

Across the Atlantic the American commentator Tom Englehardt has placed humanity on a suicide watch for itself.  “Even for an old man like me,” he says, “it’s a terrifying thing to watch humanity make a decision, however inchoate, to essentially commit suicide.” And in David Wallace-Wells’ best-selling book, An Uninhabitable Earth, he claims that climate change is “much, much worse than you think”.

This rise in extinction rhetoric in (largely) English-speaking societies over the past 12 months is in part linked to the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5C Warming published last October. The slogan “we have only 12 years left” has somehow been extracted from this report and feeds the rise of climate clocks such as this one from the Human Impact Lab in Montreal. But the IPCC report offers neither scientific nor historical evidence for human extinction.

From this extinction fear arises the “panic” that Greta Thunberg has called for. Panic demands a response and one response is to declare an emergency. ‘Climate emergencies’ are now being declared in jurisdictions ranging from universities, the British Parliament and several local authorities in the UK.

Climate emergency declarations spread across UK after Extinction Rebellion

But the rhetoric of extinction and emergency does not adequately describe the situation we find ourselves in. Declaring a climate emergency implies the possibility of time-limited radical and decisive action that can end the emergency. But climate change is not like this. The historical trajectory of human expansion, western imperialism and technological development has created climate change as a new condition of human existence rather than as a path to extinction.

So here are five reasons why I am an extinction denier.

The rhetoric of climate change and extinction does not do justice to what we know scientifically. Climate prediction science is fundamentally based on probabilistic forecasts which underpin the quantification of risk. There is a range of possible values for future global warming. It is as false scientifically to say that the climate future will be catastrophic as it is to say with certainty that it will be merely lukewarm.

Neither does it do justice to what we know historically. Some like the American veteran journalist Bill Moyers have called for a war-like stance in relation to climate change, using the analogy of the late 1930s: “In the second world war, the purpose of journalism was to awaken the world to the catastrophe looming ahead of it. We must approach our climate crisis the same way”. But as the historian and Liberal politician James Bryce explained in 1920, “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies”. We should beware of false or trite analogues.

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The rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us psychologically. It all too easily induces feelings of terror as Ed Maibach at George Mason University bluntly remarks: “As a public health professional (and as a human), I find the prospect of 3 or 4 degree C of global warming to be nothing short of terrifying.” But inducing a state of terror generates counter-productive responses in human behaviour.

Nor does the rhetoric of climate and extinction help us politically. Simply ‘uniting behind the science’ or ‘passing on the words of science’ gets us no further forward politically. Even if climate science predicted the extinction of humanity, as Darrick Evensen explains climate change “raises a host of ethical, historical and cultural questions that are at most tangentially connected to any scientific findings”.

And finally the rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us morally. Even if we take these claims literally, the mere fact of human extinction by no means impels us to conclude that the correct moral response must be to prevent that extinction. There may well be other moral demands upon us which take precedence, and yet which we ignore. Why the human species above other species? Why are the future unborn more morally demanding of us than the dispossessed victims of today? Why is suicide the worst sin of all?

Despite what some claim, climate change is not a black and white issue. It has many shades of grey. By this I mean that interpreting the significance of the fact that humans are altering the world’s climate is not self-evident. To believe that there is an absolute truth to be told about what climate change means, or what ‘it demands of us’, is misguided.

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What climate change means is not ‘revealed truth’ emerging from some scientific script. The political meanings and individual and collective responses to climate change have to be worked out iteratively. They have to be negotiated within the political structures and processes we inhabit, negotiations that can’t be circumvented by an appeal to the authority of science being ‘on our side’. (Of course this must also include the possibility of renegotiating some of those same political structures).

Campaigning on the grounds that the human species faces extinction because of climate change – and declaring a climate emergency – is a superficial response to complex realities. And it is talk that opens the door to one-eyed techno-solutions – such as envisaged by the putative Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair – and fuels the possible legitimation of dangerous solar climate engineering schemes.

The new condition of climate change is real. Without being deferential or uncritical, we need to be cognisant of what science can tell us about the future. We need more varied, and more active, voices in climate politics. And it requires us to think through, argue and enact political projects and ethical priorities in different ways.

But I will argue against climate politics henceforth being conducted under the restrictive conditions of emergency. And I will deny that there is warrant to collapse the possibilities of the future to human extinction.

Mike Hulme is professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge. This article originally appeared on his blog.

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In a 277-page report commissioned by the government, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) called for legislation to set a path to net-zero emissions across the economy.

If the government adopts the advice – as is widely expected – its targets would be world-leading, the committee said. It would exceed the average global effort needed to give a 50% chance of averting temperature rise above 1.5C – the stretch limit of the Paris Agreement.

“We [Britain] have been responsible for the biggest segment of climate change that has happened in our world to date,” said committee chair John Gummer, at a press briefing.

“We need to be responsible not only for the leadership to overcome those challenges but we have the opportunity to lead the new industrial revolution that will be the basis of the economy of which we talk.”

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The business and energy ministry said it would respond “in due course” to the recommendations. “Few subjects unite people across generations and borders like climate change and I share the passion of those wanting to halt its catastrophic effects,” said secretary of state Greg Clark in a statement. “This report now sets us on a path to become the first major economy to legislate to end our contribution to global warming entirely.”

By some measures of fairness, explored in the report, the UK as a rich country and historic high emitter should make the shift to a carbon neutral economy faster. Activist movement Extinction Rebellion is calling for a 2025 net-zero target.

The committee advised a significantly earlier carbon neutral date “does not currently appear credible”, based on existing technology and behavioural trends.

