So, what happened at COP25?

Climate crisis: what is COP and can it save the world?

As the COP25 summit of the UN’s conference of the parties begins, Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian looks at the upcoming agenda and asks whether it will work – and what the likely future holds.

Here are some extracts from The Briefing:

What is COP – and how will it help? 
For almost three decades, world governments have met every year to forge a global response to the climate emergency. Under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, every country on earth is treaty-bound to “avoid dangerous climate change”, and find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally in an equitable way.

COP stands for conference of the parties under the UNFCCC, and the annual meetings have swung between fractious and soporific, interspersed with moments of high drama and the occasional triumph (the Paris agreement in 2015) and disaster (Copenhagen in 2009). This year is the 25th iteration. Delegates started arriving last night for the two-week summit.

Where is it happening? 
This year’s COP has already needed a last-ditch rescue. Costa Rica wanted to host the event but lacked the resources, so Latin America’s richest per-capita economy – Chile – took control. Everything was set for a December COP in Santiago, billed as “the blue COP” because at long last issues about the oceans would take centre stage.

But rioting in the capital and a political crisis forced the COP to be moved. The Spanish government – despite being in the throes of a general election – stepped up and offered Madrid, where this year’s talks will now take place.

Remind me – what was agreed at Paris? 
Under the landmark 2015 agreement, nations committed to holding global heating to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. The vast majority of nations have now ratified the deal.

Though the deal is legally binding, the commitments that countries have made to cut their emissions are not. These are known as nationally defined contributions which will have to be ratcheted up next year if the aims of Paris are to be met.

Who will be the disruptors?

So far, the US has played a low-key role in the UN climate process under Donald Trump, but that could change to more damaging obstruction. “As in years past, the US plans to send an interagency delegation. The US delegation will engage in negotiations to protect US interest and level the playing field for US businesses,” the state department said. Other potential obstructors include big oil powers such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela, as well as Brazil and Bolivia. Key to progress at COP are China, the world’s biggest emitter, and India, whose emissions are rapidly rising.

Isn’t China the new green leader?

China has been working hard to cut emissions, not least from the coal-fired power plants that have generated widespread air pollution. But new research from Global Energy Monitor has found that the country has increased its coal-burning capacity by more than 40GW in the 18 months to June, and plans more.

Christine Shearer, an analyst at the NGO, said: “China’s proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet.” China is also funding the building of new coal-fired power plants elsewhere, including in South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Read this . . .

Christine Shearer, an analyst at the NGO Global Energy Monitor, said: “China’s proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach, even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet.”

More than 30 countries plan to phase out coal-fired power to help reduce carbon emissions and keep global temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels. The UK has just five coal-fired power stations, with one in south Wales scheduled to close next year and two more to be converted to gas within the next two years.

Global Energy Monitor said the gulf between China and other countries was on track to widen as Beijing pursued plans to build more new plants than the rest of the world combined.

China is also helping to finance a quarter of all the new coal projects in the rest of the world, including in South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

China’s coal investments, including domestic projects, mean it is backing more than half of all global coal power capacity under development.

The country has a pipeline of 147GW of coal plants that are either under construction or suspension but are likely to be revived, the report says. This is more than all existing coal plants in the EU combined and almost 50% higher than the 105GW of capacity planned in the rest of the world.

“Instead of expanding further, China needs to make significant reductions to its coal fleet over the coming decade,” Shearer said.

The report says China’s continued expansion of coal power is not inevitable, and urges Beijing to strengthen its policies to discourage the plant construction and incentivise low-carbon energy.

“The path that China’s central government chooses could make or break Paris climate goals,” the report says.

What will be decided this year? 
The main subject up for discussion is a provision in the Paris agreement known as article 6, which allows for the use of a global market in carbon to help countries cut emissions and to fund measures that reduce emissions in developing countries.

Carbon markets have been around since the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The broad idea is that rich countries could meet their targets by buying carbon credits that were awarded to projects reducing emissions in the developing world. In this way, rich nations bought themselves time, and poorer nations got cash to help them on the road to a green future. But the mechanism had basic flaws – with too many easy credits devaluing the system.

