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Ed Webb

5 Things COP27 Must Achieve for Vulnerable Countries | World Resources Institute - 0 views

www.wri.org/...le-countries-un-climate-summit

climate IPCC COP justice opinion analysis activism

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Vulnerable countries, despite their limited contribution to climate change and ambitious climate commitments, are and will continue to shoulder the bulk of this burden
  • Developed by organizations from the Global South, ACT2025’s new Call for Enhanced Implementation lays out where concrete action is needed in the lead-up to and at the conference.
  • When looking at countries’ commitments to reach net-zero emissions by around mid-century, temperature rise could be kept to around 1.9 degrees C. However, some major emitters’ 2030 targets are so weak that they don’t offer credible pathways to achieve their net-zero targets, indicating a major “credibility gap.”
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  • All countries — especially G20 countries — that have submitted “updated” NDCs that were no more ambitious than their previous commitments, and countries that have not yet communicated new or updated NDCs at all, should update their NDCs and long-term strategies in a credible, ambitious manner
  • developed countries must lead on climate ambition — they are the laggards in living up to their climate promises despite their overwhelming contribution to the climate crisis
  • After COP26, it was noted “with deep regret” the failure of developed countries to meet the $100 billion goal they originally promised to achieve by 2020, feeding into the credibility gap and hamstringing the ability of developing countries to plan further climate action.
  • clear finance targets for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage finance
  • $600 billion in climate finance from 2020-2025
  • The urgency for enhanced adaptation action is underscored by the IPCC Working Group II report, mentioned previously,  which finds that every tenth of a degree of additional warming will escalate threats to people, species and ecosystems. Yet many communities still lack the resources required to manage today’s climate change impacts, let alone worse impacts in the future.
  • countries must also prepare their National Adaptation Plans and Adaptation Communications
  • developed countries need to provide grant-based funding to finance adaptation plans, especially through the Adaptation Fund and other entities of the Financial Mechanism established under the UNFCCC.
  • despite an urgent plea from climate-vulnerable countries, the proposal for a new loss and damage financing facility was  rejected by developed nations. Instead, at COP26, countries established the Glasgow Dialogue to discuss possible arrangements for loss and damage funding, with the first discussion to be held in June 2022.
  • even the most effective adaptation measures cannot prevent all losses and damages, which are a present-day reality for vulnerable people in certain regions
  • Countries also made progress at COP26 on the operationalization and funding of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which aims to provide developing countries with technical assistance on how to address loss and damage in a robust and effective manner. Sufficient financing for the SNLD is crucial to ensure technical support for developing countries and to create a new method in encouraging technical assistance that is country-owned and emphasizes local expertise.
  • The first Global Stocktake process must be done in a way that is inclusive, raises awareness, ensures the meaningful participation of Global South organizations, and paves the way for a comprehensive outcome that promotes increased NDC ambition and is centered around equity. Additionally, the UN Secretary General should hold countries and non-state actors accountable to develop a robust accountability system for commitments made outside of the UNFCCC process.
  • Shortly after COP27, we will be more than a quarter of the way through the decisive decade — what will the world have to show for it? Now is the time for solidarity and ambitious, real, on-the-ground action and support that will deliver justice for vulnerable countries and communities. While realizing countries’ differentiated responsibilities and capacities, the world needs to be all in, all together on climate.
Ed Webb

Climate pledges built on flawed emissions data, Post investigation finds - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...use-gas-emissions-pledges-data

