At first glance, the growing informal use of the term might look like a shift towards recognising and protecting populations displaced by the adverse impacts of climate change.

After all, there is growing evidence of displacement of people due to weather-related disasters. There were nearly 22 million internal displacements due to floods and storms in 2021.

Climate mobility also happens across borders. For example, citizens from the Marshall Islands have migrated to the United States due to the risk of sea level rise, and the increasing pressure of floods and droughts on their homes and livelihoods.  

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It’s increasingly clear that climate change stressors are leading to both voluntary and forced displacement.

So why shouldn’t the term “refugee” be extended to such populations, leveraging its historical precedence to grant vulnerable populations with international protection?

While its growing popularity might have good intentions behind it, the term is unable to capture the diversity of experiences of those on the move due to climate change, which can lead to more exclusive policies. 

Why does language matter? 

In international law, labels serve to standardise policies and thereby become instrumental tools. The United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted in response to the Holocaust with the aim of ensuring international protections for populations being persecuted.

A policy decides not only who deserves protection, but also by extension who doesn’t. The term “climate refugee” implies that populations displaced by climate change are protected by the Refugee Convention. They are not. Experiencing environmental changes does not fall under the ambit of persecution.

Perhaps it is time to expand our definition of “refugee” to include these vulnerable populations?

Nearly all world’s population hit by global heating last quarter – study

But opening up the Refugee Convention risks weakening the protections it does offer. Especially with the growing antagonism against immigrant and refugee populations, both in society and in planned policies that leverage security concerns to tighten up border control.

Labels and their definitions create a common language and understanding of issues. However, they are not immune to these changing attitudes in societies.

Unfortunately, “refugee” is increasingly being used to describe people as either victims with little agency or as security threats.

It’s for similar reasons that some people from Tuvalu, an island nation threatened by sea level rise, reject the term “climate refugee”.  

 Attributing climate change to human mobility 

Dictionary.com now defines a “climate refugee” as “a person who has had to flee their home due to the negative effects of climate change”.

Climate change, unfortunately, has many negative effects. It might be clear that those fleeing an extreme weather event, such as storms or flooding, require emergency protections.

Here, it’s easy to attribute the cause of displacement to climate change. But the task is more difficult when the impact develops over time, for example when droughts lead to land degradation and the loss of economic opportunities.  

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Climate change is also a threat multiplier, meaning it exacerbates existing vulnerabilities. The decision to leave one’s home is usually based on multiple factors.

At what point can we say climate change is the driving factor of displacement? And if moving is only partially motivated by climate change, does that mean the people affected are not deserving of safe migration routes and protection?   

Rather than try to reduce the experience of climate mobility into one, provocative, label, we need discussions and international policies capable of creating comprehensive labels that recognise the diversity of experiences and address the context-specific needs of people on the move due to climate change. 

Kalia Ruth Barkai is a German Chancellor Fellow from South Africa, based at the University of Potsdam.

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As the leader of an island nation, battered by hurricanes and facing rising sea levels, Mottley wants the bank to take the lead in mobilising the over $1 trillion a year developing countries will need by 2030 to meet their climate investment needs.

Her campaign has picked up some powerful allies. The US is the bank’s host, its biggest shareholder and effectively picked its next president Ajay Banga. They have offered support to at least the principles of Mottley’s agenda, calling alongside Germany for “fundamental reform”.

In response to this pressure, the World Bank’s management ordered its staff to draw up an “evolution roadmap”. The 20-page document says the bank will “broaden” beyond its current “twin goals” of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.

Its new mission “will emphasize the importance of sustainability and resilience to reflect more clearly that our mission includes global public goods (GPGs), such as climate change”.

This was followed last week by a 37-page report, which offered more detail and will be debated by governments and bank officials at the development committee of the bank’s spring meeting next Wednesday. The bank’s mission is likely to be officially updated.

Take more risks

But what does that mean in practice? The only real change the bank has proposed so far is to lower the equity-to-loan ratio of its biggest subsidiary bank (IBRD) from 20% to 19%.

This would allow the IBRD to lend $4 billion more a year, much of which would be spent on climate projects.

Reformers including the German government called it a “first step” but said the ratio should be lower, freeing up more money.

This will be debated by the bank’s executive directors, a group of 25 government appointees from around the world, at next week’s spring meeting.

The bank’s development committee, which is leading the reform, said the proposal balances the ambition to spend more with the need for the bank to retain its top-tier AAA credit rating.

The World Bank raises most of the funding its needs to operate by borrowing on international bond markets. Investors’ confidence is therefore paramount.

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Reformers like Barbados’s Avinash Persaud say the bank can go further while still retaining its credit rating, which allows it to borrow, and therefore lend, money cheaply.

Next week’s meeting is likely to approve the 19% change. Reformers are hoping it will agree to revisit that figure again at the World Bank’s annual gathering in October.

A related proposal is to scrap the IBRD’s statutory lending limit, a rule drawn up when the bank was set up in 1944 which limits the amount it can lend.

Get more backing

The World Bank’s credit rating is set by agencies like Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. Their analysts look at the bank’s finances and decide what rating to give it.

Lowering the equity-to-loan ratio means taking on more risk. Something that could worry the analysts.

So the bank is seeking to reassure them by drawing attention to governments’ pledge to back the bank if it ever gets into trouble. These promises are known as the bank’s “callable capital”.

The bank says it will work on options for making better use of its callable capital “in the coming months”, while speaking to governments and rating agencies.

Get more money

But these changes can only get the bank so far. To move the big bucks, the bank needs more money to begin with.

It can get this by charging developing countries more to borrow. But, with many of the world’s poorest countries already in a lot of debt, the bank’s development committee says “there is no appetite for this”.

So, the bank says it needs more money from the wealthy governments among its shareholders through a “capital increase”.

Without this, it says, the change to the lending ratio and other measures “will not be enough relative to the vast needs of client countries”.

But wealthy governments have recently been loath to up their contributions, even as Covid-19, the climate crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine push up the needs.

As a result, World Bank predicts its support will start to fall in the July 2023 to July 2024 fiscal year.

The bank “will need substantial additional financial capacity to respond to a more ambitious, updated mission”, its evolution roadmap says.

Reformers ideas

More radical ideas have not been put on next week’s agenda by the bank. Financing projects, like solar farms, in developing countries is often more expensive than doing so in a richer nation.

One reason among many is that lenders are worried that swings in currency exchange rates in many developing countries will threaten the bank’s ability to get paid back. To compensate for this perceived added risk, banks charge higher interest rates to borrowers.

Mottley’s adviser Avinash Persaud is pushing for a new fund to hedge against currency risk for green projects, providing protection for swings in the value of a local currency. He wants to call it a Just Green Transition, Financing Investment Trust (JGT-FIT).

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According to a briefing seen by Climate Home, the idea is for this to be a focused agency sitting in the middle of a network of multilateral development banks like the World Bank.

He estimates that $14 billion would be required to hedge for the returns of half the annual investment developing countries need. Before that, he says, a pilot using $5 billion could prove the idea works.

This would need more than just the World Bank’s backing – but an endorsement from the bank or any of its shareholders next week would propel it up the agenda.

The post What’s at stake for climate at the World Bank’s spring meeting? appeared first on Climate Home News.

At Cop26 last year, over 100 governments said they would collectively reduce emissions of methane, a particularly damaging greenhouse gas, by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

Agriculture is responsible for nearly half of the world’s total human-caused methane emissions. Most of this is from cows and sheep burping.

But, wary of tractor convoys descending on their capitals, governments have largely avoided measures to tackle these emissions.

They’ve chosen instead to focus on the relatively easy target of capturing the methane that is a byproduct of extracting and moving fossil fuels, and the gas that leaks out of rotting landfills.

Nearly twice as many countries have policies to reduce methane emissions from landfills as they do for agriculture, according to World Resources Institute analysis.

More countries have plans to reduce methane emissions from waste and energy than from agriculture. (Photo: World Resources Institute)

The US’s recent inflation reduction act is a good example. It will introduce a methane fee on emissions from oil and gas facilities which does not apply to agriculture. Despite this, Republicans have falsely accused the Biden administration of planning to ration beef consumption and tax cow farts.

Marcelo Mena is CEO of the Global Methane Hub, which was set up in April to implement the methane pledge. He told Climate Home that countries whose methane comes more from fossil fuels should have more ambitious targets than those whose methane comes largely from cows.

“The collective goal is 30%. But that’s a collective goal,” he said. “We expect the major emitters that have a lot more proportionate emissions in the energy sector to do a lot [more].”

‘Burp tax’

One country which is trying to tackle its farming emissions is New Zealand. Nearly 90% of its methane is from cows and sheep and Greenpeace said its previous climate plan had a “cow-shaped hole”.

To fix this hole, its government is proposing a “farm levy”. The media and opposition prefer to call it the “fart tax” or “burp tax”.

This would charge farmers around NZ$3-5 (US$2-3) per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent of the methane they produce. Other New Zealand polluters pay NZ$85 (US$48) a tonne under the emissions trading scheme.

The money would go to research into green farming and rewards for climate-friendly farming methods.

Greenpeace campaigners oppose the plan. Cabinet meeting minutes show even climate change minister James Shaw expressed concerns it was not ambitious enough and unfairly let off the livestock industry.

Yet cattle ranchers are up in arms. New Zealand’s biggest farmers association said it would force farmers to sell up and  “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand, putting trees where farms used to be”.

A right-wing group called Groundswell mobilised 50 farmer protests around the country last Thursday – although turnout was smaller than expected.

Agriculture, mostly cows and sheep, is the biggest sources of man-made (dark blue) methane emissions. (Photo: IEA)

This controversy has reached across to Australia, where the government has become the latest to join the global methane pledge, despite preemptive agricultural lobbying.

A leading farmers group in the Australian state of New South Wales said “it is opposed to Australia signing up to a global ‘methane pledge’ that is killing small towns [in New Zealand]”. The “burp tax” has yet to be introduce in New Zealand.

Australian opposition politicians have claimed that signing the pledge will lead to “shooting cattle”, “T-bone tax” and the end of the Australian barbecue.

On the defensive, Australia’s agriculture minister Murray Watt said he wouldn’t implement a New Zealand style tax. Climate minister Chris Bowen said the pledge’s target was just an “aspirational goal”.

We heard warnings about an end to the Aussie barbeque, a T-bone tax and so on if Australia joins 120 other countries in signing a pledge to reduce methane emissions.

But for rhetorical flourish – no one was ever going to outdo Barnaby Joyce.#Insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/ZHYkbS0HJ2

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) October 15, 2022

Even Rob McCreath, from the lobby group Farmers for Climate Action, told the ABC that agriculture “shouldn’t be sucked into” methane cuts, which should focus on the oil and gas sector.

Where livestock lobbyists and governments accept that action is needed, they prefer technological solutions to curbs on meat consumption and headcount of farm animals.

US, Germany back ‘fundamental reform’ of World Bank to scale climate finance

Mena agreed that while reducing meat consumption is part of the answer, “sustainable beef” is possible.

He touted “methane inhibitors”. Feed additives from seaweed or fats and oils can reduce the amount of methane cattle produce. It’s easier to add these to the cows’ diet if they eat from a trough than if they’re free-ranging.

The Global Methane Hub is working directly with major beef producers like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile on their methane-cutting plans, Mena said.

Plugging leaks

Emissions from oil and gas are easier – if not easy – to reduce as doing so can make fossil fuel companies money.

Methane leaks from oil and gas pipelines and is deliberately vented or flared as a waste product. Companies allow it to escape because they either don’t know it is leaking, don’t know how to fix it or they think fixing it will cost them more than it saves.

By providing technological know-how, like satellites or video cameras that can monitor leaks, oil and gas companies can reduce their emissions and capture methane to sell to their customers as gas. Burning methane for power produces less greenhouse gas emissions than letting it leak into the atmosphere unburned.

But technology will not be enough, Mena said, calling for regulations and carbon pricing. “The economic case [for capturing and selling wasted methane] does not outweigh the short term profits that the oil and gas sector is focusing on today at the expense of the environment.”

Governments have launched several diplomatic initiatives to promote action to reduce methane from oil and gas production. None of these propose reducing oil and gas production itself.

Pakistan: funds for flood relief too little, too late

The US-led “net zero producers forum” launched in April 2021 but took nearly a year to convene its first meeting and has achieved little.

At the major economies forum in June, the US and EU pushed for a joint initiative on reducing methane from oil and gas. They are expected to push this further at the Cop27 climate talks.

Mena hinted that Cop27 will also see announcements on whether methane pledge signatories’ individual methane targets add up to 30% collectively.

Mena said organisations like the International Methane Emissions Observatory, Climate and Clean Air Coalition and Global Methane Pledge secretariat can help with that.

Targets are little use without effective monitoring and Mena said that there will be “major developments on making use of satellite information for accountability” at Cop27.

An NGO called Carbon Mapper has announced plans to send a Nasa jet to monitor methane emissions over sites like landfills and oil and gas pipelines in Latin America by February.

Satellites have already revealed that landfills are responsible for up to 50% of some countries’ methane emissions and that methane emissions from Arabian Gulf states are nearly ten times greater than reported.

The post Fear of farmer protests hampers methane-cutting ambition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Citizens want enough electricity to keep the lights on and governments have tried to give them that by supplying enough electricity to meet demand. But people’s demand for electricity is not constant, it goes up and down throughout a day and throughout the year.

In richer countries, many people fire up their air conditioning, switch on their lights and plug in their electric vehicle when they get back from work. After dinner, they turn on their dishwasher and they open the fridge during the advert break for Game of Thrones.

Governments have to provide enough electricity to meet not just the average electricity use but the peak electricity use – half-time in the Superbowl on a boiling hot day. They can make this easier by flattening out the peaks, by getting people to use electricity when demand is low and not when it’s high.

That doesn’t work for every use. Nobody wants to watch television at 3am or run their air conditioning when it’s cold. But people can run their dishwashers and washing machines at night-time. Industrial customers like aluminium smelters can often be flexible with their electricity use too.