The financial crisis of 2008 led to the outright collapse of the carbon market. It has never fully recovered, and today projects to cut carbon in developing countries are more likely to rely on conventional fundraising or overseas aid.

Reviving the carbon markets through article 6 is seen as a worthy aim by many involved in climate finance. Trading could also help raise funds to prevent deforestation.

For some campaigners, however, the markets are a scam aimed at allowing rich countries to get away with continuing to burn fossil fuels while paying poor countries to clean up. “We do not have the luxury of talking about carbon offsets, we need absolute emissions cuts now. Offsetting is unacceptable in the face of the scale and pace of emissions reductions required, and we will oppose the creation of a new global carbon market,” says Juan Pablo Osornio of Greenpeace.

Nat Keohane, senior vice-president at the US Environmental Defense Fund, and a former US COP delegate, rejects that analysis. “It is about cooperation – markets are cooperation, and they are a pathway to reducing emissions fast,” he says. Cooperation among developed and developing countries is crucial, in his view. By funding, using and sharing technologies and methods of bringing down emissions in the developing world, rich countries are helping solve a crucial part of the global problem.

However, he agrees that “no deal on article 6 is better than a bad deal”, and some countries are in danger of undermining the discussions by insisting on rule changes. Brazil, for instance, is accused of seeking double counting of its forests, by being allowed to count its tree cover towards its commitments to cut emissions under Paris, while also seeking to sell to other countries carbon credits received for keeping its forests standing.

This sets the scene for a bitter fight over article 6, which would endanger the delicate consensus achieved at Paris, and that must be preserved if countries are to fulfil the aims of Paris by ratcheting up their commitments to bring down emissions.

So, one article and we’re good? 
There are far bigger issues hanging over COP, but they will not be decided this year, just hinted at. The biggest alarm is that the aspiration set in Paris to constrain temperature rises will require unprecedented efforts to achieve. But individual country commitments to steer the world towards that best-case scenario were not part of the binding Paris deal, but contained in a non-binding addition.

So emissions are increasing again, temperatures are higher than ever, countries are not mandated by law to act – and time is running out: the IPCC concluded that on current rates we have little over a decade to halt emissions growth and bring down carbon rapidly to keep warming within the 1.5C threshold.

Current commitments made by national governments under the Paris agreement fall far short of what is required – taken together, they would still condemn the world to an estimated temperature rise of more than 3C by the end of the century. According to the UN’s latest “emissions gap” report, published a few days before the start of this year’s talks, countries must reduce their greenhouse gases by about 7.6% a year for the next 10 years, to stay within the 1.5C limit. Closing that gap will be COP26’s biggest task.

Wait – there’s another one after this? 
Every year, alas. To meet the Paris objectives, it is clear the national targets must be revised upwards, and the deadline for that process is next year – which is also when previous targets, set at Copenhagen, expire for many countries. That makes 2020 a pivotal year for climate action.

Arguably the most important function of this year’s COP is to clear the way for the crunch summit next year, the most important meeting on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement was struck in 2015. The past five years have been spent thrashing out the “rulebook” by which Paris would be implemented, in a long series of technical discussions on issues as arcane as how carbon sinks should be accounted for.

Those discussions have been necessary to deal with the bureaucratic side of this complex international treaty, but they have not addressed the central issue of what emissions reduction commitments governments are prepared to offer.

COP26 will take place in Glasgow, and the UK will be charged with the vital diplomatic role of coaxing countries into the commitments needed – commitments that were so ambitious, compared with governments’ meagre and sometimes reluctant offerings, that they could not be achieved in Paris five years ago.

In the years since Paris, new high-carbon infrastructure such as roads, coal-fired power plants and skyscrapers have continued to be built, and new oil and gas fields opened up. In addition, governments in some countries – the US, Brazil and Australia among the major economies – have been elected which are openly hostile to climate action.

This doesn’t sound promising 
Indeed. You could argue that three decades of negotiation have produced just one agreement to hold temperatures to a limit that is too high, and we are not even remotely on track to honour that agreement. All the hard decisions in the Paris agreement have been put off to a conference next year that might be a disaster, going on current form. Meanwhile, the Amazon is burning, bush fires are raging in Australia and America, climate chaos is causing a humanitarian disaster every week, and our global plan is to have some more meetings.