climate data environment COP

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 21 - Cached
  • An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.
  • the data the world is relying on is inaccurate
  • The gap comprises vast amounts of missing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as smaller amounts of powerful synthetic gases. It is the result of questionably drawn rules, incomplete reporting in some countries and apparently willful mistakes in others — and the fact that in some cases, humanity’s full impacts on the planet are not even required to be reported.
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  • 59 percent of the gap stems from how countries account for emissions from land, a unique sector in that it can both help and harm the climate. Land can draw in carbon as plants grow and soils store it away — or it can all go back up into the atmosphere as forests are logged or burn and as peat-rich bogs are drained and start to emit large amounts of carbon dioxide
  • methane emissions comprise a second major portion of the missing greenhouse gases in the U.N. database. Independent scientific data sets show between 57 million and 76 million tons more of human-caused methane emissions hitting the atmosphere than U.N. country reports do. That converts to between 1.6 billion and 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions
  • countries are undercounting methane of all kinds: in the oil and gas sector, where it leaks from pipelines and other sources; in agriculture, where it wafts upward from the burps and waste of cows and other ruminant animals; and in human waste, where landfills are a major source
  • Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) lists Russia as the world’s top oil and gas methane emitter, but that’s not what Russia reports to the United Nations. Its official numbers fall millions of tons shy of what independent scientific analyses show, a Post investigation found. Many oil and gas producers in the Persian Gulf region, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, also report very small levels of oil and gas methane emission that don’t line up with other scientific data sets.
  • fluorinated gases, which are exclusively human-made, also are underreported significantly. Known as “F-gases,” they are used in air conditioning, refrigeration and the electricity industry. But The Post found that dozens of countries don’t report these emissions at all — a major shortcoming since some of these potent greenhouse gases are a growing part of the world’s climate problem.
  • Vietnamese officials said more recent reports assume fluorinated gases do not escape from air conditioning and refrigeration systems. But they do: U.S. supermarkets lose an average of 25 percent of their fluorinated refrigerants each year.
  • Some countries with lagging data have significant carbon footprints: Iran, one of the top 10 largest emitters, has not filed an inventory since 2010; Qatar, a large natural gas producer, last revealed its emissions in 2007; and Algeria, a major oil and gas producer, in 2000.
  • more than 1 billion tons of emissions from international air travel and shipping, for which no country takes responsibility.
  • emission reports are so unwieldy that the United Nations does not have a complete database to track country emissions. Some 45 countries have not reported any new greenhouse gas numbers since 2009
  • While the Paris agreement calls for a more transparent system by the end of 2024, it could take until 2030 to get to robust reporting — an eternity compared with the tight time frame the world needs to get it right. The world has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels, leaving a very narrow path to avoid crossing the dangerous warming thresholds of 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.
  • In one of the most striking cases, Ciais’s study found that methane leakage from fossil fuel operations in the oil states of the Persian Gulf could be as much as seven times more than what they officially report.
  • On the one hand, the Earth is working harder to mitigate carbon pollution than we may realize. On the other hand, droughts, wildfires and other major disturbances tied to climate change quickly can release much of this carbon again.
  • The bulk of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels, which can be tallied with reasonable precision. But more than a third are not easily tracked, including the emissions that arise when forests are chopped down or lost to fire, peatlands are drained, or excess fertilizer is spread on agricultural fields.
  • the U.N. reporting guidelines don’t currently require any atmospheric or satellite measurements, known as a “top-down” approach. Rather, the guidelines ask scientific bookkeepers in each country to quantify levels of a particular activity. This includes the number of cows, whose burps makes up 4 percent of total greenhouse gases, the amount of fertilizer used or how much peatland was converted to cropland in a given year. Then, countries multiply those units by an “emissions factor” — an estimate of how much gas each activity produces — to determine a total for everything from belching cows to tailpipe emissions.
  • “garbage in, garbage out.”
  • Malaysia’s skewed data vividly illustrates the high stakes countries face as they confront the growing pressure to reduce emissions while managing the very real economic consequences that process triggers.In the past decade, some in the Southeast Asian nation have gone to great lengths to counter the scientific conclusion that its oil palm industry is releasing huge amounts of carbon
  • across Sarawak and other regions of Malaysia, 4,000 square miles of these forests — close to the size of Connecticut — have been drained in recent decades. Much of this land is sown with plantations for palm oil, commonly used in products ranging from biofuels to processed foods, soaps and makeup
  • When peatland is drained, it releases a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. Emissions then continue for decades, until all the peat is gone.
  • Malaysia’s government has downplayed the palm oil industry’s climate impact across several categories in its U.N. reports.In 2016, Malaysia claimed that it had not converted a single acre to cropland.“This is patently untrue,”
  • “When you walk over peatlands, your feet sink down into thousands of years of carbon,” said Hurowitz, the Mighty Earth chief executive. “Sarawak has sent its peatland destruction advocates to scientific, government and corporate events for years to present a wildly distorted picture of destroying these ultrarich carbon ecosystems.”
Ed Webb