That can help avoid power cuts and it can stop desperate grid operators paying extortionate prices for electricity to keep the lights on. When a heatwave hit Europe recently and spiked air conditoning use, the UK’s grid operator paid 5,000% more than usual to import electricity.

What’s all this got to do with climate change?

For the next few decades, electricity will be supplied by a mix of clean electricity and dirty electricity. Grid operators will use the clean electricity when they can and fossil fuel-powered electricity when that doesn’t fully cover demand.

For example, California gets most of its electricity from zero-carbon sources. But, it is building new gas generators which are only to be used when the supply of clean electricity can not meet demand. So the less demand outstrips supply, the less fossil fuels it will use.

More important than that though, according to Brattle Group analyst Ryan Hledik, is that demand response will make electrification and decarbonisation cheaper. If you can charge up your electric vehicle with cheap electricity at night rather than expensive electricity at 6pm then you are more likely to tell your friends to swap their gas-guzzler for an electric vehicle.

In many parts of the developing world, there’s not enough electricity to go around even before electric vehicle and electric heat pumps are rolled-out. So, as countries develop and homes and transport are electrified, demand response is key to keeping the lights on.

How is demand response done?

The simplest way to encourage consumers to shift their electricity use is to offer them discounts on their electricity bill if they do so through ‘time of use rates’. This works like ‘off peak’ fares on public transport or ‘happy hours’ at a bar, encouraging customers who can shift their demand to do so.

Currently, these rates have been targetted at electricity-guzzling businesses rather than households – as this is where demand response can have the most impact for the least amount of outreach work. (CHECK WITH SOURCES)

Hledik says that demand response is most advanced in North America. In the Canadian province of Ontario, for example, electricity costs different amounts at different times of the day. Andrew Dow, from Ontario’s grid operator IESO, said it’s cheaper at night because it’s not being used as much.

Big electricity users pay their electricity bills proportionately to their use in the five highest demand hours of the year. “So these businesses are incentivised to monitor electricity demand throughout the year and, when they see something that could be one of the top five peaks of the year, businesses are incentivised to reduce their use,” Dow explained.

South Africa takes similar measures. Malcom Van Harte works for their grid operator Eskom. He told Climate Home that 22 large industrial electricity customers are incentivised to shift their peaks by ‘time of use’ rates. When electricity is scarce, households get adverts over the television and radio asking people to switch off non essential equipment

A twist on ‘time of use’ is that electricity users are asked to switch off 10-20% of their electricity when demand looks like outstripping supply. If they accept this request, the customer is then exempted from the planned outages which plague South Africa, known as ‘load shedding’.

In the US state of Vermont, an utility called Green Mountain Power is deploying Tesla powerwall batteries to peoples’ homes. Most of the year, the resident gets to use this battery as a backup generator, to absorb excess power from their solar panels or to reduce their bill on a ‘time of use’ rate. But, for the few days a year when Green Mountain Power is desperate for electricity, it can take control of the battery and use its electricity to power the grid. “It’s a win-win situation”, said Hledik.

In the future, electricity users could even be paid to give the electricity from their vehicle’s battery back to the grid at peak times. This is known as ‘vehicle to grid’ power and, Hledik said, is still at the pilot phase. “It’s still very much at a point where the technology and the commercial business case are being tested and proven,” he said, “whereas the simpler ‘time of use’ rate concept is something that’s available at scale.

How will the energy transition affect demand response?

As electricity systems become increasingly based on renewables, daily and seasonal patterns of supply will shift. Fossil fuel power plants can pump out electricity whenever 24/7 and 365, as long as you can keep feeding them fossil fuels. But the sun and wind come and go.

The first chart shows wind (purple) and solar (yellow) potential vs demand (orange) throughout the year in the US. The second shows the same but throughout a summer’s day in the US. (Tong et al)

The same figures as above, but for South Africa, which has southern hemisphere seasons

Hledik said that parts of the US with high solar deployment like California and Arizona are already seeing this shift. Previously, grid operators have tried to delay electricity use from the post-work peak of 6pm to more like 8pm.

Now they have more electricity than they need between midday and 2pm when the sun is at its highest. So they’re trying to get dishwashers and washing machines on in the middle of the day rather than in the late evening. Luckily, the sun’s power dips at night which is when demand for electricity is also at its lowest.

The post Demand response: A win-win solution to climate and energy price crises appeared first on Climate Home News.

This early failure in the global race to net zero emissions (a balance between CO₂ emitted and absorbed) may foreshadow backtracking by other target-setters, indicating that pledges to cease contributing to climate change demand greater scrutiny.

Since 2012, when Copenhagen launched its plan to become the first carbon-neutral city in the world by 2025, the city has enjoyed international recognition and a significant branding boost. It expects to reduce emissions by 80% by, for instance, switching its power and district heating systems to biomass, wind and solar, renovating buildings to make them energy efficient and improving public transport.

The remaining emissions were supposed to be mopped up by installing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at the local waste-to-energy plant. This would remove CO₂ from the smokestack before it is emitted to the atmosphere, isolating it for later underground storage.

But at the beginning of August 2022, the semi-public utility Amager Resource Center (ARC) which manages the plant announced it was ineligible for national CCS funding. This funding, it argued, would otherwise have enabled them to capture CO₂ generated by burning the city’s waste. And so, Copenhagen has given up on its pledge.

Cities such as Glasgow and Helsinki, countries like Sweden and the UK, and companies including IKEA and Apple have made similar pledges to be net zero by 2030, 2045 or 2050. This gives the impression that sufficient measures to address climate change are in the pipeline.

Displaced by drought, climate migrants clash with Zimbabwe’s timber industry

Yet various reports and studies suggest that these pledges often skimp on important details, by failing to include progress reports or specify the emissions they target. Critics have warned that the idea of net zero may only serve to greenwash reputations and diminish the urgency around decarbonisation.

Copenhagen is unlikely to be the last to renege on its net zero pledge. The city’s example of relying on immature technology and external funding indicates how similar climate plans might disintegrate in future.

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Faith in technology

Copenhagen’s experience highlights two problems which could scupper other net zero strategies. First, the city’s reliance on immature technology.

Copenhagen’s plan to reach net zero emissions did not always include CCS. When the city announced its 2025 goal in 2012, the Danish parliament had just rejected an application from Swedish energy company Vattenfall to deploy CCS at its coal power plant in northern Jutland. Danish politicians wanted to monitor experiences with CCS abroad before allowing it in Denmark.

Instead, in 2012 Copenhagen’s net zero plan relied on the expectation of reducing the energy-to-waste plant’s emissions by recycling more plastic waste and increasing the ratio of organic waste (since it would count as carbon neutral). But when the third and final road map for Copenhagen’s transition was presented in 2021, it included a shortfall of 430,000 tonnes of CO₂.

Alongside other measures, CCS was – in line with new national policy – supposed to be installed at the plant to bridge the gap by cutting 390,000 tonnes of CO₂. The utility managing the plant suggested the technology could capture up to 500,000 tonnes.

Five priorities for a meaningful post-2025 climate finance target

Copenhagen is not alone in including CCS in its climate strategy. Neighbouring capitals Oslo and Stockholm expect to reach net zero with it too. Denmark’s national climate strategy expects CCS to cut between 3.5 million tonnes and 8 million tonnes of CO₂ by 2030.

Despite the faith invested in it, carbon capture technology has a poor track record. A new study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis think tank found that CCS projects tend to underperform on their emission reduction targets.

Dedicated investment in carbon storage technology has been sluggish too. As a result, CCS is largely used to extend the shelf life of fossil fuels, as captured CO₂ can be injected into oil wells to extract additional oil. These and other issues were reported to municipal leaders in Copenhagen as substantial risks to the 2025 goal.

Lack of accountability

The second problem concerns the question of accountability. Who is ultimately responsible for Copenhagen’s failure to meet its net zero target? When the utility ARC first announced its plan to deploy CCS at its waste-to-energy plant in 2021, it counted on external funding and a supportive policy framework to do so.

Now, the head of the city’s technology and environment committee criticises national politicians for knowingly setting financial criteria which the utility cannot meet, hindering the city’s road to climate neutrality. And so, the baton of responsibility is passed.

Emissions targets must be based on credible measures which are within the powers of those pledging them. There must be clear ways to assign accountability if those plans fail. When organisations boast of pledges which ultimately depend on the actions of others to succeed, the public is right to question their validity.

Copenhagen’s mayor suggested the city may still reach climate neutrality in 2026, 2027 or 2028. Yet this case shows how easily net zero plans can fall apart.

It reveals the dangers of the current uncoordinated approach to reaching net zero, in which every organisation is free to set its own eye-catching pledge without fully accounting for its success. What we need is for political and corporate decision-makers to present credible plans for the necessary deep decarbonisation of society.

This article was produced by The Conversation and republished under a creative commons licence.

Kirstine Lund Christiansen is a PhD fellow in political ecology at the University of Copenhagen. Inge-Merete Hougaard is a postdoctoral fellow in political ecology at Lund University.

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Several studies project that its climate and energy provisions could enable the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by around 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. That would be a significant improvement over the current projections of around 27%, and it could put the US within hailing range of its pledge under the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions at least 50% by 2030.

Notably, one linchpin of the bill’s climate provisions is a set of incentives to substantially expand technologies that capture carbon dioxide and either store it underground or ship it for reuse.

So far, the uptake of carbon capture technologies has been slow. The costs are high, and these technologies can require miles of pipeline and vast amounts of underground storage, both of which can trigger local backlash. A recent study projected that the US would have to construct 65,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines to achieve net-zero emissions in 2050, a whopping 13 times the current capacity.

I’m the former founding co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University. While the bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, has many provisions designed to jump-start the carbon removal sector, it’s far from certain that the industry will be able to move quickly.

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The bill includes two primary types of carbon capture.

Carbon capture and storage entails capturing carbon dioxide generated during power generation and industrial processes, such as steel and concrete production, and transporting it for storage or use. The most common use to date has been for enhanced oil recovery – injecting the gas into oil and gas reservoirs to extract more fossil fuels.

The bill also seeks to drive deployment of direct air capture technologies, which can pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

A Princeton University analysis estimated that pertinent provisions of the bill “would increase the use of carbon capture 13-fold by 2030 relative to current policy,” with only a modest amount projected to come from carbon dioxide removal. This could translate into about one-sixth to one-fifth of the projected carbon dioxide emissions reductions from the new bill.

Consistent with most of its other energy and climate provisions, the bill seeks to drive widespread deployment of carbon removal technologies through incentives. Most importantly, it substantially amends a provision of the U.S. tax code referred to as 45Q, which is designed to drive corporate investments in carbon capture.

Under the bill, tax credits for capturing carbon dioxide at industrial facilities and power plants would increase from $50 per ton today to up to $85 per ton if the carbon is stored. If the carbon is used instead for oil drilling, the credit would go from $30 today to $60 per ton.

Credits for capturing carbon from air via direct air capture would also dramatically jump, from $50 to $180 per ton if the carbon dioxide is stored, and from $35 currently to $130 per ton if it is used.

The bill would also move back the deadline for starting construction of carbon capture facilities that qualify from 2026 to 2033, reduce the minimum capture requirements for obtaining credits, and permit direct payments for the full value of credits for the first five years of a project’s operation in lieu of tax credits.

Currently there are only a dozen carbon capture and storage facilities in the US and a couple of direct air capture facilities removing a small amount of carbon from the air.

There’s a reason the uptake of carbon capture, particularly direct air capture, has been slow. Direct air capture cost estimates vary from $250 to $600 per ton, according to one analysis, while experts have estimated that a price under $100 and closer to $50 could create a market.

Some experts believe that the bill sufficiently ratchets up 45Q credits to start driving widespread construction of carbon capture and storage facilities in the power and industrial sectors. Others believe that the direct pay provision is “the fundamental missing piece” for carbon capture and storage because project developers and sponsors can avoid the often onerous and costly process of raising tax equity to qualify to use the credits.

There’s hope that the increase in credit values for direct air capture will help to foster “synthetic economics” for this nascent market, infusing sufficient capital to develop technologies at scales that are profitable.

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However, while the bill may appear helpful on a theoretical basis, both carbon capture and storage and direct air capture could face some serious headwinds over the course of the next decade and beyond.

One major challenge could be resistance to the construction of pipelines to transport carbon dioxide to storage sites. In recent years, counties and private landowners in Iowa have voiced opposition to such projects, particularly the idea that the state might allow pipeline builders to seize private land for their projects.

Pipeline construction is also a point of contention for environmental groups, especially environmental justice organizations, and could lead to protracted litigation. This stems in part from a carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, which hospitalized 45 people.

If public opposition delays construction, projects could be pushed past the window for the incentives, leaving developers with expensive projects. While some studies argue that enhanced oil recovery results in a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, this may ultimately be a hard political sell for local communities.

The bill may ultimately brighten the prospects for carbon removal in America, but this is by no means assured, especially in the optimistic time frame of the next decade.

Wil Burns is professor of research in environmental policy, American University School of International Service

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why the US climate bill might struggle to deliver on carbon capture appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the sanctions also have strong implications for Russia’s already slow and rather unsure green transition, be it the modernisation of its energy sector or climate science.

What Russia does or does not do matters for the rest of us: the world’s eleventh-largest economy also happens to be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the second-largest crude oil exporter, and the world’s largest gas exporter.

The Russian economy is strongly dependent on the exploitation of energy-intensive industries and fossil fuels, with oil and gas alone accounting for 35-40% of the federal budget revenue in recent years. Hydrocarbons fuel Russia’s elite’s wealth and power but are also framed as a source of energy security and welfare for the country’s citizens.

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Until recently, Russia had long been seen as a country with a lacklustre position in international climate negotiations, at best a passive player and at worst an active saboteur of worldwide ambition.

However, things have changed over the past years, most notably from November 2021 when its government adopted a framework climate legislation with a net-zero target by 2060. That year alone also saw it introduce a greenhouse gas emission reporting system for large emitters, adoption of its first national Climate Adaptation Plan and initiation of a carbon-trading experiment in its remote far Eastern region aimed at reaching carbon neutrality by 2025.

