Nations come together in bid for historic climate progress

COP26 has been deemed the world’s last chance to tackle a devastating climate catastrophe

Some of the most influential nations when it comes to climate change strategies have spent the days leading up to the crucial COP26 summit putting across their visions of what they can bring to the talks.

Indian Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav last week insisted that his country would be “a fighter for climate justice”, even though it is among several nations to not yet put forward fresh plans to reach net zero – eliminating as much carbon as they produce.

India, whose prime minister is set to be at the ongoing summit in Glasgow, Scotland, has said that controlling carbon should be the priority over actually setting target dates for net zero.

In South America, the Brazilian government said it had asked over 200 organisations to contribute ideas about the country’s approach to the summit. And its Environment Minister Joaquim Leite declared that Brazil will be “part of the solution” at the conference.

“We’ll help encourage green projects and move towards a new green economy,” said Leite, who is leading the country’s delegation to COP26.

Brazil is currently under some of the biggest scrutiny as activists, analysts, and politicians remain concerned about the nation’s stance on carbon trading markets, as well as its high rate of Amazon deforestation.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, meanwhile, last week released his government’s plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and announced the country is on track to beat its 2030 target.

Morrison hailed the plan as a “practical way” to neutralise Australia’s emissions, but analysts pointed out that almost one-third of the strategy is comprised of unspecified cuts, while a further 20 per cent will be achieved through offsets. Australia’s emissions are among the highest in the world on a per capita basis, and the country has long trailed behind similarly developed countries in pledging to reduce emissions.

In the run-up to the COP26 meeting, the EU has also moved up a gear in its climate action commitments and has pressured other states to do the same. According to Richard Youngs, an EU foreign policy senior based at Carnegie Europe, while the EU has made strong commitments to reduce carbon emissions, it has not yet devised policies to deal fully with the strategic ramifications of ecological stresses around the world.

“While the EU and its member states have ramped up their climate finance commitments, funding for adaptation still lags behind the focus on mitigation and falls far short of what is needed,” Youngs explained. “Most EU adaptation projects tend to focus on defensive containment – holding at bay the physical effects of climate change – rather than the forward-looking social and political change that will be needed to manage ecological stress.”

Taking on responsibility

This jostling for solutions and deciding what is required now and what can be held off is impacting every country – but many have other massive issues in the way which could prevent them making a real difference in the climate fight.

Last week the Jubilee Debt Campaign, a leading anti-poverty group, revealed that lower-income nations are spending five times more on debt than coping with the impact of climate change and reducing carbon emissions.

The figures show that 34 of the world’s poorest countries, including Uganda and the Maldives, are spending nearly $30 billion on debt payments a year compared with $5.4 billion on reducing climate impacts. The group noted that the figure could rise to seven times more by 2025.

Heidi Chow, executive director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said lower-income countries will raise the impact of debt at the COP26 event.

“These countries are handing over billions of US dollars in debt repayments to rich countries, banks, and other international financial institutions at a time when resources are desperately needed to fight the climate crisis,” Chow said. “At COP26, wealthy polluting nations need to stop shirking their responsibilities and provide climate finance through grants, as well as cancel debts.”

Over the last 20 years, international bodies including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have encouraged developing countries to fund development projects using bank loans and bonds. Borrowers expected interest rates to fall over time as they became trusted to make regular repayments, but low-income countries still regularly pay more than 10 per cent interest on loans compared to an average 1.5-2.5 per cent paid by rich countries.

The report said the figures are likely to overestimate expenditure on climate change adaptation. “Just because a country has said it plans to spend money on climate change adaptation, doesn’t mean that it has,” it noted.

The figures followed hot on the heels of a top UN report which opened up concerns that leaders of richer countries may need to do much more to prevent a future environmental catastrophe.

The analysis from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) stated in frank terms that countries’ current pledges would reduce carbon by only about 7.5 per cent by 2030, far less than the 45 per cent cut scientists say is needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius – the overarching target of COP26 negotiations.

António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, described the findings as a “thundering wake-up call” to world leaders, while experts called for drastic action against fossil fuel companies.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of UNEP said, “Climate change is no longer a future problem – it is a now problem. To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them, and ultimately deliver the cuts. The clock is ticking loudly.”

Sticking to pledges

In the run-up to COP26, countries were supposed to submit national plans on emissions cuts – the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – for the next decade, a requirement under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

But the UNEP report found only half of countries had submitted new NDCs, with big emitters including China and India still to publish their plans, and several other governments – including Russia, Brazil, Australia, and Mexico – presenting weak plans that were no improvement on their 2015 Paris pledges.

The report also highlighted that methane, a powerful GHG that arises from animal husbandry, natural gas extraction, and waste, was the second-biggest contributor to temperature rises after carbon. The United States, the EU, and more than 20 countries have signed a pledge to reduce methane globally by 30 per cent this decade.

The UNEP said that about 20 per cent of annual methane emissions could be cut at little or no cost, for instance through better management of natural gas drilling, stopping flaring, and capping old wells.

Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, believed in the idea of forcing fossil fuel companies and other big emitters to pay for the permanent storage of the carbon they emit, through a “carbon take-back obligation”, using carbon capture and storage technology.

Allen said last month, “On current progress, we’ll close the 2030 emissions gap sometime in the 2080s. There is no appetite for reducing fossil fuel consumption globally at the rate required. The only remaining option is to scale up safe and permanent disposal of carbon dioxide, such as storing it back underground, instead of fly-tipping it into the atmosphere.”

Some fossil fuel companies are currently falling out of favour with major funds, with financial institutions looking to the future for their activities. Last week Dutch-based ABP, one of the world’s largest pension funds, announced the sale of its $17.4 billion worth of holdings in fossil fuel companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, claiming it had been unable to persuade the sector to transition quickly enough towards decarbonisation.

Corien Wortmann-Kool, chair of ABP, said it would no longer invest in producers of oil, gas, and coal, and that it would dispense with its current investments in those sectors by the first quarter of 2023.

The fund said it did not believe the decision will have a negative impact on long-term returns for its customers and will invest instead in electricity companies, the automobile industry, and aviation. Wortmann-Kool said that the fund would be in a better position to push those companies towards being “more sustainable”.

“We want to contribute to minimising global warming to 1.5 degrees. Large groups of pension participants and employers indicate how important this is to them,” he said.

Amid the challenges, Laurent Fabius, former Prime Minister of France and chair of COP21 in 2015, believed there are bright signs when it comes to business taking responsibility, but more remains to be carried out. “More and more businesses are making commitments, for multiple reasons: ethical, economic, and financial. They do so, however, at differing paces. Among fossil fuel producers, the confusion between ‘green acting’, ‘green talking’, and ‘greenwashing’ still needs to be resolved,” Fabius wrote in The Guardian last week.