Little more than a day after the gavel came down on the climate summit in Baku, the global diplomacy tour has stopped off in Busan. Delegates from 175 countries have descended on South Korea’s second-largest city for what’s supposed to be the final round of talks aimed at clinching an international treaty on plastic.
“The moment of truth is here to end plastic pollution,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, at the start of the talks. “We have a historic moment to end the world’s plastic pollution crisis and protect our environment, our health, and our future.”
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But much work is needed to get there by this coming Sunday when the summit is scheduled to end. Deep divisions over what the treaty should tackle have hobbled negotiations so far, with little progress at the previous four meetings over the last two and a half years.
Ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso, chair of the plastics negotiations, said delegates should “harness every tool of multilateralism, every ounce of creativity, and every moment of dialogue to overcome our differences and craft a treaty as ambitious as our collective will allows”.
As they hopped off the metro at Busan’s futuristic convention centre – the venue of the talks – delegates were welcomed with a simple message on the advertising boards: “Cap plastic now”.
Full life-cycle
Yet plastic production is one of the most contentious issues being discussed here. The majority of countries around the table want an ambitious deal that includes measures to reduce the amount of plastic that is manufactured, as well as ways to deal with plastic waste. Most rich countries, Latin American and African nations, and small island states firmly hold this view.
“You cannot end or reduce plastic pollution without reducing plastic production. That is just a fact,” Graham Forbes, Greenpeace’s head of delegation at the plastics talks, told reporters on Monday. Speaking to Climate Home in Baku last week, Andersen said sustainable production and consumption of plastics would need to be defined as part of talks on the new treaty.
On Monday in Busan, she underlined that the UN resolution underpinning the talks should be a “guiding star”. The resolution indicated that the treaty would need to address “the full life cycle of plastics” – meaning from production through to consumption and waste.
UNEP executive director Inger Andersen at the opening plenary of the INC-5 talks in Busan, South Korea, where countries are set to reach an agreement on tackling plastic pollution. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth)
But a group of fossil-fuel producing nations, primarily led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, have been resisting any push to include production cuts, arguing that the treaty should only focus on demand-side measures like recycling.
Nearly all plastics are derived from oil and gas and, as the world gradually starts to wean itself off fossil fuels for energy, countries and companies that profit from carbon-based fuels view an expected ramp-up in plastic production as a lifeline for their industry.
David Azoulay, managing attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), told Climate Home that countries opposed to production curbs are trying to prevent any constraints from being imposed on their ability to extract fossil fuels.
“To be a little blunt, they want to ensure that this instrument either never sees the lights of day, or if it does, is as inefficient as the climate instruments that they have managed to block and paralyse for the past three decades,” he added.
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Delaying tactics
At a plenary session on Monday morning, Andersen pleaded with delegates to “negotiate in good faith” and not to “lower the bar so that the treaty becomes meaningless”.
The chair, Vayas Valdivieso, said the clock was ticking and that “every minute” was needed to advance in Busan. Day one did not send a positive signal, however, as the plenary ran into overtime to sort out fraught procedural matters.
Fossil fuel-producing emerging economies first warned their counterparts against triggering a rule that allows for two-thirds majority voting when negotiators fail to reach agreements by consensus. “We cannot leave anyone behind,” said Saudi Arabia’s representative. “Consensus will ensure global ownership.”
Then the focus shifted to extensive discussions over which document should be used as the basis for discussions.
The latest round of negotiations back in April produced a monster-sized “compilation text” with countries’ disparate views nestled between nearly 3,700 brackets. In an attempt to make the negotiations more practical, Vayas Valdivieso took matters into his own hands ahead of the Busan summit and produced a more streamlined text with proposals on areas of convergence and suggestions on how to move things along.
Most countries were happy to proceed on that basis with Rwanda – the co-chair of the 68-nation-strong “high ambition coalition” – asking delegates to “get down to business” and the United States saying “we cannot continue to move in circles”.
But Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Kuwait – on behalf of the so-called “like-minded” countries – lined up one after the other to say they could not accept the chair’s proposal in its current form.
After a three-hour suspension, a compromise was found. The chair’s document will be used as a “starting point” to facilitate discussions, while the “compilation text” remains on the table as a source countries can refer to in negotiations. By then the sun had long set in Busan and substantive negotiations hadn’t moved forward an inch.
CIEL’s Azoulay told Climate Home that what happened at Monday’s plenary session was part “muscle-flexing” and part “time-wasting” from the fossil fuel-producing bloc of nations set against plastic production cuts.
Countries that profess to be ambitious will need to “stand firm” when similar tactics appear again in the negotiating rooms, he added.
Having settled the ground rules, diplomats will now start negotiating behind-closed-doors in four separate groups each focusing on a cluster of issues at the heart of the treaty.
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)
The post “Moment of truth” for plastic pollution as treaty talks get underway appeared first on Climate Home News.
“Moment of truth” for plastic pollution as treaty talks get underway
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.
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