That could change if other sectors replicate recent dramatic cost reductions in solar power and battery technology, the report said – or if society embraces more radical lifestyle changes.

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“It is perfectly possible that in future, we may want to revisit that, but for now 2050 is the correct date,” said chief executive Chris Stark. “There is a moment here for the UK to set a target and to have a lot of leverage on the global questions of how quickly the rest of the world can reach net-zero.”

The only other country considering a similarly ambitious law, according to the committee’s analysis, is France. Both plans cover all greenhouse gases, all economic sectors including international aviation and shipping and do not rely on buying carbon credits from other countries to meet their obligations.

Sweden and Norway have earlier net-zero targets – 2045 and 2030 respectively – but do not tick the last two boxes. Denmark, California and New Zealand are unclear on whether their net-zero plans cover all greenhouse gases or just carbon dioxide. A handful of others have ambitious goals but have not enshrined them in law.

Britain can set an example to the rest of the EU and others, the report said: “Setting a strong net-zero target will enhance the UK’s diplomatic influence, and it should continue to use this positively, to strengthen governance for bioenergy and removals, on sustainable finance and potentially as the host of the key UN talks in 2020.”

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At the Cop26 climate summit in 2020, which the UK is bidding to host, countries will be expected to submit updated climate plans. In September, countries at a special meeting in New York have been asked by the UN secretary general to show how they plan to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. An ambitious display from the UK would turn up the heat on others.

A UK target cannot stand alone, the committee said, and needs to be backed by stronger policies. Its previous analysis showed the UK is set to fall short of existing “carbon budgets” from the mid-2020s onwards.

A ban on new petrol and diesel cars should be brought forward from 2040 to 2030, tree-planting accelerated and low carbon heating and farming pursued with more urgency. The plans also count on capturing CO2 from heavy industry and pumping it underground, using technology that has struggled to take off.

“The [Conservative government’s] clean growth framework has all the right things in it, but not nearly the right level of ambition,” said Stark.

In contrast to previous plans to cut emissions 80% by 2050, the net-zero scenario demands active participation of citizens.

Suggestions include choosing to walk, cycle or take public transport instead of driving; flying less; installing household insulation and setting thermostats at 19C or lower; eating less red meat and dairy; repairing and sharing products; and raising awareness in workplaces and schools.

“We have to get the support of the whole nation if we are going to deliver this,” said Gummer.

Climate emergency declarations spread across UK after Extinction Rebellion

The report comes amid an upswell of public concern on climate change. School strikes inspired by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg and direct action by Extinction Rebellion propelled the topic onto newspaper front pages and TV bulletins in April.

The opposition Labour Party and devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales have adopted the activists’ “climate emergency” rhetoric. And on Wednesday the UK parliament voted through a Labour motion to declare a symbolic “environment and climate emergency”.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg visits an Extinction Rebellion protest in London last week (Photo: Greta Thunberg/Twitter)

Advocates draw on last year’s UN blockbuster science report spelling out the increased dangers posed by 2C global warming compared to 1.5C.

Climate minister Claire Perry, who commissioned the CCC advice in October, was moved to defend the government record in parliament last week.

Welcoming the “passion and fervour” of protesters, Perry said: “I hope those who have taken their passion public will continue to express their views without… undermining the consensus we will need to support further, bolder action.”

In France, the government retracted a diesel tax hike after it sparked a backlash from the “yellow vest” movement; while Germany’s attempts to phase out coal have been fraught by resistance from mining unions and business.

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Taking inspiration from the US campaign for a “green new deal”, Labour is proposing a “green industrial revolution”, emphasising green jobs. However parts of the party continue to back contentious brown job-creating projects like expansion of Heathrow Airport and a new coal mine in northern England.

Farhana Yamin, climate lawyer-turned-activist with Extinction Rebellion, told Climate Home News: “Everyone who is declaring [a climate emergency] has to understand that fossil fuels have to be phased out very, very rapidly. Any new investment in fossil fuels is out and the question is how – quickly and fairly – to phase out what we have got.”

On the timing of net-zero, Yamin said “we won’t really know until we do it” what date is possible and “the important thing is to start now”.

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After a heated debate on Saturday night failed to adopt the conclusions of a scientific report on the effects of warming the planet by 1.5C, Saudi Arabia’s chief negotiator said scientists had painted a picture that ignored the historical responsibility of major polluters.

In an interview with Carbon Brief, Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator Ayman Shasly said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – released in October – “shows that [halting warming at 1.5C] is achievable, it’s doable, let’s all do it together, which is not fair. What is the equity in this? Where is history in this?”

He said responsibility for constraining the use of fossil fuels should not fall on developing countries, including Saudi Arabia, but on the largest, richest countries with long histories of emitting carbon, which include the US, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.

“They are the one in question, not us. They are the one who should really make the space for all of us, as developing countries, to at least develop to something closer to the level of development that is enjoyed by the industrial world,” said Shasly, whose country is the second largest oil producer in the world.

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But during the debate on Saturday night, which revolved around whether countries would “note” or “welcome” findings the IPCC released in October, it was developing countries that spoke most loudly in favour of the science.

In a speech to the UN body on Wednesday, Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama will also call for the report to be welcomed.

“Let me make this perfectly clear. Fiji welcomes the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees. And we thank the thousands of scientists who contributed to it,” he will say. “We must all accept the science, which is irrefutable. We accept science in virtually every single other form of human endeavour. So simple logic dictates that we must do it when the evidence of human-induced warming is so conclusive.”

All would pay a price if the the science was ignored, Bainimarama said on Tuesday: “If you think you’re safe in your environment, if you’re not vulnerable, you will be vulnerable if we do not follow what the scientists told us.”