Some will argue the impulse for these initiatives comes from outside the country. For example, as part of the European Union’s Green Deal package, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is set to place a carbon price on imports entering the European single market from non-EU countries such as Russia from 2026. The border tariff, which would see imports covered by carbon pricing equivalent to Europe’s carbon market, the emissions trading system, has been credited with inspiring the Russian government and industry to finally take climate change seriously.

However, with every passing day of war these external incentives lose traction, making Russia’s domestic climate policy more uncertain than ever.

On the one hand, it would be mistaken to claim all that is left of Russia’s climate policy is a tabula rasa. The truth is, today’s policy programmes and “green” business strategies do not fully hinge on foreign pressure. Although Russia’s parliament, the Duma, debated leaving the Paris Agreement earlier this week, there remains political will to uphold it.

The chairman of the Duma’s Committee on Ecology, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, Vyacheslav Fetisov, for example, has said: “Russia does not plan to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement [and] is not going to abandon the implementation of this most important environmental international legal instrument.”

State agencies, companies, think tanks and other institutions that have developed “green” strategies over the past years, insist on their enduring relevance for the global fight against climate change, but also climate impacts on Russia and future trade prospects.

The climate head of WWF Russia, Aleksey Kokorin, has even voiced optimism that gas surpluses resulting from sanctions could be used to substitute the country’s coal and prompt the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to drop.

Ukraine builds legal case against Russia for environmental damage

And yet, it is undeniable that the economic crisis, sanctions and strengthened anti-Western rhetoric brought on by the war have made it more difficult to pursue decarbonisation plans. Politicians and lobbyists who had already opposed decarbonisation efforts have seized the moment to demand a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

Many businesses are taking advantage of the situation to pressure the government to roll back environmental regulation in a bid to help them cope with harsher economic circumstances, with recent bills already pointing in this direction.

More specifically, there have been reports of talks between the government and energy companies over the possibility of relaxing greenhouse gas emission reporting and verification. For example, one of the country’s biggest oil suppliers, Lukoil, has pushed the government to scrap a legislation compelling large energy companies to verify their reporting on greenhouse gas emissions with an independent company starting from 1 January 2023.

Import restrictions on technology, the dwindling of foreign capital sources and the freezing of international programmes have further stalled plans to modernise the country’s old industries. Russia’s fledging renewables sector has also taken a hit, with some international investors (including Vestas, Fortum and ENEL) halting their plans in Russia or withdrawing from the country completely.

This has prompted politicians, businesspeople, and scientists to discuss alternatives to foreign technology and domestic options to finance the energy transition.

African nations’ dash for gas exposes division at the UN and ‘hypocrisy’ in Europe

Moreover, the sanctions have taken a serious toll on climate science in Russia, which matters to those who implement practical decarbonisation measures in Russia, but also to the global science community.

It is particularly jarring in relation to other instances in Russian history when scientists succeeded in overcoming political tensions with the West. Despite the Cold War, climate scientists managed to advance global climate science within the 1972 US-USSR environmental agreement enabling the exchange of data, equipment and joint publications.

In contrast, governments and science bodies worldwide have now sanctioned Russian research institutions. Meanwhile, the EU has suspended Russia’s participation in its flagship research programme Horizon Europe and national research councils of several European states paused collaborations with Russia.

Research areas that rely on foreign equipment are particularly affected. For instance, Germany’s Max Planck Institute (MPI) has received a 64-page list with electronic devices that the EU forbids scientists to share with Russian colleagues on the grounds they could be used for military purposes.

In early February, the Russian government announced plans to invest 5.9 billion roubles (at the time of writing, approximately $92 million) into climate and decarbonisation research, and create Russia’s own system to track carbon emissions.

However, Alexander Chernokulsky, a climatologist from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told us the future of the project is unclear in the absence of foreign equipment.

Similarly, for years Russian and German scientists have been measuring CO₂ concentration changes in the atmosphere from a tall tower observatory, ZOTTO, in the southwest Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, considered a “hot spot” because of its potential for large carbon storage or leak. Here again, in an e-mail exchange with us, MPI scientist Sönke Zaehle has warned that the medium- and long-term future of the station are at risk from a lack of maintenance support from the German side.

Research in the Arctic is particularly crucial for our understanding of climate change. At least a dozen international collaborations with Russia have been stalled, here, too. The maintenance of long-term measuring systems crucial for climate modelling poses particular concerns. “There is this fear of a blind spot, no matter what research topic in the Arctic you approach,” Anne Morgenstern, a coordinator of the German Alfred Wegener Institute’s scientific cooperation with Russia, told us.

Climate scientists in Russia have also lost access to the Climate Data Store, which provides a single point of access to a wide range of climate datasets for past, present and future climates, including satellite observations, in-situ measurements, climate model projections and seasonal forecasts.

They can no longer either access supercomputers based in other countries, and the departure of technology companies such as Intel will eventually lead to a deterioration of computing capacities in general, according to Evgeny Volodin, a climate modeller at the Institute of Computational Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Environmental concerns are at risk of being laid aside during wartime. However, as we stand at a point in earth history at which opportunities to mitigate climate catastrophe are fading, we believe subordinating climate issues to the dictates and temporalities of war is not an option. Attempts to stop the war have to stand alongside efforts to advance transnational climate cooperation and action, despite the damages and dilemmas caused by Russia’s war.

Ambitious international climate agendas, including phasing out oil and gas production as quickly as possible, are crucial to increase pressure on the fossil fuel industry and the war machine, and to support those forces within Russia that are still holding on to decarbonisation.

Katja Doose is a senior researcher at the University of Fribourg and Alexander Vorbrugg is a geographer at Université de Berne.

Angelina Davydova, is an environmental and climate journalist. She is currently a fellow of the Berlin-based Media in Cooperation and Transition (MICT) programme and a coordinator with N-ost, a network for cross-border journalism.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Russian climate action and research is collateral damage in Putin’s war on Ukraine appeared first on Climate Home News.

The lockdown emptied the roads and cleared the skies over the world’s largest and most polluted cities. It opened a window on what cleaner cities could look, sound and smell like.

At its peak in early April, the slowdown of road, rail and maritime transport contributed the largest drop in global emissions – just under half of a 17% daily fall in CO2 emissions, according to a study published last month in Nature.

Now restrictions are lifting, while the risk of infection puts people off public transport, a shift to private cars threatens to send emissions rocketing. Global emissions have already bounced back to just 5% below pre-pandemic daily levels.

City authorities have a challenge to make sure commuters can travel to work at a safe distance from each other.

‘Final blow’ to aviation climate plan as EU agrees to weaken rules

Many mayors have promised to rebuild greener and fairer. From Mexico City to London and Bogota to Milan, plans for hundreds of kilometres of new bike lanes have been announced – strengthening a pre-pandemic movement to reduce car dominance.

Nearly 40 members of C40, a network of major cities working to address climate change, committed to use the recovery to drive investments in “excellent public services” and increasing community resilience against future threats, including climate change.

This will require a holistic approach, going much further than a few cycle lanes.

“Cycle lanes shouldn’t be an end in themselves – they are a means to live differently,” Carlos Moreno, scientific director of the Entrepreneurship, Territory, Innovation chair at Sorbonne University in Paris and a planning advisor to mayor Anne Hidalgo, told Climate Home News.

Moreno believes the transformation of cities needs to align with a pathway to holding global warming to 1.5C, the tougher target of the Paris Agreement. To achieve that, the best available science says global emissions need to nearly halve by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

“We have 10 years to radically transform our cities,” he said.

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To live within today’s climate, biodiversity and public health constraints, Moreno argues for an overhaul of urban design to bring essential services closer to people’s homes. People get around by foot or cycle and streets are redesigned not merely as places of transit but as “living spaces”.

The pandemic compelled local authorities in densely populated areas to reclaim streets for public use: entire road sections were pedestrianised in Tel Aviv, pavements enlarged in Auckland, parking spaces became bikes lanes in Tirana, and restaurants were encouraged to use outdoor spaces for dining in Vilnius.

Janette Sadik-Khan, former transport commissioner for New York city, said the move would have been considered  “almost revolutionary” a decade ago.

“This is a historic moment when cities can change course,” she wrote in a report by the National Association of City Transportation Officials which she chairs. “Empty lanes… form the outline of the future cities we need to build,” she said.

While there is clear public support for policies that would maintain air quality improvements, private cars are still perceived as the Covid-safe transport option.

“It would be naïve to think the pandemic is going to lead to the death of the car, in a context where public transport is associated with risk,” said Tim Schwanen, director of the Transport Studies Unit at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment.

Comment: Coronavirus shows why we need an economy designed for wellbeing

The swing back to private cars is a serious concern, he told CHN. In the absence of holistic transport policies, it could cause emissions to rebound sharply.

A spike in air pollution would aggravate any future respiratory pandemic. Researchers established a link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 air pollution, much of which comes from diesel cars, and a higher death rate from Covid-19.

Yet in Wuhan, ground zero for the pandemic, car sales boomed to unprecedented levels when the city reopened after being sealed off for weeks.

An Ipsos survey in March found 66% of Chinese respondents used private cars after lockdown, compared with 34% before the outbreak. Use of buses and public transit dropped from 56% to 24%.

The study also found an uptake in people’s intention to buy a car – a trend so stark it is likely to foreshadow a similar rise in other parts of the world, Schwanen said. Early indications suggest this could already be happening.

Data published by Apple Maps on searches for directions to travel by car shows notable increases compared with volumes recorded on 13 January – a 16% rise in the US and 14% in Germany.

“Cities cannot do without public transport. It’s absolutely vital that it is brought back to some forms of normality within the constraints of public health,” Schwanen said.

“There’s no reopening cities w/o reopening transit,” tweeted Sadik-Khan in response to guidance to employers by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting incentives for staff to drive private cars to work.

“Let them drive cars.”

The CDC telling workers to drive alone assumes that everyone owns a car and that cities can handle the traffic.

This is a fever dream.

There’s no reopening cities w/o reopening transit. Ruling it out doesn’t make it safer. https://t.co/CduIy87kma

— Janette Sadik-Khan (@JSadikKhan) May 30, 2020

The document sparked considerable backlash, with University of British Columbia urban planning professor Lawrence Frank telling CNBC: “Promoting private vehicle use as public health strategy is like prescribing sugar to reduce tooth decay.”

Coronavirus delays work to protect the world’s poor from climate shocks

There are some positive signs the recovery to Covid-19 could help accelerate the transition to low-carbon transport.

Germany’s economic rescue package, which includes €5.9billion to incentivise electric vehicles and supporting infrastructure, was hailed as a “watershed moment” by local media. Notably, the government snubbed the powerful carmaker lobby’s calls to extend a buyer’s premium to petrol and diesel cars.

The UK, which is presiding over next year’s UN climate talks, has made the move to zero-carbon road transport one of five key themes for Cop26.

Electric cars are not the whole answer. While they pollute less than fossil fuelled cars, they take up the same amount of space, causing congestion.

Yet without government intervention, it could take years for public transport usage to resume to pre-pandemic levels, as confidence in the safety of the networks has eroded, Mike Lydon, of the urban planning firm Street Plans, told CHN.

“Political leaders need really strong messaging about the reality and safety of using public transport,” he said. “A lot of people assume it’s a big risk to take public transport but maybe it’s not as big a risk as they think.”

Japan to launch ‘green recovery’ platform and ministerial meeting

The emphasis on cycling facilities serves a vocal constituency that is “middle class, young and mostly white,” Schwanen said. This risks failing to cater for more vulnerable communities.

“We are far from doing really inclusive transport planning. Given the speed at which things are taking place, this is not given the thought and attention needed,” he added.

It is a political issue.

In the US, calls to “defund the police” are gaining ground. A rallying cry at “black lives matter” protests, it reflects the fact that policing has come to dominate city budgets. Proponents argue public safety would be better served by investment in community-based services, which could include urban redevelopment.

In Paris, the transformation of urban mobility has become a key issue in this year’s mayoral election.

Moreno, of the Sorbonne University, has a vision of a capital where people can access all their needs, including schools, workplaces, supermarkets, hospitals, green spaces, culture and sports facilities, within 15 minutes of their home by walking or cycling.

La #VilleDuQuartDHeure, c’est quoi ? C’est la ville des proximités où l’on trouve tout ce dont on a besoin à moins de 15 minutes de chez soi. C’est la condition de la transformation écologique de la ville, tout en améliorant la vie quotidienne des Parisiens. #Hidalgo2020 pic.twitter.com/lcQbPAjdxj

— Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) January 21, 2020

School playgrounds are open at the weekend as green spaces, every street includes large pavements, cycle lanes and vegetation with reduced space for cars and water fountains are used to cool down the city on increasingly hot days caused by global heating.

Mayor Hidalgo made the ambitious plan the backbone of her re-election campaign, describing it as “the condition for the city’s ecological transition”. The idea has inspired other cities including Melbourne, Vancouver and Milan to develop similar proposals.

“Environmental and health issues need to be addressed at the local level,” Hidalgo said during an online event on the city’s recovery last month. “In this vision for a 15-minute city, I believe there is a solution for tomorrow.”

The post It will take more than a few cycle lanes to make green, pandemic-proof cities appeared first on Climate Home News.

A globally-agreed commitment, delivered after the longest climate conference in history, looked ahead to 2020 and raised “serious concern” about “the significant gap” between what countries have pledged and what scientists say will stop the planet warming.

The Chilean presidency of the Madrid talks had made “ambition” a central aim for the meeting. But the text they drafted lacked a clear call for countries to raise their game on a specific time frame. Instead, it harked back to an obscure part of the deal cut in Paris in 2015: ‘1/CP.21’, specifically paragraphs 23 and 24 (below).

(From Decision -/CP.21)

These two paragraphs, which were drafted alongside the Paris Agreement in the cauldron of the 2015 talks, are the only piece of international law governing the 2020 push for greater action. But they place no legal requirement on most countries to step up in 2020, according to climate jurists.

Kenyan climate campaigner Mohamad Adow called the Madrid outcome “disastrous, profoundly distressing”.

“We cannot just copy and paste the text from four years ago. We need to recognise that since then the climate emergency has got worse and public anger has got fiercer,” he said.

