With voluntary commitments to cut methane pollution floundering, the prime minister of Barbados urged fellow leaders at the United Nations last month to draw up a “legally binding global agreement” to reduce emissions of the particularly potent greenhouse gas.
Mia Mottley told the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit in New York that voluntary efforts like the UAE-led Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter – signed by over 50 oil and gas companies – were “not enough” to rein in methane. She said governments should urgently discuss a “no more than two-or-three page agreement on the reduction of methane as a matter of legally binding obligations”.
The Barbadian leader – who has a global reputation for proposing new ideas on climate action and finance – said governments “do not need to reinvent the wheel”. She suggested replicating the 1987 Montreal Protocol that has phased out the production and use of CFC and other gases found in fridges and air conditioners that were responsible for opening a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer.
That protocol put in place legally binding reduction targets for these chemicals, many of which are also greenhouse gases, incentivising government policies to make companies redesign their appliances.
Emissions of ozone-depleting substances have since dropped by almost 100%, and the ozone layer is closing, with Mottley calling it “the most successful climate agreement in history”.
Why focus on methane?
Methane is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2). Experts say cutting methane emissions is a “low-hanging fruit” for tackling global warming, as it would make a big difference with relatively small actions.
Methane emissions come mainly from the agriculture sector (40%), the oil and gas industry (35%) and waste (20%).
Since COP26 in Glasgow, 111 countries have signed up to the Global Methane Pledge – which aims to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, compared to 2020 levels.
But, in its latest global tracking update in May, the International Energy Agency said methane emissions from fossil fuels remain at stubbornly high levels. Commitments like the pledge have boosted target-setting and momentum, it added, but so far “few countries or companies have formulated real implementation plans for these commitments, and even fewer have demonstrated verifiable emissions reductions”.
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Mottley told the summit at UN headquarters that tightening regulation on methane emissions made sense for the planet, fossil fuel firms and farmers – and would help buy time in the short-term as countries roll out their national climate plans to cut greenhouse gases across the board.
Her call was backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Feleti Teo, who both said in their speeches that a “binding commitment” on methane is needed. “We know that this is a reachable goal,” Macron said, adding that methane reduction would be a priority when France chairs the G7 next year.
A more difficult challenge than ozone?
But replicating the Montreal Protocol for methane will be challenging. The vast majority of ozone-depleting gases come from a relatively small number of appliances and so could be reduced relatively easily. On the other hand, methane escapes into the atmosphere from a wide variety of sources including belching cows, rice paddies, landfills, leaking gas pipelines, coal mines and oil production facilities.
While some emissions can be prevented cheaply or even profitably – particularly in oil and gas production – others, like those from cows, are more expensive and politically controversial to avoid.
Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, has previously campaigned against ozone-depleting substances and is now pushing for methane cuts. He spoke alongside Mottley and Macron at a high-profile meeting on methane in New York in late September.
He told Climate Home News that getting a “coalition of the willing” to agree on methane targets is more likely than persuading all the world’s governments to sign up to an agreement. Countries could make their targets legally binding through their own domestic law, he said.
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An international agreement is possible, he added, “but it also can start from the bottom up” if other governments – including sub-national ones like California and Punjab – adopted similar rules to the European Union’s methane regulation.
The EU requires oil and gas companies to detect and repair methane leaks and bans them from burning gas as a waste product in a process known as flaring. It is also imposing increasingly stringent methane intensity standards – opposed by the Trump administration in the US – on imported fossil fuels.
Zaelke said the next step was for Barbados to try and get the rest of the Climate Vulnerable Forum – a group of around 70 Global South countries which it now chairs – and other small island states on board with the idea.
He predicted that methane would have its “moment” at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, as reduction of non-CO2 gases is one of the 30 objectives of the COP30 presidency’s “action agenda”.
Mottley’s proposal is expected to be discussed at the pre-COP gathering in Brasilia on October 13-14, although opposition from some countries will likely make reaching global consensus very difficult.
Citing comments by UN chief Antonio Guterres that we are on “the highway to climate hell”, Zaelke said: “We’ve got a methane emergency brake. If you pull it and turn the wheel, you can reverse course and slow warming in the near term more than any other way. I think this is becoming clear and so we’ll see the drumbeat for mandatory pick-up.”
The post Mottley’s “legally binding” methane pact faces barriers, but smaller steps possible appeared first on Climate Home News.
Mottley’s “legally binding” methane pact faces barriers, but smaller steps possible
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During the closing session of COP30, the representative of the Holy See – the governing body of the Vatican – was booed. That reaction was triggered by his statement requesting that any mentions of gender should be “understood as grounded on the biological sexual identity that is male and female”.