Brazil, Indonesia and DRC in talks to form 'Opec of rainforests' | Brazil | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...servation-opec-rainforests-aoe

climate deforestation diplomacy COP Brazil Indonesia DRC

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 22 - Cached
  • The big three tropical rainforest nations – Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – are in talks to form a strategic alliance to coordinate on their conservation, nicknamed an “Opec for rainforests”, the Guardian understands.The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, has been followed by a flurry of activity to avoid the destruction of the Amazon, which scientists have warned is dangerously close to tipping point after years of deforestation under its far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.During his first speech as president-elect, Lula pledged to fight for zero deforestation in the Amazon, while Colombia has proposed creating an Amazon bloc at Cop27, and Norway’s environment minister is moving to reinstate a billion-dollar fund to protect the rainforest after it was halted under Bolsonaro.
  • The alliance could see the rainforest countries make joint proposals on carbon markets and finance, a longtime sticking point at UN climate and biodiversity talks, as part of an effort to encourage developed countries to fund their conservation
  • Oscar Soria, campaign director of the activism site Avaaz, said the alliance could be an “Opec for rainforests”, akin to the oil producers’ cartel, which coordinates on the fossil fuel’s production levels and price. Before being elected, Lula said any alliance could be expanded to other rainforest countries, such as Peru and Cambodia.“This deal could be a promising step forward, as long as Indigenous peoples and local communities are fully consulted in the process and their rights and leadership respected,” Soria said.“These three ecosystems are critical for the ecological stability of the world, and the answer for these forests to thrive lies with the people that live in them.”
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  • data from Global Forest Watch shows that Brazil, DRC and Indonesia were among the top five countries for primary forest loss in 2021, with 11.1m hectares of tree cover lost in the tropics overall last year.
Ed Webb

Climate Efforts Falling Short, U.N. Panel Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-needed-to-avert-disaster.html

UN IPCC climate environment warming

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • decades of foot-dragging by political leaders had propelled humanity into a critical situation, with greenhouse emissions rising faster than ever. Though it remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, only an intensive push over the next 15 years to bring those emissions under control can achieve the goal
  • “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”
  • the divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that have long bedeviled international climate talks were on display yet again in Berlin.Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could have been read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries — including the United States — struck out language that might have been seen as implying that they needed to write big checks to the developing countries. Both points survived in the full version of the report, but were deleted from a synopsis meant to inform the world’s top political leaders
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  • since the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, far more countries, states and cities have adopted climate plans, a measure of the growing political interest in tackling the problem. They include China and the United States, which are doing more domestically than they have been willing to commit to in international treaty negotiations
  • the emissions problem is still outrunning the determination to tackle it, with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rising almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century. That reflects a huge rush to use coal-fired power plants in developing countries that are climbing up the income scale, especially China, while rich countries are making only slow progress in cutting their high emissions
  • It is increasingly clear that measures like tougher building codes and efficiency standards for cars and trucks can save energy and reduce emissions without harming people’s quality of life, the panel found. And the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar power are falling so fast that its deployment on a large scale is becoming practical
  • if greater efforts to cut emissions are not implemented soon, future generations seeking to limit or reverse climate damage will have to depend on technologies that permanently remove greenhouse gases from the air; in effect, they will be trying to undo the damage caused by the people of today
  • these technologies do not exist on any appreciable scale, the report said, and there is no guarantee that they will be available in the future, much less that they will be affordable
  • The new report, dealing with ways to limit the growth of the emissions that are causing climate change, is the third in recent months. A report released in Stockholm in September found a certainty of 95 percent or greater that humans were the main cause of global warming, and a report released in Yokohama, Japan, two weeks ago said profound effects were already being felt around the world, and were likely to get much worse.
  • the committee described money spent fighting climate change as a form of insurance against the most severe potential consequences
Ed Webb