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Costa Rica’s environment minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez told Climate Home News that Saudi Arabia’s resistance, which it shared with Kuwait, Russia and the US, had marked it out from other developing nations, which negotiate at climate talks together under a 134-country bloc known as the G77 and China.

“This is where I think we have the big difference with some of the G77 members,” Rodríguez said. “I’m not that surprised that once more countries have expressed little commitment to comply with the scientific recommendations… there shouldn’t be any possibility to question the information.”

The IPCC concluded climate-related risks would continue to worsen with a temperature rise of 1.5C, but remain lower than at 2C. Impacts would disproportionately impact “disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods” the report said. It also found the economic growth of countries in the tropics and southern hemisphere subtropics – a region almost entirely made up of developing countries – would be most impeded.

Climate science on 1.5C erased at UN talks as US and Saudis step in

But it also found that rapid transformation would be required in every country, with fossil fuel use effectively ended by mid century.

This pressure offers developing countries “the opportunity to leapfrog into this century”, said François Martel, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Development Forum. “You don’t see any issues in relation to this report from India, from China, from south America and Africa. Because it’s not a question of economy, it’s a question of survival.”

Melchior Mataki, the Solomon Islands’ head of delegation, said the Saudi position was “akin to saying ‘OK, we can just continue to face the negative consequences of climate change, and probably even lose our economies as well’”.

Mataki said the Solomon Islands would be pushing for the Polish presidency on the UN summit to include a passage welcoming the report in the final declaration of the meeting. An EU source said they were also lobbying the presidency for “welcome”, and others are expected to join in.

Shasly told Carbon Brief that Saudi Arabia had asked for a final decision that would “note” the report.

That sets the stage for a political showdown on Friday night when the meeting is scheduled to end and where the adoption of a rulebook for the Paris Agreement is the main point of order.

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By failing to reach agreement after two and half hours of emotional negotiations, delegates in Katowice set the scene for a political fight next week over the importance of the UN’s landmark scientific report on the effects of a 1.5C rise in the global temperature.

The battle, halfway through a fortnight of Cop24 negotiations, was over two words: “note” or “welcome”.

Saudi Arabia, the US, Kuwait and Russia said it was enough for the members of the UN climate convention (the UNFCCC) to “note” the findings.

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But poor and undeveloped countries, small island states, Europeans and many others called to change the wording to “welcome” the study – noting that they had commissioned it when they reached the Paris climate agreement in 2015.

“This is not a choice between one word and another,” Rueanna Haynes, a delegate for St Kitts and Nevis, told the plenary. “This is us, as the UNFCCC, being in a position to welcome a report that we requested, that we invited [scientists] to prepare. So it seems to me that if there is anything ludicrous about the discussion that is taking place, it is that we in this body are not in a position to welcome the report.”

The four opposing countries argued the change was not necessary. Saudi Arabia threatened to block the entire discussion if others pushed to change the single word – and warned that it would disrupt the last stretch of negotiations between ministers next week.

The aim of the Cop24 climate summit is to agree a dense set of technical rules to underpin the Paris Agreement’s goals for limiting global warming to well below 2C, and ideally 1.5C, by the end of the century.

The scientific report was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October. It found that limiting global warming to 1.5C, rather than below 2C, could help avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, and potentially save vulnerable regions such as low-lying islands and coastal villages in the Arctic. But it also made clear that the world would have to slash greenhouse gases by about 45% by 2030.

Before the plenary on Saturday, the UN’s climate chief Patricia Espinosa said she hoped to see countries “really welcoming and highlighting the importance of this report… Even if the IPCC is very clear in saying how difficult it will be to achieve that goal, it still says it is possible”.

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The US, which raised doubts about the science behind the report before it was finalised, said on Saturday that it would accept wording that noted the IPCC’s findings – while stressing that that “does not imply endorsement” of its contents. Russia said “it is enough just to note it”, rather than welcoming the report, while Kuwait said it was happy with the wording as it stood.

The push in the plenary to change the wording to “welcome” began with the Maldives, which chairs the alliance of small island states. It was quickly backed by a wide range of countries and groups, including the EU, the bloc of 47 least developed countries, the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean, African countries, Norway (another large oil and gas producer), Argentina, Switzerland, Nepal, Bhutan, the Marshall Islands, Belize and South Korea.

Negotiators huddled with the plenary meeting’s chair, Paul Watkinson, for nearly an hour to try and work out a compromise. But Watkinson’s suggestion – welcoming the “efforts” of the IPCC experts and noting the “importance of the underlying research” – fell flat. Delegates from Latin America, small islands, Europe, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and elsewhere argued it was not enough to highlight the work that went into the report, it needed to address the findings.

Watkinson said he was disappointed that they could not agree. But a negotiator said the talks will continue: “This is a prelude to a huge fight next week,” when ministers arrive in Poland. It will be up to the Polish hosts to find a place for the report’s findings in the final outcome of the talks.

Wording that welcomes, rather than notes, the 1.5C report should be the bare minimum, Belize negotiator Carlos Fuller told Climate Home News. However, “the oil producing countries recognise that if the international community takes it on board, it means a massive change in the use of fossil fuels”, he said. “From the US point of view, this is the Trump administration saying ‘we do not believe the climate science’.”

COP 24: 12 activists denied entry to Poland for UN climate summit

Fuller added: “In my opinion we have won the fight, because the headline tomorrow will be: the UNFCCC cannot agree the IPCC report’, and people will say ‘Why, what’s in the report?’ and go and look.”

