Finance has been at the top of the agenda for this year’s UN climate summit in Egypt which will conclude on Friday.
Demands for billions of dollars in financing are coming from developing countries, many of which are in Africa, that will disproportionately suffer the affects of climate change after contributing little to the current crisis when compared with developed nations.
Negotiations are dragging around the demand from developing nations that COP27 needs to agree to launch a special fund to address loss and damage — compensation for losses from climate-related disasters — as wealthy countries resist the idea of a mechanism that could suggest liability for historic climate damage.
Talks are also progressing to keep high-income countries to honour their pledge to deliver $100bn a year in climate finance (yet to be realised) up to 2025, before increasing contributions even further.
The risk of turning almost all the attention to finance issues is that the summit will come to an end without any new commitments to cut climate-warming emissions fast enough and deeply enough to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the line that should not be crossed to avoid catastrophic changes in climate and damage to ecosystems.
It would probably be best to acknowledge that the world has already failed to respond robustly enough to achieve this, and to reset targets aimed at urgently limiting warming above 1.5˚
In the run up to COP27 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of experts convened by the UN, released a report which said that the world was now about 18 years away from reaching 1.5˚C of warming.
With 1.5°C of warming now almost certainly inevitable, it seems unlikely that countries will act fast enough to prevent temperature rises from exceeding this limit.
Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C would require the world to cut emissions 45% by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. However, according to current commitments, global emissions are set to increase almost 14% up to 2030.
Current emission policies and commitments put the world on course for warming of about 2.3°C to 2.7°C.
The Global Carbon Budget 2022 released at COP27 reiterated that global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels, with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.
The rate of increase is slowing, but not fast enough. In 2022 emissions are set to increase by 1% (compared with 2021), down from its peak of 3% during the 2000s. However, at the current rate there is now a 50% chance that global warming of 1.5°C will be exceeded in nine years, the report found.
Another COP gets under way this week which offers, perhaps, more vivid examples of how rapidly biodiversity, natural resources, and species diversity is declining in the face of growing consumption by humans. The 19th Conference of the Parties (CoP) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) taking place in Panama this week and here sharks and other animals threatened with extinction due to the illicit trade in wildlife and animal parts are high on the agenda.
Recent evidence shows that 37% of all sharks and 70% of species traded for their fins are already at risk of extinction. Reef sharks, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, are functionally extinct on 20% of reefs, further jeopardising the health of these ecosystems that are already devastated by the effects of climate change.
As balance and diversity gives way to volatility and uncertainty, it is worth reflecting in the question asked by a group of researchers from Melbourne Climate Futures, the University of Melbourne’s interdisciplinary climate research initiative, which shows up the irony and hypocrisy of the global, high-level response to climate change mitigation.
The study, The Land Gap Report, calculates that countries collectively need a total of 1.2-billion hectares to fulfil the promises laid out in their official climate plans. Countries intend to use 633-million hectares of the total area for carbon capture tactics like tree planting, “which would gobble up land desperately needed for food production and nature protection” and only 551-million hectares would be from the restoration of degraded lands and primary forests,
What the researchers then ask, and what we should be asking as well, is why countries would rather pledge to plant trees on vast tracts of land as a means of carbon capture, rather than doing the hard work of protecting the forests that are already there.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.