Paul Watkinson is a former chief climate negotiator for France who now works independently on ways to improve the multilateral climate process and strengthen climate action.
As COP30 in Belém approaches, the focus must shift from process to impact. We need a credible response to counter attacks on multilateralism and to boost action on reducing emissions, adaptation, loss and damage, and finance.
Whilst the traditional agendas will be heavy and results on items like adaptation indicators, just transition, finance and global stocktake follow-up will be vital, even together they do not constitute the “big ticket” item Belém requires for success.
Some have suggested that an additional political statement – often called a “cover decision” – would be a way to try and bridge the substantial gaps in climate ambition and action the world is facing.
However, while there is certainly a need to maximise the impact of Belém, I am not convinced a cover decision is most effective vehicle. It is time for the COP to move beyond fighting over decision wording and truly pivot towards supporting and facilitating implementation.
What are the problems with a cover decision? Firstly, most COPs function fine without one, and a good host-nation presidency – this year, Brazil – can land and communicate an outcome regardless of whether results are in a single decision or a series.
A cover decision does not necessarily provide a better overview of results across multiple work streams, nor does it make it easier to find the balance between different priorities. Indeed, throwing one in the mix can even complicate the management of the final days if it overlaps with ongoing substantive negotiations on parallel decisions (a concern in Sharm El Sheikh in 2023).
“Christmas tree” of issues
Secondly, whilst the initial justification for Glasgow in 2021 was the valid need to address mitigation ambition (and a similar argument can be made for Belém), proposing a cover decision inevitably opened the door to inserting a host of other topics.
Almost inevitably, the cover decision encourages a widening of the debate and quickly risks turning into an infamous “Christmas tree.” Yes, that can be a way to ensure balance across topics, but there is a cost to pay as issues multiply, as seen by looking at the 17 sections of the Sharm El Sheikh cover decision.
Thirdly, cover decisions often launch poorly prepared mandates. There were good reasons for the mitigation work programme from Glasgow and the just transition work programme from Sharm El Sheikh, but there was little discussion of their scope or aims before the decisions were adopted, and parties have been struggling ever since to find agreement on how to implement them.
COP30 president hints Brazil may be open to a cover decision in Belém
We should be looking at how to rationalise and improve the mandates we have, ensuring that we set up processes that make a difference, not clog up the process further.
Above all, what would a cover decision at COP30 concretely achieve? Would another invitation to revise NDCs, like the request from Glasgow, be effective? Using political capital to get decision wording in Belém would be little more than feel-good posturing if it does not also deliver real world impacts.
A Belém Implementation Plan
What should we do instead? Pivot to an implementation forum, as I suggested a few months’ ago.
The Action Agenda – which mobilises voluntary climate action across economies and societies – can provide just the vehicle we need to do this, with the great advantage that it does not require consensus outcomes. However, it does require major improvements to be effective.
I am heartened by the fact that the Brazilian presidency is already moving in the same direction, with the reorganisation of the Action Agenda as set out in the fourth letter from the COP president and the work by the high-level champions.
To be acceptable, an implementation forum must correct the central weakness of the Action Agenda to date – its tendency to multiply announcements rather than ensure credible follow-up and real implementation. That must change.
Global South campaigners question inclusivity of COP30 as some stay home
Pulling this together, the final days of the COP should not be the scene of yet more tense negotiation of yet another cover decision that will not be make much impact, but should instead be the moment for the presidency to present a Belém Implementation Plan.
This plan would provide clarity on how all work mobilised will move forward, specifying who, what, and when, with clear results over the next year or two. It would say where and when an implementation forum would convene in 2026 (options might include during climate weeks or in New York) to oversee progress. That process would be led by the COP30 presidency, the champions and, hopefully by then, the incoming presidency of COP31.
Maximising real-world action
Such a plan would be inclusive, bringing in not just parties, but also other international organisations, financial institutions, business, sub-national governments and civil society. Crucially, it could still capture key political messages – on mitigation ambition, adaptation, finance, loss and damage – but as results to be delivered through action, not mere rhetoric.
Changing the UNFCCC’s habit of negotiating decisions is going to be hard. I can see that, despite my arguments, many may remain of the view that the outcome should include some sort of decision text. If that can be kept short, and focused, why not? But there would still be a need for an implementation forum alongside to give it credibility.
The leaders’ summit just before the opening of COP30 may also provide further opportunities to capture high-level calls for strengthened action. Perhaps the outcome will be some combination of options.
The point is that working on the basis that a cover decision would be sufficient and the test of success in Belém is not enough since it would carry a high risk of disappointment down the road.
Belém must aim higher – and COP30 can be the moment when the world shifts its focus to ensure stronger credibility and, most importantly, starts to maximise its impact in the real world.
The post COP30 needs an implementation forum, not another cover decision appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP30 needs an implementation forum, not another cover decision
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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