China's Advance Into the Antarctic - Lawfare - 0 views

www.lawfareblog.com/chinas-advance-antarctic

China US USA Antarctica Arctic IR competition resources

shared by Ed Webb on 25 May 21 - Cached
  • Antarctica, the world’s “last great wilderness,” has for six decades been largely shielded from exploitation. A 1959 agreement born out of Cold War necessity and eventually joined by 54 countries reserved the continent “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” What began as a single agreement expanded into a web of interlocking rules and regulations known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The ATS applies to land and sea, existing alongside other international laws—like the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea—to prevent conflict, foster international cooperation and enable scientific development.
  • Experts believe Antarctica has a trove of resources, including oil, minerals, commercial fishing, and coal and hydrocarbons. In addition, the region houses the largest freshwater reserve on Earth in large ice sheets, which could soon become attractive to drought-stricken areas.
  • Among ATS signatories, China has the fastest growing presence, with four Antarctic bases and a fifth underway. Beijing has also in recent years ramped up research expenditures, signed a fueling partnership with Australia, constructed a new icebreaker, announced a permanent airfield and grown its polar tourism industry exponentially. In addition, some evidence suggests China may have already breached parts of the treaty through unreported military and development activities—mirroring a similar disregard for international law in the South China Sea.
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  • Several recent developments make Antarctica an urgent geostrategic concern. First, rapidly worsening climate change—scientists in 2015 noted a record-high temperature of 63.5°F—has led to a reduction in the continent’s ice mass. As a result, it is becoming increasingly feasible to reach resources beneath the cold surface
  • pressure from an increasingly heterogeneous group of signatories to further open up governance—resulting in part from regulatory gaps in the current ATS infrastructure—will likely threaten the ATS’s integrity
  • unresolved sovereignty questions may enable increasingly aggressive behavior by major powers such as China
  • China’s demonstrated Arctic strategy can serve as a road map for policymakers to extrapolate its potential Antarctic agenda. The latter may be a generation behind the former
  • Exploitation of Antarctic resources will probably become inevitable as domestic needs grow, turmoil in the Middle East continues and geopolitical competition drives incentives for diversification.
  • Beijing views environmental regulation in the polar regions as a “gambit to control territory.”
  • China will almost certainly seek to increase influence in the ATS on a bilateral basis with key players
  • In the Arctic, Beijing has proclaimed itself a “near-Arctic state” and in 2013 gained observer status on the Arctic Council, allowing it to help formulate policy. China has also used actors at home (scientific institutions, tourist agencies, media, cultural initiatives and bloggers) to bolster its polar connection. Brady notes that Beijing has already begun crafting a narrative around Antarctica based on five key frames: past exclusion from science and governance, a treasure chest of mineral resources, a global commons, a barometer of climate change, and “a zone for China’s emergence as a global power.”
  • While seven nations claim territory in Antarctica, none has been legally recognized
  • China will likely use informal mechanisms to gain a foothold on the continent. For example, the country has increased place naming, permanent bases and research funding. Beijing will likely also continue to increase domestic presence in and awareness of the region, laying the groundwork for possible territorial claims.
  • The United States stands woefully unprepared to compete in Antarctica with just three (aging) stations, a single failing icebreaker, a lack of capital investment and dated communication technology
  • The ATS does not have a clear mechanism by which parties can punish violators. Instead, the United States and its allies should publicly broadcast infractions and pursue sanctions through other international forums like the United Nations
Ed Webb

Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists | Pollution | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...it-for-humanity-say-scientists

sustainability environment ecology ecosystems chemicals petrochemicals agriculture industry

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jan 22 - Cached
  • The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends
  • Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics
  • chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years
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  • “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”
  • a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.
  • the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals
  • “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”
  • There are growing calls for international action on chemicals and plastics, including the establishment of a global scientific body for chemical pollution akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
  • “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”
  • The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.
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