The 1.5C science wasn’t the only divisive issue after a week of Cop24 talks, with countries still mostly holding their ground on the Paris Agreement’s rulebook.

Contentious decisions related to the transparency of reporting emissions and the make up of national climate plans have all been refined, but ultimately kicked to the higher ministerial level. Several observers raised the concern that some unresolved issues may be too technical for ministers to debate with adequate expertise.

Financial aid is still contentious issue. The rules on how and what developed countries must report on their past and planned funding, and the extent to which emerging economies are urged to do the same, remains largely up for debate.

In a further moment of drama on Saturday afternoon, Africa stood firm as UN officials tried to finalise a draft of the rules that will govern the deal. Africa’s representative Mohamed Nasr said the continent could not accept the deal as it was presented, forcing the text to be redrafted on the plenary floor.

“You can’t bully Africa, it’s 54 countries,” said one negotiator, watching from the plenary floor.

The change will mean new proposals to be made to the text next week. That would allow African ministers to attempt to strengthen a major climate fund dedicated to helping countries adapt to climate change and push for less strict measures for developing countries.

“We have been voicing our concerns, maybe the co-chairs in their attempt to seek a balanced outcome they overlooked some of the stuff. So we are saying that we are not going to stop the process but we need to make sure that our views are included,” Nasr told CHN.

Mohamed Adow, a campaigner with Christian Aid, said the African intervention had “saved the process” by ensuring that dissatisfied countries could still have their issues heard.

“It’s actually much better than it’s ever been in this process at this stage,” he said. “Because this is the end of the first week and ministers have been provided with clear options. Of course nothing is closed but the options are actually narrower.”

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Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist and co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Climate Home News’ podcast CopCast that members of the senate committee of sustainable development had been “surprised” by findings in a major report in October, which said green policies must be coupled with public consultation or face social resistance.

“They expressed how difficult it is for them as members of the senate to think on how to implement transitions. They also said they were powerless. They didn’t know how to change things, basically,” said Masson-Delmotte.

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France has been gripped by rioting for three weeks, after Emmanuel Macron’s government announced a tax on diesel fuels designed to reduce pollution.

Despite a retraction of the policy this week, large demonstrations are expected in the French capital over the weekend. On Saturday morning, police arrested hundreds of protestors from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in Paris.

Masson-Delmotte, who spoke to CHN’s podcast at UN climate talks in Poland, said she had met protesters near her home in Paris.

“It was interesting to understand how much they don’t trust policy makers, how they don’t trust experts,” she said. “What is striking is the inability of the usual democratic representatives, elected people, trade unions – the usual instruments of a democracy – to deal with the situation. There is a lack of dialogue and a lack of perception of representation of a fraction of the population which believes they are trapped when the price of oil goes up and they believe they have no alternative.”

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The IPCC’s special report in October found social barriers to change could be overcome through strong, consultative leadership, “including citizens and allowing for participation for minorities, and having them provide input and endorse it”.

Masson-Delmotte called for the creation of citizens’ assemblies, borrowing a model created in Ireland, in order for the political class to better understand social anxieties and needs.

The protests in France coincide with UN climate talks in Katowice. The Polish host government has used the talks to highlight the impact on workers and other groups affected by the closure of mines or other measures necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.

“It’s … tragic to observe when I live and work in France and I see that our country failed to have a sustainable development approach that pays attention to the ones who are most vulnerable to policies,” said Masson-Delmotte. “I think our senators reflect society and maybe the older generation of society, so they have not yet fully understood the implications of climate change and how deep it goes into thinking differently the way we build a new future.”

France’s standing committee on sustainable development did not respond to a request for comment.

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I was chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) when our group fought for the report at the Paris climate change conference back in 2015. The findings came as a shock, even for those of us who have been sounding the climate change alarm for decades.

Among the most startling revelations is that global warming may exceed 1.5C above preindustrial levels – the temperature beyond which climate change impacts could spiral out of control – in as few as 11 years. Already, with 1C of warming, climate impacts have grown more frequent and severe than previously imagined, including increasingly powerful storms and accelerating sea level rise.

In fact, along with the IPCC report, Aosis successfully advocated for setting a global temperature goal of 1.5C in Paris. As countries on the frontline of the climate crisis, we have long devoted an enormous amount of political capital to pushing for the most ambitious temperature target as possible.

Reality check: is the 1.5C warming target even possible?

Our efforts have helped remind the international community that scientific information, however difficult it may be to hear, must inform the international climate change regime.

But, in light of the report, as well my own observations as the environment minister for the one of the world’s lowest-lying countries, I fear we have entered a new phase in the climate talks, one where we must now devote at least as much energy to securing our priorities on adaptation and loss and damage as we do on mitigation ambition.  

As small island leaders, we know that the cost of adapting to climate impacts is straining our budgets.

In the Maldives, for instance, we are witnessing prolonged droughts in our outlying atolls. Such extremes have major implications for ensuring our people have enough water to drink. In emergencies, we have been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship supplies from our desalination plant in the capital to the affected areas.

At the same time, we have been forced to build coastal protection structures around numerous islands to help manage rising seas and erosion. In the past 5 years, we have spent $85 million on such projects.

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We were fortunate to be among the first group of countries to receive support from the Green Climate Fund for an adaptation project on water security. When complete, it is projected to provide freshwater to over 100,000 people in a group of outer islands at a cost of about $28 million ($4 million of which came from our own budget).

This represents a significant return on investment by any measure, but like all small islands we face dramatically higher adaptation costs if we hope to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects.

Globally, the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries could rise to between $280 and $500 billion per year by 2050, according to a 2016 UN Environment report. The cost will be disproportionately borne by the world’s developing and least developed countries and is exponentially larger than the amount of international public finance available today.