And yet if we didn’t have this UN process, we’d have to invent it. Without it, the world would be truly adrift and fully at the mercy of individual governments and vested commercial interests. Osornio says: “Whether or not the UNFCCC is adequate isn’t really the point – at the moment, it’s all we’ve got. Without [it], we would have to create another multilateral process for the world to come together and address the global climate crisis. Upholding existing multilateral processes, like the UNFCCC, helps against the rise in nationalism and isolationism already threatening international cooperation.”

Maisa Rojas makes a plea for the COP process to include the social and cultural impacts of change . . .

Maisa Rojas writes for the Guardian opinion piece on the Madrid COP25 climate change conference (Sun 8 Dec 2020) under the headline:

Global heating plus inequality is a recipe for chaos – just look at Chile

Part of the work that needs to be accomplished by this climate meeting and the next one, which will be held in Glasgow in 2020, is that countries must become much more ambitious about their commitments.

Can we implement these transformations without addressing all the other social challenges that our countries face? Clearly not. The Chilean crisis illustrates this very vividly, highlighting the great social, economic and environmental obstacles ahead of us. Climate emergency plus growing inequality is a recipe for chaos.

We can see what happens when those whose social demands have been ignored are asked to contribute to the climate effort: the gilets jaunes (yellow vests)movement in France grew up in response to rising fuel prices. Protests in Ecuador, over an end to fuel subsidies, brought the capital Quito to a standstill and forced the government to back down. These, along with events in Santiago, demonstrate that we need to pay attention to social and cultural impacts, too.

Addressing those problems might feel like adding even more complexity to an already uphill struggle. In the long run, however, only if social demands are met will ambitious and rapid climate action be feasible.

What happened during the first week?

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent for the Guardian find out (Mon 9 Dec 2019). here are some extracts from her report:

What happened in week one?
The COP25 climate talks in Madrid may have officially opened on Monday 2 December, but they only really started on Friday evening. That was when Greta Thunberg arrived to join a 500,000-strong march through the centre of Madrid, demanding that world leaders listen.

The young activist said that she, and the millions who have marched and protested around the world in the last two years, had “achieved nothing” because greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. Her stark message summed up the disjunction that scientists, campaigners and some politicians have despaired of at these talks: that the sense of urgency scientists have warned is needed, and that is felt in the outside world among those worst affected by climate breakdown, is still missing from these negotiating rooms.

Notable developments 
Earlier in the week, a report on the world’s “carbon budget” revealed how far the world is from meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Greenhouse gas emissions rose by 0.6% last year – less than in recent years, but not enough to turn the corner. Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “We must bend the curve [from increasing carbon to falling emissions] in the next year.”

What governments did – or didn’t – do 
Meanwhile, negotiators finally managed over the weekend to put out a text on the future of carbon markets. It is only a first step and there are still major disagreements over how carbon credits should be counted and how countries’ success in meeting previous carbon targets should be allowed to count towards their future targets.

There is still no guarantee of any resolution to the disputes over carbon markets – the so-called article 6 talks, named after the section of the Paris agreement that they are aimed at clarifying. If this issue is not resolved, this technical question will hang over next year’s talks too, getting in the way of the substantive issue: the fact that by next year at the latest, countries are supposed to realign their emissions-cutting targets with scientific advice on staying within 2C (and hopefully 1.5C) of global heating above pre-industrial levels.

Chile to Madrid 
These talks were supposed to take place in Chile, but were relocated after political unrest in Santiago. There are reminders everywhere that Chile is still technically the host – in the logo and signs; in the leadership of the Chilean COP president, Carolina Schmidt, at every important meeting; the conference rooms named after Chilean landmarks, rivers and natural features; and in the protests outside the conference centre by Chilean democracy and social justice campaigners, who say they are being silenced and ignored.