Without clear action in 2020, the first concrete moment for nations to step up their national climate commitments (known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) under the Paris Agreement is not until 2025. That is more than half the time left before the carbon budget for 1.5C is blown at current emissions – see Glen Peters’ graphic below.

How big is the CO₂ bucket for 1.5°C?

Well, the bucket is about to overflow in a few short years, unless we:
1. Turn off the tap (urgently)
2. Put a hole in the bottom to remove CO₂ (negative emissions)#COP25 #CarbonBudget @FutureEarth @gcarbonproject https://t.co/ycYcuFSPdF pic.twitter.com/o7JwZt7GlX

— Glen Peters (@Peters_Glen) December 13, 2019

To try to speed things up, some governments, the UN and climate campaigners are pushing for a collective raising of ambition during 2020. Advocates insist all countries are obliged by international agreement to raise their voluntary Paris pledges by 2020.

Scientists are clear on the need for increased, near term action to halt warming and prevent large-scale human suffering. But countries’ legal responsibilities in 2020 – centred on the two paragraphs agreed in Paris – are clear and separate from other imperatives, according to Sue Biniaz, who was the US state department lead climate lawyer for nearly three decades and had a hand in drafting parts of the Paris text.

She told CHN that, for most countries “there is no requirement to up your NDC in 2020”, adding “I have been saying that the science, rather than Paris per se, is why parties should enhance their NDCs.”

The two paragraphs each contain two key elements: they differentiate between countries that set an emissions target for 2025 and those with a goal stretching to 2030 (in yellow above); and they place different requirements on these countries for 2020 (green).

The different requirements are critical. Nations that set a 2025 target are asked to present a new NDC. Under the Paris Agreement any new or updated NDC must represent a “progression”. So these nations really have to bring new and improved pledges in the next 12 months. Nations that set a 2030 goal have a choice: to “communicate or update”.

Irreconcilable rift cripples UN climate talks as majority stand against polluters

Who are the countries that fall into the first group? The US dominates the list in terms of emissions, but is leaving the Paris Agreement before the end of 2020 and won’t be updating its NDC. Brazil is also in this category, and while its current government has flirted with following Trump out of the pact, remains in Paris.

The other 13 countries that set only a 2025 target in their pledge to the Paris Agreement account for around one quarter of one percent of global emissions. They are: Ecuador, Congo, Gabon, El Salvador, Suriname, Guyana, Belize, Micronesia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Niue, Palau, Tuvalu.

The rest – including all the big non-US emitters – are covered by paragraph 24.

Biniaz said: “The Paris decision requests parties with 2025 targets (such as the US) to submit their next NDC in 2020 and parties with 2030 targets to either update them or recommunicate them in 2020.

“We included ‘recommunicate’ on the theory that a party might think twice about sticking to an unambitious target if it had to affirmatively repeat it, rather than just kick back and silently keep it. I have been saying that the science, rather than Paris per se, is why parties should enhance their NDCs.”

CHN spoke with several active climate diplomats regarding this issue; they confirmed there was no legal requirement for new NDCs in 2020 but didn’t want to speak on record because while the letter of the law appears clear, the issue remains contested.

Champions of higher ambition argue that other aspects of the decisions taken in Paris should be considered. They argue that the overarching goals set in Paris – to limit warming “well below 2C” and try to halt it at 1.5C – compel countries to do what is necessary to reach them.

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Bill Hare, an Australian climate scientist and veteran watcher of the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), told CHN on Twitter: “The full context of the UNFCCC decisions in Paris, which Australia supported, provide deeper background to the requirement to submit more ambitious NDCs by 2020.” (This issue is particularly pointed in Australia, where the government has already ruled out enhancing its NDC next year).

Hare said another deal made in Paris – the request to IPCC scientists to report on the steps needed to limit warming to 1.5C – was also relevant.

“The IPCC’s special report on 1.5C confirmed very clearly that unless there is substantial improvement in the NDC’s and their emission commitments for 2030 but it will be very difficult, if not impossible to meet the Paris agreement long-term temperature goal,” he said.

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Halldór Thorgeirsson, who chairs Iceland’s climate council but was previously a senior director at the UN climate secretariat, said it was “not helpful to look at elements of the logic of Paris in isolation”.

“NDCs are a contribution to the objective to stabilise the climate and it was well understood that they would need to become more significant with time,” he said. “It is crystal clear that we are not on track but can get on track with political leadership and focus. There is even greater need for global unity of purpose and push for ambition now than in Paris in 2015.”

The Madrid outcome weakens this argument by focusing narrowly on paragraphs 23 and 24, rather than updating them to match the new evidence provided by scientists.

“This deal rips out the most important part of the Paris Agreement – its requirement for countries to revise and update their climate plans next year,” said Adow, who is the director of Power Shift Africa. “That regular review and ratchet mechanism was what promised to make the Paris Agreement an effective tool for reducing emissions. It is this which makes it such a powerful law to prevent climate disaster.

“But in Madrid, governments have turned their backs on raising ambition, at a time when we need more than ever to heed the scientific warning – act now or pay a terrible price later.”

Note: This article was amended to include Brazil in the list of countries that fall under paragraph 23. Brazil’s 2030 target is “indicative”.

The post How Cop25 turned its back on climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Countries failed to agree on many of the hoped for outcomes, including rules to set up a global carbon trading system and a system to channel new finance to countries facing the impacts of climate change.

Ambition

Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to revisit their climate pledges by 2020. But many countries were pushing this year for a clear call for all countries to submit more ambitious climate pledges next year. This is seen as a key means of ensuring countries put a focus on improving their current pledges, as well as empowering civil society to hold them to account.

But countries such as China and Brazil opposed placing any obligation on countries to submit enhanced pledges next year, arguing it should be each country’s own decision. They instead argued the focus should be on pre-2020 action by developing countries to meet their previous pledges (see below).

As talks reached their final days, tensions grew after a draft decision removed any call for countries to “update” or “enhance” their climate plans by 2020. Instead, it only invited them to “communicate” them in 2020 – far weaker language which put no obligation on enhanced ambition.

Plenary is about to start at #Cop25. The latest text has been released this morning and all the language on ambition has been scrapped. Countries are now "invited" to "communicate" by 2020 their mid and long-term climate plans. No language to "update" or "enhance". pic.twitter.com/GZ5WgOBGOl

— Chloé Farand (@ChloeFarand) December 14, 2019

Reacting to this, a high ambition coalition, led by the Marshall Islands and backed by the EU Commission and a number of European countries, made it clear that final Cop 25 decision text must include a clear call for enhanced ambition in 2020.

In the end, the final text added some more ambitious wording back in, pointing directly to the emissions gap between what country pledges currently add up to and what is needed to keep global temperature rise well below 2C.

It also “recalls” that new climate pledges should “represent a progression” beyond previous pledges and represent the highest possible ambition. This text was an improvement on previous drafts but “still weak”, according to Naoyuki Yamagishi of WWF Japan.

Jennifer Tollman, policy advisor at climate thinktank E3G, says the final texts adopted make it clear that countries are expected to start closing the emissions gap in 2020. But it “could have been strengthened by more direct language urging parties to enhance ambition in 2020 in response to climate urgency”, she said.

It’s worth noting that 80 countries have already signalled plans to enhance their climate pledges next year. Even as the talks fell into disarray this week, the EU agreed to a “climate neutral” target for 2050, joining 73 countries who have signed up to a similar goal.

Pre-2020

Developing countries have for years expressed their frustration that rich countries haven’t lived up to the climate action they promised up to 2020. 

Even though 2020 is nearly upon us, these concerns over meeting previous promises remain and again became a source of political tension at the talks. 

Countries such as China and India made it clear they would not support strong language on raising ambition without a similar call for rich countries to provide the finance and support promised to developing countries. 

They called for the creation of a “work programme” to close the gap of commitments made by rich countries before 2020. But the EU opposed this, saying the focus needs to be on future ambition under the Paris Agreement, which applies to all countries. Other poorer developing countries made it clear that, while they support pre-2020 action, higher ambition for the future from all countries should not be conditional on it.

In the final text, countries agreed to hold pre-2020 roundtables. The outcomes of these pre-2020 roundtables will also be rounded up in a report in 2021, which will in turn feed into a review on progress towards meeting the Paris Agreement’s “well below 2C” goal.

It did not specifically say whether the results of these roundtables would feed directly into the global stocktake set to occur in 2023 under the Paris agreement.

Final outcome text on meeting pre-2020 pledges

Global carbon market – overview

A headline outcome of the talks was supposed to be a collection of new rules governing the new global carbon market. 

This market was established by the Paris Agreement, and setting up its rules is the main remaining part of the so-called Paris “rulebook”, the nitty gritty details of how the Paris deal will work in practice. 

According to a planned timetable, countries should have agreed on these rules last year, but the issue was pushed to this year’s talks instead. At Cop25, with tensions breaking out yet again on multiple parts of the rules, no outcome was agreed. 

In the end a mere two paragraphs summed up plans to continue talks in 2020. This did acknowledge the draft texts from this year’s negotiations as a basis for future talks, meaning countries will not have to start from scratch. However, none of these texts (discussed below) have found consensus.

Australia and Brazil continued to push for a system with loopholes which allowed initial double counting of emissions reductions and trading of Kyoto-era credits – explained below. 

But other countries say this would undermine the entire market. As tensions peaked on Saturday, a group of 31 countries led by Costa Rica signed up to the ‘San Jose principles’, a set of minimum standards for ensuring the integrity of the global carbon market.

Given what many viewed as huge problems with the current draft texts, it was good that the negotiations deadlocked and were again postponed, says Joe Thwaites, climate finance expert at WRI. “As many groups have been saying, in this situation, no deal was better than a bad deal that would have undermined the Paris Agreement.”

Double counting

The Paris Agreement is clear that a country that sells emissions cuts via offsetting credits to another country can not count those emissions cuts towards its own climate targets. 

But even though nearly all countries agree with this, a lonely few – most notably Brazil – continue to argue this so-called “corresponding adjustment” is not needed initially. 

The most recent draft text tried to reach a compromise on this by saying double counting would ultimately not be allowed, but also introducing an as-yet-undefined “opt out” period for this.

Li Shuo, senior energy and climate policy officer at Greenpeace China, said his organisation’s interpretation is that this “fairly convoluted provision” would double counting.

Kyoto carryover credits

The new system will allow emission reduction credits to be traded on an open carbon market. It will replace the current Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), established under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Some countries, including Australia, Brazil and India, want to be able to use old, unspent CDM credits in the new system. Australia openly plans on using CDM credits to meet its emission reduction goals.

But many countries are concerned allowing CDM carryover could flood the market with cheap credits that don’t represent real emissions reductions, undermining the integrity of the entire system. This is because CDMs represent emissions cuts made well before 2020, the year the Paris Agreement formally begins, and there serious doubts over whether many CDM-registered projects have even driven real emissions cuts. 

Little consensus was found on this at the talks. The draft text proposes that Kyoto-era credits could be accounted against climate pledges until 2025, a view that many countries find unacceptable. Much of the rest of the text remains vague.

“The current text preserves the possibility of carry over, which should certainly be avoided next year,” said Li.

Overall mitigation

The Paris Agreement text calls for the new carbon market to deliver an “overall mitigation in global emissions”. This essentially means it must generate additional emissions cuts, rather than just offsetting them.

The current draft text on this says at least a 2% share of credits transferred on the market should be automatically cancelled to enable overall mitigation.

However, the real fight on this lies in whether a similar rule should apply to trades made directly between two countries rather than via the global market. The Paris Agreement does not specifically oblige these types of trades to result in an overall mitigation. The more progressive negotiating blocs argue that without a similar rule for both the carbon market and bilateral trading, the system will be distorted in favour of bilateral trading. 

The current draft text “strongly recommends” voluntary cancellation of these bilateral offsets in line with whatever amount is settled up on in the market mechanism. It does not set out how these voluntary contributions might work.

Adaptation share

Countries have already agreed to use a share of money transferred via the international carbon market for adaptation projects.

In the CDM, 2% of credits in the market were used to finance the Adaptation Fund. This is seen as a crucial stream of funding for adaptation projects in vulnerable countries, which tend to receive far less money than mitigation projects.

A similar set up for the new global carbon market has already been agreed, but countries have not settled on how much, with options for 2% of proceeds (generally supported by developed countries), 5% (supported by developing countries), or “x”% all on the table until recently. The latest draft sets it at 2%, though this could change in future talks.

But the real fight here again lay in whether a similar “share of proceeds” for adaptation should be set up for bilateral trading.

Not applying a similar measure could mean bilateral trading ends up more favourable to use than carbon market mechanisms, in turn reducing the money that goes to adaptation. But many countries have domestic legal systems that would prohibit what they see as an internationally imposed tax. 

The current draft text tries to meet the middle by “strongly recommend[ing]” bilateral trades give the same proportion as the carbon market settles on.

But Thwaites says this voluntary language needs to be strengthened to provide more certainty on the predictability and scale of funding, even considering the legal red lines on making it mandatory. “Those provisions really wouldn’t have provided very much,” he says.

Social and environmental safeguards

Indigenous and human rights groups have long called for the new mechanism to ensure the projects it funds do no harm to local communities.

They have pushed for the new carbon market rules to require projects to respect human rights, protect indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups, consult meaningfully with local communities and set up an independent grievance program for projects gone awry.

While elements of these were in initial drafts discussed at the beginning of the talks, successive drafts removed several of them. The current draft text has no mention of human rights, asking only that projects shall “avoid negative environmental and social impacts”. It says consultations should take place “where consistent with applicable domestic arrangements” and that further safeguards could be reviewed by 2028.

Several countries voiced support for human rights protections during the final plenary on Sunday morning.

The texts are ”woefully inadequate” in regards to protecting people on the ground from harm caused by activities under the new market mechanisms,” says Erika Lennon, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “Delaying the decision to Cop26 was the only responsible decision.”

Loss and damage

There has long been calls by vulnerable nations and civil society for new streams of finance on loss and damage – the term for climate impacts which can not be adapted to.