A failure to keep global warming under 1.5C and the enormous shortfall in the support needed to help vulnerable communities adapt also forces us to confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.

Comment: It’s time to make polluters pay for climate damages

Loss and damage refers to the irreversible harm caused by climate change—slow onset events like the disappearance of an island to rising seas or extreme catastrophes like the near total destruction of property seen on Barbuda in the wake of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, established in 2013, was ostensibly supposed to address the aforementioned concerns, but while progress has been made in developing the bureaucratic structure of the mechanism, there is faint hope today that real money will materialize to let it do its work.

Since Aosis formed in 1992, it has always advocated for positions that would give all our members the best chance for survival. Decades ago, the group called for a global temperature goal of 1C. As greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, it became clear that the target was unrealistic. Later, strong scientific evidence pointed to 1.5C as the responsible global temperature goal and the slogan “1.5 to stay alive” was born.

Now that the IPCC is saying we could overshoot 1.5C of warming in about a decade, we must adjust our political demands accordingly. Make no mistake: it would be suicide for the world to continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current pace and we should all demand a rapid transition to renewable energy. But for small island nations, it would also be suicide not to use every lever of power we have to demand what is fair and just: the support we need to manage a crisis that has been thrust upon us.

Thoriq Ibrahim is the environment and energy minister of the Maldives and has been chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States since 2015

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Yet fewer than one in ten contributors to a landmark UN report on the science of 1.5C global warming launched this month were African, of whom many were based at universities outside the region.

A shortage of observational data, high journal fees and lack of compensation for contributors throw up barriers to participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process, experts tell Climate Home News.

“Africa’s participation in the IPCC assessments is very limited,” says James Murombedzi, coordinator of the African Climate Policy Centre at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

Whereas the IPCC draws confident conclusions about trends in the EU, North America and Australia, there is a lot of uncertainty around African findings. Some chapters have no African authors, or only one.

Consequently, Murombedzi says African theories, perspectives and experiences are inadequately represented.

The numbers

Eight out of 91 lead authors of the IPCC special report on 1.5C global warming were from Africa.

A further 78 are among the 783 contributing authors to the three working groups, with most focused on the impacts of climate change.

Of the 489 expert reviewers of the first draft, only 25 were Africans, or 5%.

The problem starts with patchy raw data. “Climate change is based on long term observations of weather patterns,” says Murombedzi. “There is very little climate observation infrastructure in Africa, and therefore very little is known about what is actually happening in terms of climate impacts in Africa.”

That is compounded by a lack of resources to get African research published in the peer-reviewed journals the IPCC relies on to make its assessments.

“African scientists lack funding, capacity, technology, human resource to undertake and monitor front line research and publish their findings,” says Brad Garanganga, a climate scientist from Zimbabwe. “It’s leaving huge data gaps as research is mainly donor-driven, as African governments do not invest in research.”

Analysis: 37 things you need to know about 1.5C global warming

Accessing the latest literature is expensive. Subscriptions to science journals run to hundreds of dollars, which is beyond many academics’ budgets.

“If I want Africa to read my work, I must publish in open access journals or make my articles open access,” says Mouhamadou Bamba Sylla, a senior climate modeller at the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use and contributing author of the IPCC 1.5C report. “That’s an additional between €1500-5000 ($1,700-5,700) fee depending on the journal.”

Even with publications under their belts, scientists usually need to be nominated by governments to take part in the IPCC process. Many governments are not proactive about putting forward their best researchers, according to Sylla.

It is a demanding and unpaid job for those accepted to contribute. At times, African authors, struggling to make a living, would volunteer to write sections but not deliver, he adds.

“The numbers are improving but we must show that we can deliver the things we can volunteer for. If we do not, the next IPCC reports, they will select a few Africans for geographical representation but there will be no actual responsibility and impacts.”

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Murombedzi acknowledges there is little funding in Africa for climate change research. There are various platforms through which African governments can boost investment, he says, citing the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) and the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN).

Mithika Mwenda, secretary general of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), is urging African governments to make it a priority. “I do not think it is about lack of finances since we have a lot of resources wasted on irrelevant issues compared to research institutions. Lop-sided kind of priorities are hindering funds allocation to research and other broader climate work,” he says.

Developing and funding a critical mass of climate scientists in Africa is key, says Sylla: “Only then can we contribute effectively to the IPCC and global climate matters.”

This article was produced as part of an African reporting fellowship supported by Future Climate for Africa.

The post Why UN climate science reports have Africa-shaped gaps appeared first on Climate Home News.

IEA’s Fatih Birol told a conference in Paris that data for the first nine months of the years was already pointing to a record increase in carbon emissions.

A United Nations report last week said society would have to make deep changes to how it consumes energy, travels and builds, to meet a lower global warming target.

Global emissions would need to peak soon after 2020 and decline sharply afterwards in order to keep temperature rise within 1.5C or 2C, said a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Sorry, I have very bad news. My numbers are giving me some despair,” Birol told the conference at the Polish embassy in Paris on Wednesday.

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Poland will host United Nations COP24 talks in December, which will lay out a “rule book” to implement a historic accord reached in Paris in 2015. That agreement set goals to phase out fossil fuel use this century, shift towards cleaner energies and help limit a rise in temperatures.

“Looking at data for the first nine months of this year, emissions this year will increase once again … global emissions will reach a record historical high,” Birol said.

Graphic from the IPCC’s special report on 1.5C

“Therefore the chances of reaching such ambitious targets in my view, are becoming weaker and weaker every year, every month,” he said.

