Glasgow Climate Change Conference Venue. Photo: United Nations
By David Holmquist
For the next month the world will once again be focused on the treacherous global geopolitical terrain of climate change.
The 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, beginning on October 31. The talks are scheduled to end on Friday, November 12, but if recent experience is any guide will be extended over the weekend as agreements are forged and contentious issues are resolved—or not, in which case they will be tabled for later consideration. Kicking the can down the road is standard operating procedure for these meetings, as one might expect for a 196-member international body that must operate by consensus.
The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty, adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and entering into force in March 1994. The treaty has three main goals—to be achieved through scientific research, ongoing negotiations and subsequent policy agreements. They are to (1) ensure that ecosystems are able to adapt to climate change, (2) ensure that food production is not threatened by climate change, and (3) promote sustainable economic development. It established a UN Secretariat headquartered in Bonn with staff to administer its work, and created the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC, or simply IPCC) to organize its climate change research and reporting.
The IPCC does not perform original research, but instead releases scheduled comprehensive “assessment reports,” which review all the relevant published scientific literature. The Panel also issues occasional reports on special topics. There have been six Assessment Reports since 1990, released at roughly 5-year intervals. (See my August article on AR6 for more detail on this process and a close look at the latest report.)
The first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, and the Convention has met annually every year since, with the exception of 2020 when it was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The UNFCCC’s most significant COPs tend to respond to new evidence provided by recent UN IPCC’s Assessment Reports.
It is of special significance at this juncture that the Paris Agreement set a new framework approach by lowering the threshold temperature increase thought to be commensurate with avoiding the worst effects of climate change—from 2.oC to 1.5oC—and called for a formal reassessment at COP26 of progress toward achieving the required emissions reductions to make that aspiration achievable. Although these goals are legally binding, the mechanism established to meet them is not. The Paris Agreement calls on countries to establish indicated nationally determined contributions (INDCs) for emissions reductions, with no assurance that the sum of those reductions will be adequate. To date, they have been woefully inadequate. Scientists project that emissions must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 in order for us to have a fair chance of remaining within the 1.5oC threshold. The INDCs offered so far would result in an increase in emissions of 16 percent and an increase in global temperatures of 3.oC.
COP26 Priority Topics
The overarching goal of COP26 is to “keep 1.5oC within sight.” Given the weak response to Paris shown by the world’s largest emitters, the negotiations are bound to be difficult. These are some of the topics to anticipate:
Equity and Climate Finance. Promises have been made ever since COP15 in Copenhagen for a $100 billion fund to facilitate clean energy strategies in developing countries. These promises have not been fulfilled, and are becoming more contentious as the years pass and developing countries feel the immediate effects of climate change.
Phasing out the use of coal. This is a priority for the UK host government and the European Union. The countries most heavily dependent upon coal-fired power plants are China, India and Australia.
Preserving and protecting natural carbon sinks such as forests, peatlands and wetlands. Brazil and Indonesia are among the countries making progress on this priority quite difficult.
Reducing emissions of methane. Growing evidence indicates that methane emissions pose a greater potential threat than previously assumed. Negotiations have already begun to form a global partnership to cut these emissions from agriculture, animal husbandry and fossil fuel exploration and distribution.
Reducing emissions through carbon trading. Introduced as part of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, emissions trading has become the primary strategy to seek out the least-cost means of reducing emissions. It is the basis of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and is being implemented in some Chinese provinces. Over the years, some of these trading and offset schemes have been abused, and in any case this approach lacks the transparency and ambition required in a world where emissions must be reduced, like, yesterday. Carbon trading was included in the Paris Agreement, but there have been conflicts over its implementation which threatened to derail the last COP in Madrid and have still not been resolved.
Graphic: Pacific Community
The Impact of IPCC AR6
COP26 discussions and negotiations will be heavily influenced by the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the IPCC. Only the first of three parts of AR6 has been officially released, but excerpts from the other two parts have been leaked in recent months. The most surprising findings included in the draft report on Mitigation (Part III) call into question some of the strategies that have been presumed.
For example, part of the “Summary for Policymakers” in the leaked Part III is its insistence that technological improvements that allow for relative decarbonization will not be enough. Rather, what is required is a massive social transition in material production and consumption. Although stabilizing the climate below 1.5°C necessitates some carbon dioxide removal (CDR), there is no mere technological fix to the climate change problem. Attempts to intervene massively in the climate by technological means to counteract the effect of carbon emissions carry with them their own threats to the planet as a safe space for humanity.
At present, solar and wind technology account for just 7 percent of world energy use, with fossil fuels making up most of the rest. Although solar and wind expansion is to be encouraged, the economic entrenchment of fossil fuel technology has inhibited any real rapid progress. Incremental decarbonization strategies favored by corporations have resulted overall in relative, but not absolute, “decoupling” of emissions due to economic growth.
The biological or nature-based CDR approaches, such as afforestation/reforestation, ecosystems restoration, and soil management, are those that offer the most hope in the immediate future. In general, “the scale-up, diffusion and global spread of carbon capture and storage (CCS), nuclear energy, and carbon removal (CDR) technologies” are questionable and cannot play the primary role in climate change mitigation.
Thus, the overall thrust of the AR6 “Mitigation” (or Part III) report is—for the first time in the IPCC process—that it is essential to turn to demand-side strategies, exploring cutbacks in energy use and across all economic sectors, as well as aggressively pursuing conservation and low-energy paths.
Stay tuned!
Links:
“August article on AR6”