This year’s talks was seen as a major moment to address these calls, due to the review of the UN framework to address loss and damage – known as the Warsaw International Mechanism (Wim). This was set up in 2013, but has never garnered momentum to provide new finance to cover climate losses.

The main push by vulnerable countries at this Cop was the establishment of a new financial facility under the Wim to channel new and additional loss and damage finance to countries facing climate emergency. 

However, some developed countries, are extremely wary of language around loss and damage finance. “The US was particularly resistant to any discussion about new areas of work even for existing funds,” says Thwaites, noting that other developed countries are more willing to engage.

Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for ActionAid, tells CHN the final agreement was far weaker than demanded. A previous draft had called on developed countries to scale up action and support, but the final text removed all reference to any developed country obligations on finance.

Final outcome on loss and damage finance

There were some small signs of process, including the creation of an expert group which could allow space for more conversations on how and by what means loss and damage funding could be provided. “This issue is not going to go away,” says Thwaites.

Meanwhile, a newly formed “Santiago network” will lead more work on how to minimise, avoid and recover from loss and damage.

But Sven Harmeling, climate change lead for Care International, called the loss and damage outcome “disappointing”, in particular pointing to the vague mandate for the Green Climate Fund on whether and how it should incorporate loss and damages into its remit.

Another technical but important argument was whether the WIM should be put under the Paris Agreement body or the general Conference of Parties (COP). The US pushed strongly for it to remain outside the Cop, which it does in the current draft, although several country groups made it clear that the WIM should report jointly to both the COP and the Paris Agreement going forward.

“[This] is exactly what the US wanted so that it is not affected by [the WIM], after it leaves Paris Agreement while continuing to remain a party to the convention, therefore under the COP,” says Singh.

Other outcomes

In a climate talks that could boast few triumphs to its name, two small wins were the approval of a new Gender Action Plan and a work plan for the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform.

But elsewhere there was little to champion. A decision on “common timeframes”, another part of the Paris rulebook which addresses whether future climate pledges should last five or ten years, was pushed to next year. 

Meanwhile, a last minute fight on the plenary floor about long term finance meant there was no outcome on this, though talks will continue next year.

Where to next?

The next round of climate talks is set to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2020. Former UK clean energy minister Claire Perry O’Neill, who will lead the talks, was quick to reassure that she will push for progress next year.

“No deal is definitely better than the bad deal proposed,” she wrote on Twitter shortly after the talks ended. “We will pull no punches next year in getting clarity and certainty for natural carbon markets and will work with everyone including the private sector for clear rules and transparent measurement.”

https://twitter.com/Cop26President/status/1206208162925289479

The UK is one of several European countries which yesterday supported the ‘San Jose principles’ for environmental integrity of the new carbon market. It is also a member of the high-ambition coalition of countries which pushed hard this year for a clear call for enhanced climate plans in 2020.

With so little agreed at this year’s conference, the stakes will now be even higher for the Glasgow talks. These will now have the challenge of finding a resolution to the carbon markets and common timeframes at the same time as galvanising countries to submit upgraded climate pledges due next year. 

Another discussion set to begin next year is the promised new global climate finance goal to be made by 2025, and has to be higher than the $100bn per year promised from 2020-2025.

Work will begin on many of these issues at the annual “intersessional” negotiations in Bonn in May/June 2020, although no political issues are likely to be finalised here.

Note: This article was amended. It originally said Australia planned to use 370 million CDM credits to meet its targets. Not all of those credits are from the CDM. 

The post Cop25: What was achieved and where to next? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last year in Katowice, countries agreed that climate pledges made from 2031 onwards should all cover the same time period. But parties are yet to decide on exactly how long this time period should be, and the flexibility of this rule.

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What are common time frames?

Under the Paris Agreement, countries submitted climate pledges. These initial pledges all begin in 2020, but covered a variety of time periods, from five to fifteen years.

The common time frame negotiation, which is taking place in Madrid, is an attempt to make the timelines of these pledges more uniform, allowing a more aligned set of goals that can be assessed and ramped up together.

“The idea is very simple,” says Li Shuo from Greenpeace China. “The common time frame is basically dealing with how long [Paris climate pledges] should be. Should they be five years, should they be ten years. And to what extent parties have flexibility in terms of choosing deadlines of their time frame.”

Aside from the new global carbon market, common time frames are the only part of the Paris “rulebook” yet to be resolved. Both issues were supposed to have been agreed on last year at Cop24 in Katowice but couldn’t find consensus.

Why does it matter?

NGOs and many countries argue the length of goals’ time frames will influence the ambition of climate action and affect the signals and certainty countries send to their citizens and businesses.

“Whether you have five year, ten year, it gives a sense of the acceleration, the pace of action,” says Yamide Dagnet from the World Resources Institute. “We need to just go faster, we cannot take the risk to lock in for too long something that some countries may think is high ambition when, collectively speaking, we need everybody to do more than they are currently doing.”

It will also influence other parts of the Paris Agreement, she says, such as assessment of each “trading period” of the new carbon market.

In addition, Dagnet says it is important to conclude these remaining discussions before next year’s UN climate conference in Glasgow, to leave space for focus there to be on raising the ambition of current climate pledges.

What are the options?

Lots of options still remain on the table for common time frames.

Five year time frames means initially all countries’ pledges should last from 2031 to 2035, although they could also include indications of longer term goals. This option is supported by most NGOs as well as several country groups including small island states, least developed countries (LDC) and the Environmental Integrity Group (EIG). 

Loss and damage: Who pays for the impacts of the heated Earth?

Sonam P Wangdi, chair of the LDC group, says five year time frames will avoid locking in low ambition and follow the five-year cycle of the Paris Agreement. “Every five years, successive NDCs that represent a progression and highest possible ambition should be submitted in response to the global stocktake,” he says.

Meanwhile, Japan and Russia are pushing for ten year time frames, arguing that this is more suited to their national planning. 

Another option still on the table is to let each country decide themselves if they want five or ten year time frames.

Yet another option previously pushed by Brazil, known as “5 plus 5”, would set a five year time frame but provide an indication of the goals for ten years time which could be adjusted in the future.

The UK must steer the Paris Agreement out of its ‘perilous decade’

There’s also disagreement over whether there should be a “lag period” for pledges, whereby pledges are set five years before the implementation period begins, as they were for Paris,

Other groups, such as the EU, argue the decision should just be delayed until later and have yet to take a clear position on what time frame they support.

“You have a large number of countries who have not made their preferred option clear,” says Shuo. “The most prominent one amongst them is the European Union. […]. And this is, I would argue, the primary reason why the issue has not been resolved.” 

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What’s next?

Countries begin the first round of discussions on Wednesday, with the first draft text expected on Friday.  “I think by the end of the week we will know more or less what will happen,” says Dagnet.

Shuo says: “If there is no clear move from the European Union, we won’t have a solution on this issue in [Madrid]”.

The post ‘Common timeframes’: How they could speed or slow climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

As a range of dangerous phenomena intensify because of global warming, countries are set to assess how these impacts – known as loss and damage – are accounted for.

The 2013 international framework to address loss and damage – known as the Warsaw International Mechanism (Wim) – is up for review. How this mechanism should be governed and financed is a major aspect of the Cop25 talks in Madrid this fortnight.

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The framework intended that developed countries provide developing countries with finance, technology and capacity-building to help victims of climate change recover after extreme weather events or slower-onset climate disasters such as sea-level rise.

The UN has established funds to finance the transition to cleaner energy in poor countries and their adaptation to a heated world. But rich countries – which hold the historical responsibility for climate change – have dragged their feet on providing new finance to cover losses. Preferring to encourage the creation of insurance schemes.

What is Article 6? The issue climate negotiators cannot agree

They have also sought to avoid any liability and compensation claims for their historic responsibility in causing climate change, with the US a consistent opponent across multiple administrations. The US in now the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and in a Tuesday op-ed for Climate Home News Bangladeshi academic Saleemul Huq called for compensation to again be openly discussed.

But Carlos Fuller, lead negotiator for Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), told Climate Home News that pushing for compensation was still a political “no-no”.

“In my opinion that will never fly,” he said.

Madrid climate talks to split nations into vanguard and laggard

Still, the consideration of the Wim review – which took place on Sunday – is likely to see disagreements between rich and vulnerable countries at Cop25, as it has for decades. 

In submissions to UN Climate Change ahead of Cop25, the typhoon-vulnerable Philippines said it was “imperative for finance to immediately and systematically flow” to address loss and damage impacts. The Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) urged countries to “sufficiently and reliably” fund work to address the issue.

Fuller said countries that experience loss and damage should be supported through “finance but also capacity-building”.

The establishment of a financing facility remained a distant prospect, he said, with talks focused on reviewing the Wim.

“I don’t think we have reached that stage yet,” he said.

Civil society groups have called for financial support to go beyond insurance-based funding and humanitarian aid for climate victims to become systematic.

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In an open letter to Cop25 president and Chile’s environment minister Carolina Schmidt, more than 150 civil society groups have called for the creation of a specific financing facility and debt relief to help vulnerable countries recover from loss and damage impacts. They argued regular contributions from wealthy countries and global taxes on financial transactions, international air travel and fossil fuels should finance the fund.

The letter comes after a report by a coalition of climate and environmental organisations estimated rich countries should provide an additional $50 billion per year by 2022 and $300 billion annually by 2030 to address loss and damage.

Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for ActionAid, told CHN: “The world is recognising a climate emergency but there is no global system to provide relief and help [vulnerable countries] to recover from the impacts.”

The post Loss and damage: Who pays for the impacts of the heated Earth? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Under the Paris Agreement (the relevant section is Article 6), countries agreed to set up a new global carbon market system to help countries decarbonise their economies at lower cost.

Countries have tried and failed to agree the rules governing this mechanism. It is the last section of the Paris accord rulebook which remains unresolved and it has the potential to make or break efforts to curb emissions.

How are markets linked to the Paris Agreement?

A majority of national climate plans include the use of carbon markets to achieve cheaper emissions reductions. Most commonly this means governments and the private sector can trade emissions reductions.

But some governments may also look to buy carbon credits to develop green projects designed to cut emissions in another country. Others which have cut emissions beyond their target could sell their overachievement to countries struggling to meet their goals.

Not all countries will use these credits. For now, Finland and the UK, for example, have said they will not use them to reach their net zero targets. Norway and Canada, on the other hand, will.

The Paris Agreement sought to establish a common set of rules to govern these transactions and ensure they lead to global emissions cuts.

Madrid climate talks to split nations into vanguard and laggard

What is Article 6? 

The framework defined by Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is divided into three sections.

Article 6.2 allows countries to strike bilateral and voluntary agreements to trade carbon units.

Article 6.4 creates a centralised governance system for countries and the private sector to trade emissions reduction anywhere in the world. This system known as the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM) is due to replace the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), established under the Kyoto Protocol.

Finally, Article 6.8 develops a framework for cooperation between countries to reduce emissions outside market mechanisms, such as aid.

Under the Paris Agreement, a share of proceeds from the markets needs to be deployed to help developing countries adapt to climate impacts. Whether this applies to the centralised SDM market only or to all trading, including from bilateral agreements has not yet been agreed.

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What is at stake in the negotiations? 

While the text of the Paris Agreement is not up for discussion, Article 6 is just two pages long and fails to describe how these systems will work and what rules will ensure they lead to real emissions cuts.

The issue is paramount to the integrity of the Paris Agreement and negotiators have warned that weak rules could undermine the entire accord and even lead to an increase in emissions.

“How these rules are decided is really going to make or break the ambition of the Paris agreement,” said World Resources Institute senior associate Kelly Levin, adding that weak rules “could lead to an increase of global emissions”.

At the latest climate talks in Bonn in June, Costa Rican negotiator Felipe de Leon Denegri told Climate Home News: “Article 6, unlike almost anything else in the [UN climate negotiations], has the potential to do actual active harm.” He added there was a “quite substantial” risk of introducing loopholes that undermine the ambition of the deal.

“The risk is that carbon markets are used as a trick to meet emissions reduction targets on paper. They can be used as an excuse not to do very much in practice,” warned Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch.

However, a robust set of rules could help bolster ambition.

In talks that have now lasted several years, negotiators have been unable to overcome some major sticking points.

Sticking point 1: CDM credits

Brazil, China and India want to trade their surplus of old credits from the previous CDM regime on the new market set-up under the Paris Agreement. But the CDM has been mired in allegations of human rights abuses and corruption with a majority of projects found unlikely to drive emissions cuts.

Experts have warned this risked flooding the market with credits of no value and undermine global efforts to curb emissions. This is one of the thorniest issues in the negotiations, which require consensus. In 2018, Brazil forced this section of the Paris rules to be extended for an extra year even as the rest of the Paris rulebook was agreed.

Marina Grossi, a former negotiator and president of Brazil-based CEBDS, a non-profit organisation promoting sustainable development for companies, told CHN the Brazilian government wanted flexibility in the way the rules are implemented.

“The government is not trying to be an obstacle to Article 6” but rather act in way that “it can take advantage of this new market,” she said. Grossi suggested a period of transition during which old credits could be traded on the new market could bring Brazil on side.

Sticking point 2: The corresponding adjustment (or avoiding double counting)

Brazil has also pushed back against rules to prevent double counting emissions reductions. A majority of countries argue emissions cuts cannot be claimed by both the country that made them and the country that bought the offsetting credit.

To ensure a credible system, countries who sell credits to other countries will need to increase their own reported emissions by the same amount. But the rules remain under discussion, with Brazil arguing this so-called “corresponding adjustment” is not needed initially.

If emissions reductions are reported twice by two different countries, “there isn’t much point having targets in the first place,” warned Dufrasne.

Sticking point 3: Overall mitigation

Another key issue is to ensure the new market doesn’t allow transfers of emissions reduction across borders without generating additional cuts.

Countries need to agree on a way to ensure “overall mitigation” of the market. But there is disagreement over which of the three types of market (6.2, 6.4 and 6.8) will be governed by this principle. The Paris Agreement text only Article 6.4 includes this goal. More progressive negotiating blocs argue that all markets need to adhere to this principle or the system will be distorted.