While renewables have been growing strongly, their growth isn’t large enough to reverse CO2 emissions trends, Birol said.

“We need more renewables in all end-uses – including more bioenergy – more energy efficiency and a range of other technologies and fuel sources to correct this course,” he said on Twitter.

Referring to the IPCC report released earlier this month, Birol underscored the “critical role of bioenergy to limit global temperature rises.”

The share of bioenergy in total renewables consumption globally is about 50% today – as much as hydro, wind, solar and all other renewables combined, the IEA said in a report published earlier this month.

In transport, the IPCC’s integrated assessment indicates that biofuels will need to rise 260% by 2030 and 750% by 2050 in order to keep global warming within the 1.5C aspirational limit of the Paris Agreement.

Bioenergy is “the overlooked giant of the renewable energy field,” Birol said.

This article was originally published on Euractiv, CHN’s media partner.

The post ‘Despair’ as global carbon emissions to hit new record in 2018 appeared first on Climate Home News.

The parliament’s environment committee decided in its COP24 resolution that the EU should reconsider its greenhouse gas emissions reduction pledge for 2030, currently fixed at 40%, and bump it up to “at least 55%”.

Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its landmark report on the effects of global warming and warned that temperatures are currently on track to rise by 3C by century’s end.

Stark confirmation that global climate action efforts are nearly completely insufficient to meet even the Paris Agreement’s 2C goal proved incentive enough as a broad coalition of MEPs ended up backing the proposed increase, tabled by the liberal ALDE group.

Green MEP Bas Eickhout, one of the co-authors of the resolution, told Euractiv that the IPCC report was “good timing” and provided “substantive backing of the world’s science” for what his political group have been championing for some time.

The text, which will be scrutinised by a full sitting of the parliament at the end of the month, urges the EU to use the UN’s Talanoa Dialogue to revisit its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) by 2020, as “the current NDC is not in line with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement”.

Unwilling hosts?

Increasing the EU’s climate ambition was less evident in conclusions adopted by EU environment ministers on Tuesday.

Although the council agreed that “collectively, NDCs submitted by parties and current emission trajectories fall far short of what is required to achieve the long-term Paris goals”, the conclusions made no specific mention of increasing the current 40% cuts promise.

Indeed, ministers only agreed that the EU is ready to “communicate or update” its NDC by 2020.

COP24 host Poland actually attempted to water down what have already been branded “weak” conclusions by environmental groups, according to leaked amendments seen by Euractiv.

The Polish delegation wanted to remove “the outcome of the Talanoa Dialogue in Katowice should be a commitment for all parties to reflect on their levels of ambition” but were not successful.

“Poland is sabotaging an ambitious outcome of the Talanoa Dialogue, which is indispensable for success at COP24. Poland is also putting relentless efforts to kill the debate on the need to increase the EU’s targets,” said Wendel Trio, the director of Climate Action Network Europe.

EU Climate Action Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete has made no secret of the fact that recently revised clean energy rules mean the bloc will “de facto” emit 45% less and was reportedly keen to push for a formal increase at the council’s Luxembourg meeting.

But that did not transpire and a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv that the idea was never actually put on the table. A review of the pledge is currently ongoing though.

Commission, can you hear us?

The European Commission’s ongoing effort to draft a long-term climate strategy was also scrutinised by both the parliament resolution and the council conclusions.

MEPs agreed that the strategy should include an option for Europe to reduce emissions to net-zero by 2050, clarifying that the transition should not happen after that specific date.

Parliament sources explained before the vote that less-progressive forces within the European People’s Party wanted to push for “by mid-century” but the EPP eventually ended up backing the 2050 clarification for the very first time.

Eickhout called on the EU executive to present a “credible strategy”.

Tuesday’s council conclusions also urged the Commission to provide a 1.5C-compliant scenario and “at least one pathway towards net-zero emissions in the EU by 2050”.

Further political backing will be decided in plenary session later this month but it will send a strong signal to the EU executive, which is reportedly split over which direction its strategy should take.

Euractiv reported at the beginning of the week that although the political arm of the Commission, including Arias Cañete and even President Jean-Claude Juncker, are pro-net-zero emissions, some in the climate directorate believe business-as-usual is Paris-compliant.

A draft of the long-term strategy revealed that the Commission is split between applying the precautionary principle and favouring a less ambitious transition.

Rockwool International’s Brook Riley told Euractiv that “from a business and investment point of view, there is a big risk in being told a pathway is adequate only to find out later that it isn’t”.

Work is ongoing and a final version is expected to be revealed the week before COP24 on 28 November.

This article was produced by Euractiv

The post EU lawmakers support 55% emission cuts as IPCC spectre lurks appeared first on Climate Home News.

“If you would like to stabilise global warming at 1.5C, the key message is that net CO2 emissions at the global scale must reach zero by 2050,“ Valérie Masson-Delmotte, one of co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s research on the target, said on Monday.

Such a target would require urgent, Herculean changes around the world, criss-crossing the energy, agricultural and transport sectors. Yet, scientists are adamant that countries can limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels if they can summon up the political will.

“The message is: over to governments at this stage: we’ve told you the scientific facts, the evidence, the cost, it is up to the governments now to decide what to do with it,” Jim Skea, another one of the co-chairs of the report, said.

‘Most important years in history’: UN report sounds last-minute climate alarm

The world will need to flex every institutional and diplomatic muscle it has available.

“Countries will need to collaborate,” he added. “We don’t have a top down agreement at Paris, it’s bottom-up. But they need to take collaborative and coordinated action if we’re actually going to achieve a goal of 1.5 degrees warming.”