The comments followed a heated debate that had threatened to derail talks on the new Gender Action Plan (GAP) in Belém, stirring concerns that growing political pressure in the wider world to roll back advances on gender issues had seeped into the UN climate process.
Gender was a hotter-than-usual topic at this COP. Negotiators were tasked with agreeing a new GAP – a document to guide how gender features in climate decisions and action over the next 10 years, including balanced participation in climate talks, ensuring that climate projects consider different gender needs in their implementation, and collecting data that is broken down by gender.
Part of a broader work programme on gender, which was renewed during COP29, work on the GAP started at June’s mid-year talks in Bonn. That produced a text containing 99 brackets, denoting issues to be resolved. As disagreement among parties multiplied in Brazil, the last draft made public during COP30 had 496 brackets, making it a small miracle that a final version of the GAP was approved at the summit.
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The most controversial issue was the definition of gender, which the Holy See, Argentina, Paraguay and Iran wanted to refer to as “biological sex”, reflecting their concerns about trans and non-binary people. One draft version of the text included a footnote added by each of those countries marking their objections. None of them made it into the final decision.
While Russia did not submit its own footnote, Climate Home News understands that it pushed hard to replace the term “gender” with “women and girls” and “men and boys”. During its intervention at the closing plenary, Russia’s delegate said his government works to strengthen the institution of marriage, which it understands as “a relationship between a man and a woman”.
Another thorny issue was “sexual and reproductive health”, a term that did not appear in the final text. The Holy See was among those that fought hard to exclude it. Archbishop Giambattista Diquattro, the head of delegation, said in an interview with Vatican News that tackling this topic was “a diversion from the real issue under discussion”, adding that “the inclusion in the text of sexual and reproductive rights, which include abortion”, is something the city-state could not “in any way accept.”
“Cruel” intrusion into climate debate
Partway through COP30, as the rows over gender surfaced, women’s rights organisations denounced the situation at a press conference.
“We’ve always had fights on the Gender Action Plan… but this is different. This is trying to actually push women back by having this binary definition,” said Mary Robinson, former Irish president who is now a member of the Elders. “It’s so cruel. I mean, it’s actually unbelievable that this would enter into our space.”
Bridget Burns, executive director of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), said it felt like a coordinated backlash – and it wasn’t limited to the gender negotiations.
Argentina and Paraguay also raised objections to definitions of gender in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) negotiations. But they didn’t get what they wanted there either.
“The outcomes we got in the JTWP decision are the most ambitious from a rights and inclusion perspective ever,” said Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition with Climate Action Network International, noting that the protestations by specific countries on gender would only be added to the UN climate summit’s report. “They didn’t get what they wanted, which was a footnote in each decision.”
Had that happened, it would have posed “a very serious threat to the process”, said Rosemberg. Burns said allowing definitions on what words mean for individual parties to creep into the formal decision texts could have set “a bad precedent”.
Claudia Rubio Giraldo, associate for policy and programmes at WEDO, said that such resistance to human rights language shows how important advocacy is – and advocacy groups should be ready to act when negotiation rooms that were previously “progressive points of discussion” become “battlegrounds” on human rights in climate action.
Nonetheless, noted Burns, this was the first time sexual and reproductive rights had entered a gender draft, albeit in brackets.
And she pointed to a deliverable in the final GAP document that asks governments to submit the findings of national assessments, including on “health, violence against women and girls, and care work in the context of gender and climate change”.
“We’re hopeful that [this] gives us the opportunity for countries who are making progress on this to actually share their solutions,” Burns added.
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A GAP without money
On finance, however, campaigners were disappointed with the outcome. They had pushed for women to be given direct access to funding – and for gender to be addressed as part of the climate finance negotiations. Yet, even at a COP where one of the main wins was a tripling of finance for adaptation by 2035, there was little progress on funding for “gender-responsive” work.
Burns described the talks as “a massive failure” on that front. But she pointed to the COP29 decision to renew the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender, which says that the Green Climate Fund, the biggest UN climate fund, should “strengthen the gender-responsiveness of climate finance”, and facilitate access to climate finance for grassroots women’s organisations.
In 2022, they received just 4% of government aid spent on adaptation. On mitigation efforts to reduce emissions, that number dropped to 2%.
Burns said advocacy groups will also push for finance across broader areas like tax, trade and debt to intersect with gender needs and unlock more funds for climate programmes targeted at women.
For now, she said, it is important to ensure COP30’s progress is protected and that the agreement on the GAP in Belém in allows for “focusing on solutions and ways in which we can both enhance climate action and gender equality without having to renegotiate our rights every single year”.
The post “Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat appeared first on Climate Home News.
“Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat
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