How this is achieved is also up for debate, with some suggesting a systematic ‘cancellation’ of credits to the benefit of the atmosphere.

What stage have the negotiations reached?

A deal was very close to being done in Katowice, Poland last December. But since then the conjecture has widened, rather than shrunk, according to analysis of the number of square brackets (points of disagreement) in the negotiating text by Carbon Brief. In Katowice, the rest of the Paris rulebook was being negotiated and countries were pushing hard to agree everything. Now that Article 6 has been siloed, that pressure has dissipated.

The latest texts governing Article 6.2, Article 6.4 and Article 6.8 are riddled with 672 square brackets, all of which need to be resolved for the Madrid talks to close this issue.

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What happens if the talks fail?

Negotiations on carbon markets are technical but this doesn’t prevent highly politicised positions. Discussions are anticipated to be tough.

If an agreement cannot be found, the issue will be kicked further down the road to Cop26 in December next year.

Resolving Article 6 is the major agenda item for Cop25. But failure is a perception the UN, Cop hosts, national governments and parts of civil society traditionally try to avoid. If things drag on to 2020, expect a fudge to emerge from Madrid. This might come in the form of a ‘partial resolution’, where some points of disagreement are declared agreed with a narrower discussion tabled for 2020.

The post What is Article 6? The issue climate negotiators cannot agree appeared first on Climate Home News.

The high-level meeting at the UN headquarters is a critical moment for political leaders to show their willingness to increase their climate plans and deepen the decarbonisation of their economies.

Here is how it’s going to work.

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When and where?

The summit will take place over three days 21-23 September at UN Headquarters in New York. With a culminating summit of national leaders on Monday 23.

What’s going to happen?

A youth climate summit on Saturday 21 September will open the meeting, bringing together young activists, entrepreneurs and change-makers on the day following the world’s first global climate strike.

On Sunday, the nine coalitions are due to meet to take stock of their recent work and finalise details before Monday’s big reveal.

Monday’s plenary meeting, the main event, will be a combination of presentations from the best national plans and coalition initiatives being showcased on stage.

Why another UN climate meeting? Isn’t the Paris Agreement already acting as a compass for action?

Despite commitments by governments to tackle the climate crisis, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise year on year.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries pledged to limit global temperature rise “well below” 2C of warming. But current national commitments will struggle to hold warming below 3C by the end of the century.

Countries have also agreed to review and update their climate plans every five years, with a view to progressively increase their emissions reductions targets. The first stage of this process is due next year.

To galvanise political leadership for ambition at a time when much of the world is gripped by a surge of nationalism and turning inwards, Guterres personally convened the summit, backing it with the full force of the UN machine.

It is expected to be a critical moment for climate diplomacy, intended to kick-start the process of increasing countries’ climate plans.

Further reading: Nationalism could sink the Paris Agreement. The UN chief is fighting back

What is Guterres demanding?

“Bring plans, not speeches,” Guterres told countries.

In a letter sent to every head of state, the UN chief set-out his expectations for the summit, urging governments to come with concrete and meaningful plans for action.

Excerpts of the letter, showed Guterres asked all leaders to come “ready to announce the plans that they will set next year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050”.

His demands, in line with the tougher 1.5C goal of the Paris deal, set a high benchmark for ambition. Reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 is something only a handful of largely developed countries have so far committed to do.

Guterres also called on countries to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030, end fossil fuel subsidies and ban new coal plants after 2020 – a set of asks unusually prescriptive for the head of the UN.

Further reading:

• Guterres asks all countries to plan for carbon neutrality by 2050 
  
• Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

What noises are coming from governments?

Countries are expected to compete for the spotlight with only the most ambitious and meaningful plans being showcased on stage on Monday 23, with the aim to spur a race to the top.

Between 80 and 100 countries have suggested they were ready to increase their climate plans ahead of schedule, with some countries signalling they could make an announcement at the summit, according to the UN.

Special envoy for climate change Luis Alfonso de Alba said a number of countries had told the UN they were “committed to be reaching new [climate] plans but they might not be ready to do that by the summit”. The UN is also expecting countries to set-out how they are going to meet their targets and plan to increase them.

Indications of what large emitters might bring to the summit remain mixed. Days before the summit, de Alba said he was “very confident” that China will come to the summit with clear commitments and “a much higher level of ambition”.

The UN has repeatedly pointed to a statement signed by China, France, and Guterres on the margins of the G20 as an indication of Beijing’s plans. It included a commitment to increase their climate plans and publish their “long-term mid-century low greenhouse gas emissions development strategies by 2020”, something Beijing could flesh out at the event.

In a communique released last week, EU Commission outgoing vice-president for the energy union Maroš Šefčovič said the EU will bring “the fruit of our work”, which he described as “a realistic perspective of a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, backed by ambitious policies set in binding legislation.” The Commission is hoping members states can agree on the target by early next year, but must overcome resistance from some holdouts.

The US is not part of the conversation at the moment. For China and the EU, the ultimate deadline to come up with more ambitious plans will be next year’s climate talks. And yet, without a strong indication that the world’s largest emitters are ready to take more robust climate action, the summit’s success could be compromised.

Further reading:

• UN ‘very confident’ China plans to raise climate ambition
• China pledges to strengthen climate plan
• UN chief’s climate asks fall flat in emerging economies
• EU climate deal fails amid four-nation revolt

So is this all about competition?

No, it’s also about cooperation.

Besides, a push for countries to increase their climate plans, preparation for the summit have seen the creation of nine tracks – or coalitions – under which governments together with businesses, NGOs and other international organisations are expected to present meaningful, realistic and scalable initiatives.

The tracks have been led by national governments and include mitigation (Chile), energy transition (Denmark and Ethiopia); industry transition (India and Sweden); climate finance and carbon pricing (France, Jamaica and Qatar), infrastructure, cities and local action (Turkey and Kenya); nature-based solutions (China and New Zealand), resilience and adaptation (UK and Egypt), youth engagement and public mobilisation (Marshall Islands and Ireland) and social and political drivers (Peru and Spain).

Each track is led by an alliance of countries working with a range of partners, including businesses and civil society. The proposals emerging from these tracks should be “transformational”, the UN said, in a way that doesn’t leave communities who depend on fossil fuels for their livelihood behind.

Who is coming?

60 heads of states are expected to take the podium to announce more ambitious plans – or at least plans to plan in time for next year’s climate talks.

Some of those expected to make an appearance include India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, France’s president Emmanuel Macron, the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson and German chancellor Angela Merkel. China is due to send a lower-ranking minister than initially anticipated – and the foreign minister is expected to be in attendance.

Neither US president Donald Trump, nor Australian prime minister Scott Morrison will attend the summit despite both attending the UN’s assembly general later in the week. Foreign minister Marise Payne and ambassador for the environment Patrick Suckling are expected to represent Australia, while US state department officials are also due to attend.

Besides business and civil society representatives, more than 500 young people have been selected to attend the summit, with youth due to play a key role throughout the event. The UN has funded travel “as carbon-neutral as possible” to New York for 100 young climate leaders from across the world.

Greta Thunberg, who crossed the Atlantic on a race boat as an alternative to flying, is also due to have a speaking role during the three-day event.

What happens next?

The summit is a political moment for world leaders to take concrete steps to ramp up ambition. It doesn’t replace the annual climate negotiations talks, which this year are taking place in December in Santiago, Chile.

Instead, the summit marks an additional step for countries to build momentum ahead of the 2020 climate talks – the most important negotiating moment since the Paris Agreement when countries are due to announce how they are going to update their climate plans.

Following the summit, Guterres is expected to write an analytical report about the meeting’s achievement in securing additional emissions reduction pledges and the support needed to implement the proposed initiatives.

The report is due to be presented at Cop25 in Chile.

The post What is the UN climate action summit? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last week’s IPCC report on land use may not have turned out to be the headline-generating machine that the 2018 report on limiting warming to 1.5C was; nor did it go unnoticed. The scope for stories was wide, with co-chair Jim Skea telling Climate Home News the paper was “the most complicated thing I’ve ever been involved with”.

While some journalists picked up on trade-offs between carbon storage and food production, the importance of indigenous land rights or sustainable farming practices, one theme dominated: meat.

Led by western media, the majority of coverage focused on the environmental impact of readers’ steak habits – even in countries where vegetarian diets are dictated by financial constraints or spiritual practice, not consumer preference.

Despite being the first IPCC report with a majority of authors from the developing world, few news outlets in poorer countries dedicated space to it. What little reporting filtered through was largely based on the IPCC press release or newswire copy, rather than highlighting the stark implications of the science for vulnerable communities.

Comment: How we manage land is critical to climate justice

AFP led with “Can we eat Big Macs and still avoid climate chaos?”, summarising that “not everyone needs to become a vegetarian, much less vegan, to keep the planet from overheating, but it would probably make things a lot easier if they did.” Reuters also attempted to capture that nuance, writing “although the report stopped short of explicitly advocating going meat free, it called for big changes to farming and eating habits to limit the impact of population growth and changing consumption patterns on stretched land and water resources.”

In the UK, The Times called on the reader to “Eat less meat to save the Earth”, while in the Guardian leftist commentator George Monbiot hit out at the IPCC for “[understating] the true carbon cost of our meat and dairy habits”. It provoked a backlash from British farming unions, who lamented “biased” and “selective” reporting of the science.

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine had a similar focus, describing it the report as “a thorn in the flesh” (the word “fleisch” also meaning meat). Spanish online magazine Economía Digital warned the report would worsen the dire state of the national meat sector, which has suffered from declining demand in the past decade.

The focus on diet isn’t without its problems, Max Boykoff, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and a seasoned observer on climate coverage, told Climate Home News.

“Some of these ways in which certain outlets can choose to focus in on the individual can serve to distract and simply displace in a finite news hole those larger scale stories that need attention: the revolutionising of our agricultural practices, the way we manage our forests,” Boykoff said.

“Yes, [eating habits] are the way we come into contact with the environment most frequently. But to stay in that place is to atomise and limit the possibilities for making the kind of changes that are needed.” It also gave “corporations a free pass”, he said.

Analysis: Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma

India initially set its own agenda, with the Business Standard first to obtain a leak of the draft report in July. Under the headline “Climate change could cause 29% spike in cereal prices,” journalist Nitin Sethi noted that increased aridity in Asia could severely impact food security, and leave up to 522 million people prey to “water stress, drought and habitat degradation…. in a significant finding for countries such as India”.

On the day of the final report’s publication, however, much of the national media toed the vegetarian line. The Times of India went with an uncannily similar headline to that of The Times in the UK (“Adopt a green diet and help save Earth: UN body report”), while India Today gave twin prominence to the report’s messages on food security and plant-based diets.

In the most vegetarian country on earth, that angle smacked of irresponsibility, said Dharini Parthasarathy, a communications officer at the umbrella group Climate Action Network (CAN).

“The report also talks about the extent of hunger and poverty that will be exacerbated by bad land use and climate change. For decision makers in India, that’s an alarm bell. We’re in an agrarian crisis, so for that not to be the big takeaway is quite something,” she said.

The big picture wasn’t lost on everyone.

IPCC: Urgent action needed to tackle hunger alongside climate crisis

The New York Times wrote of the planet’s soil as a carbon and hunger time bomb. “A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming.” It quoted one of the lead authors of the report, Cynthia Rosenzweig, who said that “the potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing… All of these things are happening at the same time.”

In France, Germany and Spain media called for a revolution in food systems. The French and German media covered the report particularly extensively, with Le Monde, Liberation and Ouest-France devoting front pages to it. Left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung mentioned the report in no fewer than 16 articles on Thursday and Friday.

Addressing a nation of farmers, France’s press delved deeper than others into the takeaways for agriculture. Le Monde splashed with the headline “Humanity is exhausting the earth” – the word “terre” carrying the double meaning of “planet Earth” and “soils”. A caricature by Plantu shows a mapped snake biting its own tail, in a reference to a French phrase denoting self-harm.

To Olivier de Schutter, former UN chief on the right to food, the report is first and foremost an endorsement of agroecology. He told the French paper of record that humanity needed to turn away from fertilisers and pesticides and embrace organic methods.

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Like Climate Home News, Brazil’s Folha de S Paulo homed in on the competing demands on land to cut emissions through forest plantations and biofuels, and grow food.

In the highest and fourth highest emitting countries in the world, China and Russia, media stuck to neutral summaries of the report’s key messages.

China’s official state-run press agency, Xinhua News Agency, led with the headline that “UN report points out that land degradation will exacerbate climate change”.

As record wildfires tore across Siberia, unleashing plumes of smog the size of the EU, the Russian press missed an opportunity to cover feedback loops between fires and climate change. It wasn’t for want of trying on the part of Greenpeace Russia, which circulated a press release to 400 outlets titled “UN recognizes fires in natural areas as a threat to climate”. The report noted that “fire weather season has already lengthened by 18.7% globally between 1979 and 2013,” with “significant increases in forest area burnt in boreal Siberia”.

Instead, state news agency Interfax contented itself with a broadbrush overview of the report, focusing on rising food security risks and the need to slash meat consumption.

Tanzania’s The Citizen offered a rare bit of African commentary, with an editorial urging the “government… to check the habit of wanton falling [sic] of trees for the excuse of farming” and advocating “strong punitive measures against the destruction of natural forests”.

Reuter’s charitable arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was one of the few outlets to focus on the report’s conclusion about the critical role of indigenous people  in land and climate conservation.

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The text makes for the most earnest attempt yet to define a concept that has been backed by many a Democratic presidential candidate, often with little detail.

The agenda would touch every aspect of the US economy and calls for carbon emissions and inequality to be tackled as one.

“Today is the day we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a press conference launching the resolution.

Green New Deal should not be feared, says Spanish prime minister

There are many legislative hurdles for the deal to leap if it is ever to become US policy – not least the Republican-controlled senate and White House.

The plan was the beginning of a phase of “political education”, said Markey, that would eventually lead to the adoption of the package. The pair said the document had attracted 60 Democrats as cosponsors, from across the party.

