The US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and their allies have spearheaded a push to alter the approval process for a hard-fought green shipping deal, which experts say could jeopardise the landmark pact at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) talks in London this week.
If approved, the procedural changes would make it harder for the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) to come into effect, as it would require support from countries representing half of the world’s shipping fleet.
After years of discussions, governments provisionally agreed the NZF in April, in which they pledged to penalise polluting ships and uses the money to fund the transition to cleaner fuel. The policy is the world’s first global emissions pricing on any sector. At talks in London this week, countries are meeting to discuss how to carry the NZF forward.
Procedural roadblock to shipping deal
The US and its allies want to shift away from a system of tacit approval where, after the NZF is approved at the IMO talks, its rules automatically come into force unless a certain number of countries object. They prefer explicit approval instead, meaning it would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.
Emma Fenton, senior director of climate diplomacy at nonprofit policy group Opportunity Green, told Climate Home News that the US’s proposed change “risks undermining the NZF’s ambitions, delays the maritime transition and does not meet the scale or the pace of action that the climate crisis demands”.
Bryan Comer, maritime director at the International Council on Clean Transportation called it “an unnecessary procedural roadblock”.
The US has been pressuring governments not to support the NZF, which they provisionally agreed at the last set of talks in April. Last week, the US threatened supportive government officials and their shipowners with sanctions, visa restrictions, tariffs and port fees.
These measures that would hit small nations with big shipping registries, particularly those whose ships sail frequently to the USA or who have office offices there, the hardest. Two such governments, Bahamas and Liberia – have reversed their support for the NZF and have been actively opposing it this week.
Green shipping deal at risk
While in April some climate campaigners said the NZF lacked ambition and Pacific Island nations abstained from supporting it, others celebrated it a “groundbreaking moment which should signal a turning of the tide on greenhouse gases from global shipping”.
The deal was set to be officially approved by governments at talks at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) this week, with discussions limited to minor changes to the text. The head of the IMO – Panamanian Arsenio Dominguez – told governments on Tuesday that the text was “balanced” and that not agreeing to it would cause uncertainty and lead to a patchwork of regional and national green shipping regulations which would “increase the costs of this transition in the long run”.
Despite the US threats, government statements at an opening plenary on Tuesday suggested that support for the measure had grown since April – with Pacific and other nations who had previously abstained backing the proposal.
A US, Saudi and Russia-led attempt to oppose the adoption of the agenda failed and the talks’ chair – Liberian Harry Conway – introduced a three-minute time limit and urged governments to stop repetitive interventions in an attempt to prevent delays, joking that offenders would have to donate money to the IMO if they kept repeating themselves.
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Tacit or explicit approval
But on Wednesday morning, the US proposed not to use the tacit approval, a system which stipulates that, after agreements, amendments have a ten-month cooling off period.
During this period, the deal can be cancelled if a third of the nations signed up to the relevant IMO treaty – in this case the countries signed up to the Marpol Annex 6 treaty – object. It can also be cancelled if nations whose ship registries make up half of the world’s fleet by weight actively oppose it.
The US negotiator – who IMO rules say cannot be named – proposed explicit acceptance, which puts the onus on the governments supporting the NZF. Under this system, it would come into force until six months after two-thirds of nations, representing more than half the world’s shipping fleet, actively “communicated” to the IMO that they accept the deal.
“The usual tacit acceptance method is not appropriate for the potential entry into force of such significant measures”, the US negotiator said. They were supported by just over 20 governments, mainly from oil-reliant states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Nigeria as well as Turkiye, Morocco, Argentina and Paraguay.
Their proposal was opposed by a larger group of nations, including Western and Pacific countries, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Namibia and Kenya. The Danish negotiator protested that switching to the “time consuming and inefficient” explicit acceptance procedure would throw off the NZF’s timeline and reopening the text would mean “starting all over again”.
“The regulatory framework is ready. It is mature. The decision to move forward was already made in April with the approval of the amendments and, in reality, accepting an explicit acceptance procedure would, in reality, mean no to realising the NZF”, she said.
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The Brazilian negotiator said tacit approval has been the default since 1973 because explicit acceptance “simply does not work”. The internal procedures for national governments to ratify amendments are “complicated”, he said, and “may take longer than action requires”, particularly as the shipping industry needs “predictability” on what the rules will be.
The negotiator from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu said he was “surprised” that the US had not made its proposal before the talks. “We are of the view that the requested change at this stage is not conducive of a transparent and predictable process”, he said.
Talks’ chair U-turns under pressure
After nearly two hours of government statements, Conway said that from what he had heard it was “the will of the committee to proceed with the tacit approval”.
But that conclusion drew further complaints from the US and allies, who repeated their arguments. The US accused Conway and the IMO secretariat of not being “neutral” – which they later firmly denied. Russia’s negotiator accepted that “perhaps those who spoke in the majority were indeed for tacit acceptance” but argued that because the NZF is so “significant” it needs explicit approval.
Countries like Spain and Denmark spoke in defence of Conway’s ruling that the room was for tacit approval. Conway repeated that “there’s a clear majority that have decided to maintain the tacit acceptance procedure” and said he did not want to hear arguments repeated.
But after 30 more minutes of statements from the US, Saudi Arabia and allies, he changed his mind. In the interest of consensus and compromise, he said that the US proposal should be discussed by technical negotiators in a working group. “This will be my final ruling on the matter, he said.
The other side then complained. The Cook Islands negotiator suggested Conway had folded under the “pressure of events” and his decision risked “driving a VLCC [a type of big ship] through the processes and procedures that have stood the test of time”.
But they relented and Wednesday morning’s plenary meeting ended with negotiators being given a mandate to discuss tacit and explicit acceptance procedures in behind closed door sessions, which continued until nearly 11pm that night.
The full plenary met again on Thursday afternoon, but Conway proposed that discussions continue on Friday morning. The US called for time to consult and gathered with its Saudi Arabian and other allies. As negotiations continued behind closed doors, Conway urged governments to come back in the morning – the last day of talks – with solutions “so we will have a smooth discussion and a happy ending”.
Governments are also likely to vote tomorrow on the NZF itself. To pass, the deal need two-thirds of the MARPOL VI signatory countries which are present and voting to vote in favour of the deal – a threshold that was achieved easily in April.
The post US, Saudi-led alliance plunges green shipping deal into doubt appeared first on Climate Home News.
US, Saudi-led alliance plunges green shipping deal into doubt
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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.
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