With the COP 28 climate summit set to open eight months from now in Dubai, this week’s synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underscores the yawning gap between the actions scientists say are required to prevent catastrophic climate change and the real political steps governments are taking.
Scientists have been ringing alarm bells ever more loudly in the last five years. But this Summary for Policymakers spells out that without decisive action flowing from the COP 28 negotiations, politicians will have missed the last chance to save the world from exceeding 1.5°C average global warming. Any more exploring for, and exploiting, fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—then billions of people will suffer and many will die.
Emissions have to be cut 43% by 2030 to stand a hope of preventing a 1.5°C rise. Current pledges are less than half that, and implementation is even further behind, UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell said yesterday.
Perhaps the message is so clearcut because scientists from across the world realize that time for drastic action has all but run out. By the time their next report is due in seven years, the future of the human race will already have been decided by the action or inaction of the current crop of politicians.
“This report is definitely a final warning on 1.5°C,” Kaisa Kosonen, senior political advisor and head of delegation at Greenpeace International, told a media conference Sunday. “If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report.”
With the track record of the last 27 COPs behind us, the prospects for decisive action in December look bleak. Every COP ends with a compromise that all nations have to agree, and inevitably it is heavily influenced by countries and politicians allied with fossil fuel interests. The fact that the next COP is being hosted by one of those fossil fuel-dependent countries, the United Arab Emirates, does not bode well, though state oil and gas CEO and COP 28 President Sultan Al Jaber is promising better. After this report, there will no more excuses for inaction.
“Any company, any government that promotes new coal, gas, or other fossil fuel projects is dealing a death sentence to the 1.5°C global warming threshold and the survival of millions,” said Gerry Arances, executive director of the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development in Quezon City, the Philippines. “The science is clear: the only option we have is to urgently shift to energy from renewables, or else sentence vulnerable peoples, especially in the Global South, to even more irreparable and irreversible loss and damage.”
Those issues will be front and centre when COP 28 hosts the Global Stocktake, a key element of the Paris process meant to assess countries’ climate progress and set the stage for more ambitious commitments. On Monday, IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said the Summary for Policymakers was structured with that COP moment in mind, synthesizing about 10,000 pages of findings from a half-dozen reports dating back to October, 2018.
Lee said the summary “will provide a valuable resource for policy-makers to address the key tasks for the Global Stocktake.”
While much of the focus of the report is on mitigation, the scientists urge much greater emphasis too on climate adaptation. The last COP in Egypt had was hailed as a breakthrough after negotiators agreed to a loss and damage fund for countries facing the worst impacts of climate change. This is to be funded by rich nations, responsible for historical emissions, to pay for the damage and adaptation in countries that are worst affected by climate change but least responsible for it. Less than a quarter of the money needed for such a fund has yet been pledged, let alone actually provided.
One of the great services the scientists have done in the report is to point out the smokescreens that politicians have long been hiding behind. They dismiss carbon capture and storage and expanded nuclear power as expensive, unproven technologies that can’t be deployed at scale, in time to make a difference on emission reductions.
By contrast, the most promising path to cut emissions by half this decade from 2019 levels is to install massive amounts of solar power, with wind a close second. Reducing methane emissions from existing coal, gas, and oil installations comes third. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear are the least practical, most expensive options.
This will be a blow to many governments which have recently been pouring money into these far-off solutions. The United Kingdom, which currently claims to be a climate leader, is still using planning powers to hold back onshore wind power—the cheapest form of electricity production in these windy isles—while pouring millions of pounds into carbon capture, small modular nuclear reactors, and even nuclear fusion. The scientists have exposed these policies as window dressing.
Perhaps the most positive part of the scientific consensus is that the climate has not yet passed the point of no return. If we are fast enough on our feet, we do have the technologies and the money to survive if there is the political will to do so. It is clear the scientific recommendations make economic as well as political sense, but whether politicians will agree on decisive action in Dubai is another matter.
“The science tells us it is not too late to save ourselves and future generations, and we have the tools and information we need to avert climate catastrophe, but it requires a political will we have yet to see from the world’s biggest polluters,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the U.S. Sierra Club. “The question then ultimately is whether President Biden, the U.S. Congress, and world leaders are up to the challenge of protecting our environment and our humanity, or will they fail the ultimate test?”
“The IPCC report confirms what we already know: we are seriously off track from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said ESG Senior Associate and veteran COP negotiator Alden Meyer. “In the run-up to December’s COP 28 UN climate summit in Dubai, leaders, ministers, and negotiators must all work together to speed up the end of the fossil fuel era, strengthen climate resilience, help vulnerable communities cope with mounting climate impacts, and unlock much greater sums of money for climate action.”
“The women, men, and children of the Pacific and Caribbean islands are disproportionately affected by climate change,” said Ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru of Samoa, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. “While our people are being displaced from their homes and climate commitments go unmet, the fossil fuel industry is enjoying billions in profits. There can be no excuses for this continued lack of action.”
“Research by World Weather Attribution has highlighted that climate change is bringing suffering to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries through extreme weather events. This research is a big part of the new evidence assessed in the report,” said climatologist Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, UK.
“What this report also shows with much more clarity than ever before is the inequity of climate change—those causing the problem are not the ones that are suffering the consequences,” she added. “If we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero rapidly and sustainably, those most vulnerable—who have emitted far less than the rich nations and people—will continue to suffer.”
