Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Lead, former Minister of Environment for Peru and COP20 President.
As we approach the latest UN climate summit, COP29, we find ourselves once more demanding faster progress, greater ambition and redoubled commitments from governments to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. We also, once more, face calls for the COP process to be reformed and participation curtailed.
These calls are partly a response to COP28, held in Dubai last year, which was attended by 83,884 people – indeed an exception. More delegates means, for example, that negotiating rooms are fuller, compromising participation for some who are deeply engaged in the process. The growing pressure to reform COPs is also partly an expression of frustration with the process and with slow advances over many years on solving the world’s most pressing environmental crisis.
Not just governments
But suggestions that COPs should become more exclusive, or less frequent, or that negotiations should be separated from civil society participation, are misguided. It is essential that the COPs continue to be transparent and inclusive, especially for Global South governments and civil society, if they are to build the broad-based support we need to transition to a net-zero world.
Each COP – or Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to give the full title – is, as the name suggests, an intergovernmental negotiation. However, the COPs have evolved over time to become much more than that, reflecting the perspectives and needs of a much wider range of stakeholders.
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An important development in that direction took place almost 10 years ago, at COP20 in Lima, where I served as COP president. There, we launched the Lima-Paris Action Agenda, to bring non-state actors – cities, business, NGOs, Indigenous communities – into the COP process. It allowed them to organise, define targets and actions, and create campaigns within the formal machinery of the COP.
This Action Agenda has given non-state actors a role – alongside the UNFCCC Secretariat and the Climate Champions appointed by COP host countries – in supporting the climate ambition of governments. It has spawned initiatives such as the Race to Zero, Race to Resilience and the Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda.
Five rings of negotiations
I see the COPs as operating in five ‘rings’ – which are concentric, influence each other, but allow different constituencies to operate and make their voices heard.
The innermost ring is the most important: the negotiations themselves. This is the forum in which decisions are made, in the context of mandates set by preceding COPs. For COP29, these include the New Collective Quantified Goal for finance, the Global Goal for Adaptation, implementation of the UAE Consensus, and the new cycle of national climate plans (or Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs). These processes must be transparent and accountable to the global public.
The second ring is formed of the high-level thematic events, organised by the presidency of each COP. These events – such as those on health, fresh water, and climate and nature held in Dubai – take place outside the negotiations, but can help initiate processes that inform future negotiations and create political momentum.
The third ring comprises the Action Agenda, as discussed above. The fourth ring is often dismissed as a mere trade fair, but the pavilions at COP provide a place for business, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples, academia and other stakeholders to meet, share ideas and create new partnerships. New ideas and concepts are launched, contested, and sink or swim – which can have a profound impact on global debates throughout the year and all over the world.
Finally, the fifth ring is that of bilateral and plurilateral relations between key state actors, which is a vital connective point to advance decision-making on key climate issues.
Balanced and equitable participation
These five rings depend on the participation of many thousands of people. Making the process more efficient by reducing participation of key actors will undermine the collective nature of the climate negotiations.
This is a multilateral process in which every voice, not just those of governments, must be heard, through a bottom-up, democratic set of interlinked discussions at many levels. We recognize the need for balanced and equitable participation – especially from the Global South – and the need to limit the influence of fossil fuel and other corporate lobbies aimed at inhibiting rapid progress towards climate goals. But neither of these necessarily means less people overall participating in COPs – although there can be logistical difficulties in managing large conferences.
The annual climate summits must also be as accessible as possible, including to participants from least-developed countries and marginalised communities, who may not have the resources to readily travel to the talks. Host governments have a role to play, whether by financially supporting participation from those who can least afford it, or by capping the costs that hotels and service providers charge delegates. Some recent COPs have been characterised by rampant profiteering and price–gouging, with hotels dramatically increasing their rates to take advantage of delegates.
The real cause of sluggish progress
Some critics of the COP process have blamed the high numbers of attendees for slow progress in the process. That blame is misdirected. The real culprits are governments around the world that have not set ambitious targets or are not doing enough to reach the targets they have committed to – and the entrenched polluting interests that undermine political will and commitments to strong climate action.
Proposals for reducing participation at COPs are a distraction from the main task at hand: finding mechanisms that make NDCs more ambitious, and targets within them more enforceable. Without that, we will not have a multilateral process that is equal to the climate emergency that we face, no matter how many people are in the room.
The post Why we need to keep climate COPs inclusive appeared first on Climate Home News.
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.