Here are CHN’s seven take-aways:

A historically ambitious agenda: Borrowing its name after Franklin Roosevelt’s depression-era New Deal, the resolution commits the US to axe greenhouse gas emissions through a series of Green New Deal goals to be achieved within ten years, and reach net zero emissions by 2050. This is a far more radical pledge than the current US target, which seeks to slash emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels in 2025.

A punch back at climate denial: Swept under the carpet by the White House, the landmark UN report on 1.5C of warming and the fourth national assessment climate report are hoisted at the very forefront of the resolution.

This marks a 180 degree turn away from the current administration, which has consistently sought to sow doubt on man-made climate change. In November, Donald Trump told reporters that he didn’t believe his government’s climate report, while the US sided with Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait in October in diminishing the role of the 1.5C report at the UN climate summit in December.

The “just transition” enters Congress: Thought out by trade-unions, the just transition aims to decarbonise the economy in a way that softens the impact on fossil-fuel workers. The legislation explicitly refers to it by aiming to “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers”.

“We are not going to transition to renewable energies without also transitioning front line communities and coal communities into economic prosperity,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

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Calling for an energy revolution: Within 10 years, the deal calls for 100% of power demand in the US to be met “through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”. To make this happen, the government would work to provide “energy-efficient, distributed, and ‘‘smart’’ power grids” and “ensure affordable access to electricity.

The nuclear option: An original fact sheet that was released by Ocasio-Cortez’ office regarding the resolution said there was no place for nuclear in the 100% renewable energy target. But asked about that in the press conference, Markey said the resolution was “silent” on any particular carbon-free energy technology. Nuclear currently supplies 20% of US electricity.

Large-scale investments in infrastructure. The resolution calls for a massive overhaul of infrastructure and industry. Overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as is “technologically feasible”.

Building climate policy from the bottom-up: Written after France’s gilets jaune movement brought tens of thousands to the streets to protest a tax rise on fuel, the legislation seeks to involve citizens into the development of the plans that will implement the Green New Deal. It called for “transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with front line and vulnerable communities, labour unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses”.

* Note: this article has been amended to reflect the fact that the GND does not set a 2030 emissions target.

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In 2015, the world’s top two emitters, the US and China, joined with Brazil, some small island countries and the European Union, led by Germany, France and the UK, to land the agreement.

But climate change politics have shifted significantly since then, with two more big tilts this week. Brazil elected a staunch and radical anti-environmentalist president, while Germany’s Angela Merkel confirmed her exit plans, further weakening an already fading image as the “climate chancellor” and Europe’s go-to leader in the field.

It is the latest bout of a malaise that has infected climate efforts since Donald Trump was elected in the US in 2016.

Now, in many important countries, climate scepticism and economic nationalism are usurping the international green enthusiasm of 2015. As a result, political support for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, sending aid to the poorest and most vulnerable countries and discussing it all in multilateral summits is waning. Others that remain committed to climate action are consumed by domestic concerns – like Brexit in the UK, and political instability in Germany.

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None of this bodes well for the Cop24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland this December, where nearly 200 countries must agree the complex rules to keep each other on track to fulfil the Paris goals for limiting the temperature rise. Negotiations in the run-up to what observers are calling the most important Cop since Paris have been slow and fraught.

The rhetoric going into the meeting is less positive than before Paris – at least in the top echelons of national politics. Ambitious calls to overhaul old, dirty sectors such as energy and transport is matched by caution from Germany, Poland, Australia, Brazil, the US and others about the need to protect industrial heavyweights such as coal miners, auto-makers and beef farmers.

“Of course, we have big issue with Trump and the consequences of Trump in other countries,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and France’s ambassador at the Paris summit.

That raises the pressure for Katowice, she said. “Symbolically, politically, to have a well-run Cop which delivers on its results is really important to show that whatever the ups and downs of the global politics on climate, and however much the climate issue is taken hostage by certain political parties, in reality there is still global consensus pushing for it.”

The election of the rightwing Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is set to bring radical changes, including opening the Amazon to mining, agriculture and construction and merging the environment and agriculture ministries. Bolsonaro said last week that he would not pull out of the Paris Agreement, as long as it did not affect Brazilian control over the Andes mountains, Amazon and Atlantic Ocean. Previously, however, he praised US president Trump for his decision to withdraw.

https://twitter.com/izabella1709/status/1057410046584180736

Brazil was never an all-out champion of climate action. Yet it did help tip the balance in favour of a stronger Paris Agreement, breaking ranks with other emerging economies and backing bigger and faster emissions cuts.

More recently, Michel Temer’s current government has crimped Amazon deforestation – while drawing criticism from environmentalists for still favouring farmers – and secured the role of host of next year’s COP25 summit, where countries will be under pressure to hike their national commitments to reducing greenhouse gases.

Brazil elects Bolsonaro, who has threatened Amazon and global climate efforts

Compared to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the German shift will be far more subtle – with continued headline support for the Paris Agreement and strict rules to fulfil it, as well as financial aid for poorer countries.

But Merkel’s announcement on Monday, that she will step down as leader of her conservative Christian Democratic Union and will not stand for re-election in 2021, further weakens her clout. Her image on climate change has already taken a hit this year, amid criticism for allowing deforestation for a coal mine, failure to meet the country’s 2020 emissions reduction goal, and slow progress on setting an end date for coal use.

It marks a change from 2015, when Merkel won praise for securing a G7 commitment to keeping the temperature below 2C, just months before Paris. Germany’s Energiewende pivot to renewable energy has also lost its lustre since then, and is now blamed for keeping coal afloat to make up for the shutdown of emissions-free nuclear power plants.

“I do not expect Merkel to stand out at the Cop,” said German European parliament member Reinhard Bütikofer, co-chair of the European Greens, adding that she is swayed by the Social Democrats’ “conventional and backward” views on environmental policy. Referring to the chancellor’s 2007 trip to learn about the consequences of global warming, he added: “Merkel has not been a proactive force in that realm of policymaking ever since she famously sported her red jacket in front of some Greenland glaciers.”

These developments come after two years of political upheaval that has affected all the key players in the Paris deal.

The most well-documented was Trump’s announcement six months after Paris that he would pull the US out of the deal, and subsequent moves to eliminate Obama-era measures including limits on coal-fired power and fuel efficiency improvements.

Meanwhile Australia – always reluctant to take climate action that might harm its large resource economy – is growing more brazen, criticising international climate talks and funding and ruling out a quick end to coal use.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is the environmental story of 2018.

No-one is better positioned than CHN’s Fabiano Maisonnave to cover the impact of his presidency on the world’s most important forest. We are the only international news site with a correspondent living in the heart of the Amazon. You can read some of the great reporting Fabiano has already done for us here.

We know we need to keep on this story, but after a huge 2018 and with the biggest UNFCCC talks in years approaching, our resources are really stretched. Please help us to keep Fabiano writing by making a small donation through our Patreon account.

Similar views are still alive and kicking in coal-reliant Poland, which presides over Cop24. Warsaw tends to stress the need for a gradual transition from coal, along with forestry and technology to catch CO2 and offset fossil fuel burning, and the rise of electric transport – which could present new demand for coal-fired power.

Even China, which has set high targets for cutting coal use and adding renewables and electric vehicles, sticks to a hard line behind negotiating doors. It wants to differentiate the responsibilities for developing economies and put more burden on developed countries – something the US and EU oppose.

This leaves the question of where leadership will come from to drive action forward.

“The political signals we are getting are not in favour of climate action,” said Harjeet Singh from the NGO ActionAid. “This is quite frustrating, this is a time when all of us in the global community should have come together to deal with this global problem.”

Still, climate change advocates stress that they see a positive side-effect to the disappointing turns in high-level politics: the rise of action from states, cities, regions, businesses, philanthropists and others.

“At this point the private sector and finance and technology have taken over the leadership and are decarbonising the electricity grid and are moving, not fast enough, but much more quickly than they were five years ago into a decarbonised economy,” Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN’s climate secretariat and convener of the Mission 2020 initiative, told Climate Home News.

Megan Darby contributed reporting.

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The ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) – the sister party to Angela Merkel’s CDU and the partner in her national grand coalition government – were dealt a historic blow in the Bavarian state elections, rattling Merkel’s fragile three-party alliance in Berlin.

While a direct impact on climate and energy policy is unlikely given looming elections in the next key state of Hesse in two weeks, the state of the coalition raises doubts about whether it can muster the strength to drive major policy projects such as an exit from coal fired power generation. The conservative CSU looks set to govern in Bavaria in an alliance with the moderate-conservative Free Voters, a party that has voiced clear support for the Energiewende but has still to show its priorities once it enters its first-ever state government.

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This is the first time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has gathered evidence on the tougher target demanded by countries on the front line of climate impacts.

It validates their concerns, showing that the difference between 1.5C and 2C – the upper limit governments committed to in the Paris Agreement – is critical to millions of people’s homes, jobs and lives.

As to whether it is feasible to halt the temperature rise at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the report has no easy answers. What it does is elucidate the options.

It was a mammoth undertaking, with 91 authors from 40 countries compiling evidence from more than 6,000 papers and addressing 42,001 comments from experts and governments.

‘Most important years in history’: major UN report sounds last-minute climate alarm

In a tense meeting in South Korea last week, government representatives haggled with scientists for six days to produce a 33-page summary of four in-depth chapters.

The result of writing by committee is a somewhat dense and technical document. Here is our breakdown of the key messages and omissions, and their political significance.

We have followed the structure of the IPCC report, in four sections.

• Understanding 1.5C warming
• Impacts and threats
• Pathways to 1.5C
• Ramping up action

1. The first draft summary circulated for review in January included a high-level statement. That disappeared from subsequent versions, which is a shame because it helped to clarify the findings. It is a sign of how politically sensitive the issues are that governments did not agree on which elements to highlight.

Understanding 1.5C warming

2. The world has already warmed by 1C since pre-industrial times, due to human activity. On current trends, it is likely to pass the 1.5C mark between 2030 and 2052. The land is warming faster than the oceans and the Arctic is warming at 2-3 times the global average rate.

Ilulissat fjord, Greenland: Arctic temperatures are rising faster than the global average (Pic: Deposit Photos)

3. There is a time lag between greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on the climate. That means the world is already committed to further warming and sea level rise, but past emissions are unlikely to tip temperatures over the 1.5C threshold.

4. To stabilise temperatures, emissions need to reach net zero and stay there. That means cutting emissions as much as possible and drawing carbon dioxide out of the air to balance out any remaining emissions. The amount of warming is ultimately determined by how long it takes to get to net zero.

5. Global warming is already impacting people and ecosystems. The risks at 1.5C and 2C are progressively higher.

6. Lines on the feasibility of holding the temperature rise to 1.5C and the importance of considering sustainable development have been cut from this section. They are considered in detail elsewhere, but it shows a lack of consensus on the high-level conclusions.

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Impacts and threats

7. There will be worse heatwaves, drought and flooding at 2C compared to 1.5C. A previous version characterised these as “substantial differences in extremes”. That wording has been replaced with “robust differences in regional climate characteristics”, in a win for the US, which argued “substantial” was too subjective.

8. Sea levels are expected to rise 10cm higher this century under 2C of warming than 1.5C. That exposes an extra 10 million people to impacts like coastal flooding and saltwater getting into their fields and drinking water supplies. Slower warming buys them time to adapt.

9. Over centuries and millenia, sea levels will continue rising after temperatures have stabilised. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could lead to rises of several metres.

10. One of the most striking quantitative findings concerns the loss of biodiversity. It predicts the proportion of species that will lose half their geographic range. Out of 105,000 species studied, the rate doubles between 1.5C and 2C warming to 16% for plants and 8% for vertebrates, and triples to 18% for insects.

A Bengal tiger. Global warming puts more species at risk of habitat loss and extinction (Pic: Flickr/Eric Kilby)

11. An estimated 1.5-2.5 million square kilometres more permafrost will thaw this century under 2C warming compared to 1.5C. That is equivalent to the land area of Iran, Mexico or Algeria. In a vicious cycle, thawing permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas.

12. The probability of a sea ice-free Arctic summer increases tenfold from once a century at 1.5C warming to once a decade at 2C. Marine ecosystems will be hit by ocean acidification and warming. 2C virtually wipes out coral reefs, compared to a 70-90% decline at 1.5C.

13. Farming and fishing communities will be hit hardest by these impacts, particularly in the Arctic, drylands, islands and the poorest countries. Limiting global warming to 1.5C cuts the number susceptible to poverty and climate-related risks by up to several hundred million by 2050.

14. That extra half a degree of warming is mostly bad for health. It expands the range of mosquitoes carrying diseases like malaria and dengue, and heat makes a whole range of conditions more deadly.

A pregnant woman suffering from malaria. As the climate changes, mosquitoes will spread disease to new areas (Pic: Flickr/hdptcar)

15. The quantity and quality of staple crops suffers under 2C warming compared to 1.5C, as do livestock. That is bad for the availability of food in many parts of the world.

16. Economic growth is expected to suffer as a result of the impacts of global warming, all else being equal. This assessment does not attempt to balance that with the costs and benefits of cutting emissions and investing in resilience to climate change impacts.

17. There are lots of options to protect against the impacts of global warming, from sea walls to drought-resistant crops. But these adaptations have limitations and some vulnerable populations face losses. The Paris Agreement acknowledged this “loss and damage”, but the UN process has yet to yield concrete support for the victims.

Pathways to 1.5C

18. To keep to 1.5C, CO2 emissions would have to decline by about 45% between 2010 and 2030 and hit net zero in 2050. That’s significantly faster than what is needed for 2C – a reduction of around 20% by 2030 and net zero by 2075.

19. Methane and black carbon, both more potent greenhouse gases, will need to be cut by at least 35% by 2050, compared to 2010. But cuts in non-CO2 emissions must be made carefully. If more bioenergy is used to replace fossil fuels, it could push up climate-warming nitrous oxide pollution from agriculture.

20. How much carbon dioxide can be emitted before we pass the 1.5C threshold? The way “carbon budgets” are calculated has changed since the IPCC’s last big assessment in 2014, adding some 300 gigatons to the estimate. But it’s still a slim window.