“Saying option x or option y is not the way this report is framed,” Skea said. “The word ‘or’ does not work in relation to the ambition of 1.5 warming. The only linking word you can use is ‘and’. We can make choices about how much of each option we use, and trade off a bit between them. But the idea you can leave anything out is not possible.”

That means going gang busters for renewables and reforestation, but also using unproven technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, and some that are even less developed, like direct air capture, or enhanced weathering of rocks.

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Whether or not certain individual countries can go net zero by 2050 is another matter. Among developing countries, China and India are key. According to the International Energy Agency, China was the largest carbon emitter in 2015, coughing out 28% of the world’s emissions. Coming third after the United States, India accounted for 6% of the CO2 pie.

Scientists are divided over their potential to wean themselves off carbon by 2050.

Roberto Schaeffer, one of the authors of the report focusing on sustainable development, ruled out a net zero scenario by 2050 for both countries.

“Probably the only countries that, perhaps, can get to zero by, or right after, 2050 are the ones with high potential for afforestation, reforestation, soil gains, pasture intensification, and biofuels with carbon capture and storage [Beccs],” he said.

“Brazil, other parts of Latin America, and parts of Africa may be good candidates for that. But probably not China or India.”

Like Schaeffer, report author Diana Ürge-Vorsatz raised concerns about India’s reliance on coal. However, she stressed the country could likely go net zero “very soon after”, providing solutions like Beccs that allow negative emissions are in place.

37 things you need to know about 1.5C global warming

China’s economic reforms are the “most forward looking” around, Ürge-Vorsatz said. According to research by the University of East Anglia, emissions may have already peaked before its Paris pledge.

Other governments are moving in the opposite direction. In the US, Australia and now seemingly Brazil, leaders are set to actively undermine progress just when scientists say the world needs to accelerate as one. In response, authors and campaigners urged individuals and non-state actors to take a step forward for every one backward by governments.

Masson-Delmotte highlighted lifestyle choices as “important elements of feasibility”, citing the impact of diet on land use. Skea also reminds of the potential for travel behaviour to sway emissions in the aviation industry.

Individuals, states, regions, cities and companies all need to take climate change seriously, said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace.

“In a world where there are governments that are not delivering, the pressure on those non-state actors is going to grow,” she said.

Graphic from the IPCC’s special report on 1.5C

There have been myriad ‘subnational’ climate initiatives in response to Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. New York, which pledged in September to invest $4 billion of its pension funds into climate-focused projects, is but one example of local leadership on climate change.

Morgan asked what feasibility really meant and who non-action on climate change was feasible for? “The report spells out quite clearly who loses from climate change,” she said “It’s the vulnerable and poor. That’s quite a choice.”

“Decision makers also need to think the feasibility of living in a world of living above 1.5C. That’s 420m people frequently exposed to heatwaves. And 2 million people exposed to sea-level rise,” she said.

“It’s really important that people understand that this report gives us hope,” Rueanna Haynes, a delegate to the IPCC meeting for St Kitts and Nevis, one of the Carribean islands gravely exposed to climate impacts, said. “I’ve heard people interpret it as almost giving us a basis to say: What’s the point? It can never be done.

“But for us this report is telling us: Yes, this situation is a difficult one. Yes, the situation is only going to get worse. But we have choices and there are options, and the report sets out the timeframe in which we need to act over the next 30 years. We have to act.”

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The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sets out the difference in severity of climate impacts between 1.5C and 2C. It also indicates what would be needed to stabilise temperatures at the lower threshold.

That fuels a range of legal strategies to seek compensation or stronger climate action through the courts, lawyers say.

Roda Verheyen is representing ten families in a lawsuit against EU institutions, dubbed the People’s Climate Case. She will argue in the European General Court that the EU must adopt a more ambitious 2030 climate target to defend their human rights – drawing on the UN assessment of the science.

“There is a huge difference between 1.5 and 1.9 or whatever is ‘below 2C’, especially for the people I represent. The impact prognosis is very, very different,” she said.

What happens in the next few months will impact the future of the Paris Agreement and the global climate

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In a letter to EU politicians, published in Climate Home News on Tuesday, the plaintiffs said the IPCC had confirmed that only European emissions targets that hold warming below 1.5C were compatible with their “fundamental rights”.

The signatories included Maurice Feschet, 72, a fourth-generation farmer in the south of France. He told CHN climate disruption has become more frequent since his youth.

Repeated drought has hit the lavender harvest, making it harder for his son to continue the family tradition, Feschet said. “It is very difficult to live now on this… we joined the ten other families to ask Europe to protect our way of life.” He added: “It is not for me I do it, it is for my children.”

Analysis: 37 things you need to know about 1.5C global warming

What the IPCC special report does not do is fundamentally alter anyone’s legal obligations. These cases still rely on a mixture of existing national and international legal principles.

“It doesn’t change the law,” said Jonathan Church, lawyer at London-based firm Client Earth, “but at the same time it does potentially provide a lot of ammunition for those of us seeking to use the law to effect change in this area.”

National climate pledges under the Paris Agreement put the world on track for 3C of warming this century, according to the IPCC report, substantially exceeding the overall targets of 1.5C or below 2C.

The volume of climate lawsuits is increasing, as action to tackle climate change fails to keep pace with the impacts. “We expect more and more climate litigation in the coming years,” said Church.

Oil majors to face London, New York hearings over Philippines climate impact

Greenpeace Southeast Asia has a “climate justice” team. It is primarily focused on a petition to the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, seeking to hold major historic coal, oil and gas producers to account for their role in causing climate change.

People who have borne the brunt of intense tropical storms and other climate-linked damage have given testimony in a series of hearings in Manila. The inquiry continues with a session in London on 6-8 November.