Blue COP 
Oceans campaigners have also struggled to be heard at these talks, which were meant to highlight the plight of the oceans and the vital but often overlooked part they play in the Earth’s climate. The key message from campaigners is that protecting marine life – stopping overfishing, stemming the plastic tide of pollution and the flow of fertilisers and chemicals that is suffocating fish – is not just vital to biodiversity, and healthy fisheries for the more than 1 billion people who depend on the oceans, but also to regulate the climate. Healthy oceans absorb carbon and provide a buffer against climate chaos, so damage to them is damage to the climate, and vice versa.

“Next year is the year of truth. The year when we must move decisively to an economy that really starts to reduce investments in fossil fuels.” 

- Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Fiona Harvey in Madrid (Sun 8 Dec 2019) reported on conversations with observers at the COP25 and the worries that many have that an appropriate sense of urgency is missing. She quotes one of the world's leading climate scientists, Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who called for action as well as talking in 2020 "the year of truth"!

She writes:

Urgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned, as high-ranking ministers from governments around the world began to arrive in Madrid for the final days of negotiations.

Talks are focusing on some of the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, but the overriding issue of how fast the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions has received little official attention.

“We are at risk of getting so bogged down in incremental technicalities at these negotiations that we forget to see the forest for the trees,” said Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “There is a risk of disappointment in the UN process because of the inability to recognise that there is an emergency.”

In the next few days, environment and finance ministers from more than 190 governments will begin the “high-level segment” of the UN talks, which began on 2 December, and will finish on Friday. Over the weekend, negotiators produced the latest draft of a key text on carbon markets, which still does not have the consensus needed to pass.

The stately pace of negotiations was in stark contrast with the scenes outside the conference in Madrid, where on Friday evening more than 500,000 people marched through the Spanish capital led by the Swedish school striker Greta Thunberg. Protests continued through the weekend, with Extinction Rebellion and groups from across the world. On Monday, Thunberg and other youth activists will hold meetings with officials inside the conference.

Rockström said the UN conference must grapple urgently with reversing emissions of greenhouse gases, which are still on the rise despite repeated scientific warnings over three decades and multiple resolutions by governments to tackle the problem.

“We must bend the curve next year,” he told the Guardian, citing stark warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Next year is the year of truth. The year when we must move decisively to an economy that really starts to reduce investments in fossil fuels.”

Even the coal-fired power plants currently planned or in construction are enough to produce double the amount of carbon that can safely be put in the atmosphere for the next century, Rockström said.

The situation was so dire that governments should be starting to consider geoengineering technology, he said. Such projects could use a combination of natural and artificial means, from seeding clouds to erecting reflectors in space.

“Geoengineering has to be assessed, maybe even piloted already in case we need to deploy it,” he said. “It makes me very nervous. That is really playing with biological processes that might kick back in very unexpected ways. But I don’t think we should rule anything out – an emergency is an emergency.”

As the UN conference enters its final stages, the role of the UK is likely to come under much greater scrutiny. Britain will play host to next year’s conference at which world leaders must pledge much greater cuts in emissions than have yet been made, if the 2015 Paris accord is to succeed.

Claire O’Neill, the former Tory climate minister designated to lead next year’s conference, is in Madrid but cannot make official announcements because of the “purdah” rules surrounding political announcements in the run-up to the general election.

However, the UK’s plans were rated as “insufficient” in a key independent analysis called the Climate Action Tracker. Despite the government’s eye-catching commitment last summer to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 – one of the first major economies to make such a pledge – few measures are in place to keep pace with the target.

“There has been a dearth of new significant climate policies in recent years which, if left unaddressed, will leave the UK missing its medium and long-term targets,” concluded the analysis of global emissions-cutting plans.

That would damage the host nation’s credibility at next year’s crucial talks in Glasgow, campaigners said.

Dr Bill Hare, a climate scientist and the chief executive of Climate Analytics, which carried out the study, said it was clear which of the two biggest parties had the better plans on the issue before this week’s general election.

“While both major political parties have proposed further climate action, the Conservatives have not put sufficient proposals on the table to close this gap, whereas [our analysis shows] the Labour’s £250bn could easily close that gap and push on towards a 1.5C pathway,” Hare said.

Climate Action Tracker

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