21. Estimates of the carbon budget vary depending on which measure of warming you use. If you are going by the average temperature over land, it is 420Gt CO2 to give a 66% chance of staying below 1.5C. If you factor in sea surface temperatures, which are rising more slowly, it’s 570Gt. Either way, we are using up the budget at a rate of 42Gt a year.

22. There are also “substantial” uncertainties over how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions and the level of historic emissions, which affect the size of the carbon budget. Additional carbon released when permafrost thaws, and methane emitted from wetlands, could shrink the budget by up to 100Gt over the century, and continue beyond it.

23. Geoengineering is given short shrift. So-called solar radiation modification – pumping particles into the air to reflect sunlight – could be “theoretically effective” in reaching the 1.5C goal. But it is excluded from the model scenarios due to “large uncertainties”, “knowledge gaps”, “substantial risks” and “institutional and social constraints”.

(Pic: Vattenfall/Flickr)

24. The biggest polluting industries will have to make radical changes. In energy, renewables will need to supply 70% to 85% of power by 2050. There is still room for fossil fuel generation combined with technology to catch and store CO2 emissions, but it’s small: around 8% for gas and close to zero for coal by 2050.

25. Energy-intensive industries will have to slash their CO2 by 75% to 90% by 2050, compared to 2010, in order to stick to 1.5C. A 2C limit would require a 50% to 80% decline. This can be done with new and existing technologies that are technically proven – but they have yet to be deployed on a large scale, and are limited by costs and other constraints.

26. Buildings and transport will also need to shift heavily towards (newly green) electricity Buildings should use power for 55% to 75% of their total energy by mid-century, while the transport sector should boost its low-emission sources to 35% to 65% of its energy supply, from less than 5% in 2020.

27. There will be tough choices around how to use land. A lot of scenarios rely heavily on bioenergy and/or expansion of forests, potentially conflicting with demand for pasture and arable land. Sustainable intensification of farming and “less resource-intensive diets” – code for eating less meat – can help ease the competing pressures.

An oil palm plantation in Indonesia. Food and energy crops are putting pressure on tropical forests (Pic: Nanang Sujana/CIFOR)

28. Mitigating energy emissions for the 1.5C goal will require around $900 billion of investment per year between 2015 and 2050. That pushes the total investment needed for energy supply to $1.6-3.8 trillion, and for energy demand at $700bn to $1trn over the 35 years. The investment needed is around 12% higher than for 2C.

29. Tools to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, such as carbon capture and storage and forests, will be needed to suck out 100 to 1,000 gigatons over the century, for a 1.5C limit. If material consumption is kept in check, it minimises the need for carbon removal.

30. Carbon removal measures could help return temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels if the world overshoots the threshold, but they may have significant impacts on land, energy, water and nutrients if used on a large scale. Governments will have to limit the trade-offs and make sure the CO2 is removed permanently.

Ramping up action

31. Existing national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement are inadequate to the challenge. They would lead to 52-58 gigatons of CO2 emissions a year in 2030 – in line with a 3C temperature rise. Almost all the pathways to 1.5C require greenhouse gas emissions to fall below 35Gt/yr by then.

32. The lower the emissions in 2030, the easier it will be to limit global warming to 1.5C. Delay in cutting greenhouse gases risks increasing the cost of reductions, locking countries into carbon-emitting infrastructure or stranding high-emission assets. It could also add to the uneven distribution of climate impacts between developed and developing countries.

33. Adapting to the effects of climate change, and reducing vulnerabilities to it, can support sustainable development. It can ensure food and water security, lower the risks of disasters, improve health and reduce poverty and inequality. Adaptation measures that also lower emissions, such as low-carbon buildings that are efficiently cooled, can help sectors go green at a lower cost.

Handled right, climate action also supports sustainable development (Pic: AusAid/Stephen Morrison)

34. While emissions reductions in line with 1.5C can support the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030, they present a few trade-offs too. They fit particularly well with the development goals for health, clean energy, cities and communities and responsible consumption and production. But if not properly managed, they could harm the goals on poverty, hunger, water and energy access.

35. Directing finance towards infrastructure that lowers emissions and adapts to climate change can help meet the 1.5C goal in a way that supports sustainable development and lowers poverty. This includes private funds from institutional investors, asset managers and development or investment banks, as well as public funds. Governments can help with policies that lower the risk of investment in low-emission and adaptation projects.

36. It’s difficult to quantify the finance needed for adaptation measures that fit with a 1.5C limit, and how that compares with 2C. The data on investments that boost resilience to climate change is insufficient. That said, the cost of adapting to 1.5C “might” be lower than for 2C.

Say it with confidence

37. On the whole, the authors only put stuff in the summary they are sure of. They indicate the strength of consensus in brackets after many of the statements. “Very high confidence” appears five times; “high confidence” 107 times, “medium confidence” 60 times and “low confidence” just twice.

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Since the Paris Agreement on climate change was adopted in December 2015, negotiators have been grappling with how to set it in motion with a strong framework of rules and operating procedures, commonly known as the “implementing guidelines” or “the Paris Rulebook”. 

These guidelines are essential to drive a fair and effective process that will support all countries to achieve zero-carbon, climate resilient transformation in the coming decades.

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The clock is ticking. In 2015, countries set a deadline of December 2018 to finalize the implementing guidelines at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. With time running out, and uneven progress made so far, countries have agreed to an interim meeting in Bangkok, Thailand next week to advance their work before the end of the year. A “satisfactory outcome in Katowice will be in jeopardy”, the presiding officers of the negotiating session recently warned, unless negotiators can decide on a clear and cohesive negotiating text that ministers can take up and approve in a few short months.

Negotiators have three critical tasks to advance while in Bangkok:

• Understanding, clarifying, and streamlining the options on the table. Discussions must begin to identify compromise options and those which have the potential to win support.
• Translating the options into legal language that can be used for a Cop decision. Once options have been clarified and streamlined, they will need to be translated into language setting out specific, final, modalities, procedures and guidelines.
• Generating a negotiating text. Once all of the options have been translated into legal language, they need to be compiled, organized and presented in a manner that best facilitates final negotiations in good faith.

Unlike other climate negotiation sessions that include dozens of side events and an exhibit hall, there will be none of those at the Bangkok session in order to minimize distractions and ensure negotiators make maximum progress advancing the rulebook.

The Stakes of Bangkok

The issues inherent in the negotiations are politically and technically complex. “Negotiating groups” will delve into the key elements of the implementing guidelines, including:

• How countries will communicate their climate plans (in the form of nationally determined contributions, or NDCs), and report and account for the impact of their actions as well as the support provided or received;
• How countries will review the progress made individually and collectively to curb emissions, adapt to the changing climate and scale up finance;
• How countries will cooperate with each other (using market and non-market approaches) and provide indicative information on the future provision of support to countries in need of climate finance;
• How an expert committee will operate to facilitate implementation and promote compliance.

In the end, all these elements must work together to create multi-year cycles of planning, implementation and review that lead to more ambitious national action to curb greenhouse gas emissions while also achieving sustainable development.

To date, negotiating groups have made uneven progress in developing advanced options and guidance. While the nature of negotiations in each group differs, there are several common sticking points. The guidelines must provide flexibility and support for parties that need it, while avoiding the developed-versus-developing country dynamics that have often been a challenge in previous climate negotiations.

In addition, parties must agree on the level of detail of the information to share in order to build confidence and trust in countries’ efforts and on the scope and effective governance of the various mechanisms. And, though some issues are more mature than others, they also need to represent a coherent and balanced package, when considered as a whole.

The Game Plan

As they head into the Bangkok negotiations, countries have additional resources at their disposal to help them work through the sticking points highlighted above. These include informal tools produced by the negotiation co-chairs and a new publication released earlier this month by WRI and the Project for Advancing Climate Transparency (PACT) consortium, which provides suggestions for negotiators to meet their December 2018 deadline.

Informed by careful analysis and the experience of negotiators and other key stakeholders, PACT’s major new working paper provides an overarching vision and practical suggestions for the foundational elements of the Paris Agreement’s implementing guidelines. This unique publication can help negotiators overcome the remaining negotiating hurdles in order to achieve clear, robust, and cohesive implementing guidelines.

While negotiators work to draft and adopt guidelines for adoption in Katowice this December, they will benefit from keeping in mind the cooperative spirit of the Agreement. By negotiating in good faith and demonstrating renewed trust in the multilateral systems, they can solidify the global response to the climate challenge and bring the agreement truly to life.

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On the way to COP24, key milestones include the Global Climate Action Summit in mid-September, which will celebrate and incentivize climate action from states, regions, cities and the private sector through such initiatives as science-based targets. The One Planet Summit on the margins of the UN General Assembly in late September will continue to galvanize and scale up financial support from the private sector and others. And the upcoming Climate Vulnerable Forum virtual leaders’ summit on November 22 aims to create a coalition of countries committed to strengthening their climate action to meet the most ambitious Paris goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C.

If they are successful at the Bangkok session, countries will lay the ground for success at COP24, where they can adopt rules and guidelines that strengthen domestic efforts, guide countries’ efforts to strengthen their national contributions by 2020, and leverage global initiatives driving action by countries and many other actors.

This article was originally published on the World Resources Institute’s website. Yamide Dagnet is a senior associate and Nathan Cogswell is a research analyst with WRI’s international climate action initiative. 

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That, at least, is the assessment of the Australian Energy Market Operator, which makes this prediction as part of its Integrated System Plan, its 20-year blueprint for the integration of renewables into Australia’s electricity grid.

The prediction contrasts dramatically with the modelling prepared for the NEG by the Energy Security Board (ESB), of which AEMO is a member.

The ESB modelling (extract below) suggests that South Australia will reach 75% renewables by 2020 and 80% by 2022 – and then it somehow imagines the state installing not a single added megawatt of large scale solar or large scale wind until after 2030.

(Source: RenewEconomy)

Just who the ESB is trying to kid with this sort of modelling nonsense is not clear. The ISP modelling, on the other hand, is alive to the sound of good economics and building intentions.

It factors in developments such as UK entrepreneur Sanjeev Gupta’s plans for up to 1GW of solar and storage, and the numerous other projects in the pipeline.

Tesla: South Australian super battery beats expectations for first month

Gupta, as it happens, was presiding at the launch ceremony for the first of his major solar plants – 280MW at Whyalla – that he says will power not just the Whyalla steel works, but his other steel operations in Victoria and NSW.

He says it will deliver reduced costs, and it is hard to imagine him stopping just because of a vague promise from the ESB to the right wing of the coalition parties. Indeed, he sees up to 10GW across the country as the combination of solar and storage brings down energy costs to half of what they are now.

(See RenewEconomy’s interview with Gupta here).

(Source: RenewEconomy)

What’s really interesting about this graph above – put together by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College from the ISP data – is the growth in solar – both at a rooftop level but also in large scale solar, with big jumps in large scale solar in particular from 2025 and 2033.

Notice how combined cycle gas generation effectively disappears from around 2024, presumably from the time a new transmission link is completed to NSW, and peaking gas and diesel plays only a minor role behind that – much less than storage.

McConnell says the scenario underlines the value of interconnection and planning – and the fact that while the reduction in synchronous generation presents challenges, they are not insurmountable.

“Indeed they appear to be cheaper than business as usual,” he says. “The ISP suggest that a combination of deeper interconnection and other options such as synchronous condensers are a cheaper option than maintaining gas generation, given that AEMO uses a least-cost engineering optimization approach.”

This is the key point also picked up by another leading energy analyst Hugh Saddler, who wrote a detailed appraisal of the ISP for The Australia Institute, and put together the next two graphs below.

Saddler notes that the ISP modelling assumes South Australia jumps to almost 100% renewables in 2025, as the various gas turbines are shut down – including the ageing 50-plus year old Torrens Island gas-fired steam power stations, and the more modern combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) stations at Pelican Point and Osborne.

“This is a particularly striking outcome,” Saddler writes.

(Source: RenewEconomy/Hugh Sadler)

“Following the system black event in September 2016, AEMO introduced a requirement for a minimum level of synchronous generation to remain online in South Australia at all times. This requirement remains in force, though it has been somewhat relaxed since then.

“The key reason for the requirement is that during windy conditions, when the state’s entire electrical energy demand can be met by wind generators, the Heywood interconnector to south-west Victoria is the only source of system strength and security services if the local gas generators shut down.

“One of the key components of the first five years of AEMO’s integrated system plan is a new high-capacity synchronous interconnector, called RiverLink, to run from the mid north of South Australia to southern New South Wales and be completed by 2025.

“By implication, AEMO has concluded that, when RiverLink is completed it will be sufficient, in combination with the other new types of grid services mentioned previously, to eliminate the need for local synchronous generation.

“This is the clearest possible example of how a well-planned combination of grid level services can obviate the need for synchronous generation, and do so at lower cost.”

(Source: RenewEconomy/Hugh Sadler)

This next graph shows the share of renewables including the sharing of capacity from Victoria and NSW with those connections. Even counting the interconnector flow, South Australia is still running at around 90% renewable energy.

It is interesting to note the high rate of renewable energy in states like Victoria, and the low share in NSW.

The contrast with the debate being run in Canberra about reliability and the dangers of high renewable energy scenarios could not be any more dramatic.

To be sure, AEMO says there are significant issues in South Australia that will need to be managed, such as system strength, voltage and frequency. These are outlined in the ISP, and form part of the Group 1 and group 2 actions that the CoAG energy ministers have told the ESB to get on top of.

None of them will be affected by the NEG. Despite all the ravings about reliability, the AEMO plan envisages no “baseload” coal, not even any “baseload” gas in South Australia’s electricity mix.

It is all about exploiting the cheapest form of bulk generation – quite clearly wind and solar – and ensuring that these are married with dispatchable capacity that can fill in the gaps and provide the system strength.

Meanwhile, in Canberra, the base-load bovver boys are out in force. Not just the politicians but also the big business guys like Bluescope and smelter in the Hunter Valley. We can’t run the smelters on renewables alone, they claim.

Gupta and South Australia, are about to prove them wrong.

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy

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The post South Australia to hit 100% renewable power by 2025 – market operator appeared first on Climate Home News.