Louise Fournier, a lawyer involved in the project, explained in a briefing note how they see the 1.5C report applying to climate litigation.

“States have positive obligations to prevent foreseeable violations of human rights,” she wrote, adding in bullet points:

• “The IPCC special report outlines the very foreseeable risks of a world that is not aligned with 1.5C.
• “Governments are put ‘on notice’ that their climate and energy laws and policies are not aligned with the latest IPCC science;
• “Failure to align climate and energy laws and policies with the latest IPCC science exposes governments to climate lawsuits.”

Some climate lawsuits have already made a mark. Notably, campaign group Urgenda forced the Dutch government to tighten its 2020 emissions reduction target in line with international goals.

The government appealed, arguing it was a matter for policymakers to set such targets. The court of appeal is due to publish its ruling on Tuesday.

Previewing the appeal judgement last week, Urgenda director Marjan Minnesma said in a statement: “It’s disappointing that the Dutch government keeps fighting a judgement that has brought so much hope and inspiration around the world. The upcoming special report of the IPCC emphasises that we need to reduce emissions with much greater urgency.”

Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres backed the campaigners, saying: “The judgment in the Urgenda case recognizes the critical importance of early action on climate change. If global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, the temperature goals negotiated in Paris, will almost certainly become unattainable.”

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We write to you as farmers, shepherds, foresters, hotel and restaurant owners and students. We live in different countries across Europe: Sweden, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany and Romania. We have only one thing in common: climate change is affecting our everyday life.

A few months ago, we took the EU to court for the inadequacy of the Union’s 2030 climate target. For most of us, it was the first time that we filed a lawsuit. We wouldn’t do it, if our families, friends, homes, traditions and the future of our children weren’t at stake. For us, climate change is not about high level diplomacy or negotiations. It is happening to us and we urgently need a Europe that protects us.

Last year, Armando lost his forested land in the Portuguese wildfires. The authorities publicly associated the wildfires with climate change.

The reindeer herding which is in the centerpiece of Saami culture is at risk because of the changes in the living conditions of the reindeers. Sanna is not only worried about the reindeers but also for her traditions, culture and the future of her generation.

Maurice has lost 44% of his revenue from the lavender farming in the last 6 years due to consecutive droughts in the south of France. His son Renaud is the first generation to start other businesses, as the lavender farming can no longer guarantee sufficient income for the whole family.

The sand dunes protecting the freshwater resources in Langeoog, a small German island, are under stress due to stronger storms. Maike and Michael, who have been living on this island for generations, are worried that they will lose the restaurant and hotel business that they built from scratch 20 years ago.

Vlad lives in the Carpatian Mountains. He takes his cattle from 700m altitude to 1400m for water and decent grass to graze. As he says: “I cannot go any further up with my herd, because above 2000m there is only the sky.”

In Portugal, Alfredo’s organic farm is hit by severe and more frequent droughts. He knows that in a climate change scenario beyond 1.5C of warming, which is where we are headed with the EU’s existing climate target, there will be a desert on the land where his farm stands today. And he, as well as 35 families who work on the farm, will have to move.

Ildebrando’s family has been in the beekeeping business for generations. The changes in the flowering season and unusual warm weather has started to destroy the hives and his family lost 60% of their production in 2017.

Giorgio’s family manages a very small bed & breakfast hotel in the Italian Alps, which is fully dependent on the famous ice climbing opportunities in the region. The changes in temperature are making the ice climbing dangerous which affects the revenue of the families in the region.

All of these impacts are happening to us right now and in the middle of Europe, as the result of a mere 1C of average temperature increase. It is already more than what we can bear.

Yesterday, the science reminded us that our future depends on one single number: 1.5.

The most important scientific body on climate change, the IPCC, alerted the world to the impacts of climate change, which will be much worse if we don’t limit temperature increase to 1.5C. The scientists also stated that “1.5C” is possible and feasible. This is the most ambitious target that is still achievable, if we act urgently.

The EU should now act to protect our fundamental rights from the worsening impacts of climate change. In our lawsuit and ever since, we have been asking to the EU to have better climate policies. We do not ask for compensation, nor money. We believe that increased climate action is the only way that we can save our loved ones and livelihoods where we’ve been living since generations.

Science proves once again that we have concrete means to address the challenge. And in Europe, we also have moments to put the topic on the table and reconsider what actual climate policies cost to us citizens.

Today, the Environment Ministers of the EU Member States are gathering in Luxembourg to discuss climate change. In a few months, Europe will host the annual UN climate change conference in Katowice, Poland.

Missing this opportunity to update the European climate targets and policies to a 1.5C-compatible pathway will have devastating effects on our safety, future and human rights.

We call upon the EU decision makers to listen to the word of science and increase the EU’s climate target for 2030 in line with a 1.5C-compatible pathway. This is the only possible way to protect citizens from the worsening impacts of climate change. The sole way that this generation of European politicians will be remembered as the ones who wrote history to the benefit of all.

Sanna Vannar, president of Sáminuorra, Sweden

Maurice and Renaud Feschet, farmers, France

Maike and Michael Recktenwald, hotel and restaurant owners, Germany

Vlad Petru, farmer and shepherd, Romania

Armando Carvalho, forest owner, Portugal

Alfredo Sendim, farmer, Portugal

Ildebrando Conceição, beekeeper, Portugal

Joaquim Caixeiro, farmer, Portugal

Giorgio Elter, farmer and hotel owner, Italy

The post Dear EU leaders, this is why we are suing you for a 1.5C global warming limit appeared first on Climate Home News.