Negotiators Make Climate Deal, But World Stays Away From Limitation

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GLASGOW – Diplomats from nearly 200 countries on Saturday reached a major agreement aimed at intensifying global efforts to tackle climate change, urging governments to come back with stronger plans to reduce planet-warming emissions next year and “at least double” rich countries. funding to protect poor nations from the dangers of a warmer planet.

Despite the urgent demands of thousands of politicians, environmentalists and protesters gathered at the Glasgow climate summit, the new deal alone will not solve global warming. It leaves the critical question of how much and how fast each nation must cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the next decade. And it still leaves many developing countries far from the funds they need to deal with escalating air disasters.

The talks highlighted the complexity of trying to persuade multiple countries, each with its own economic interests and domestic politics, to act together for the better.

But the agreement provided a clear consensus that all nations must do much more immediately to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. And it created transparency rules to hold countries accountable for progress they’ve made or failed to achieve.

US climate ambassador John Kerry entered the plenary room on Saturday evening. with his arm around Xie Zhenhua’s shoulder, China’s chief climate negotiator. Last minute deals were seen on the field as Mr. Xie and Mr. Kerry gathered together from mask to mask. British politician Alok Sharma leading the UN summit.

The architects of the deal hoped it would send a strong signal to capitals and corporate boards around the world that more ambitious action on climate change was inevitable, which would strengthen civil society groups and lawmakers working to steer countries away from burning oil and gas. and coal for energy in favor of cleaner sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power.

“The train is moving and all countries need to get on board,” said Ani Dasgupta, head of the World Resources Institute.If the world is to push back the climate crisis, no one can sit on the sidelines.”

Still, many said the deal wasn’t immediately met, in a year of deadly heat in Canada, devastating flooding in Germany and New York, and severe wildfires in Siberia. At the start of the two-week summit, leaders including President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the meeting as the world’s last and best chance to save the planet.

Shauna Aminath, the environment minister for the Maldives, an archipelago of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean that has been inhabited for thousands of years but could be submerged within three years, said the deal “does not meet the urgency and scale required”. generations due to rising seas. “What seems balanced and pragmatic to other parties is not going to help the Maldives adapt over time. It will be too late for the Maldives.”

In the final hours of talks on Saturday night, negotiators clashed over phrases that would urge countries to “step up” coal power and government subsidies for oil and gas. Although fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global warming, they have never been explicitly mentioned in any global climate agreement before. Eventually, ‘progressive exit’ was changed to ‘progressive decline’ at the insistence of India, which maintains that fossil fuels are still crucial to its development.

World leaders attending the summit said their ultimate goal is to prevent the Earth from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pre-industrial levels. Scientists have warned that once this threshold is crossed, the risk of deadly heat waves, devastating storms, water shortages and ecosystem collapse is extremely high. The world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.

But even as countries pledge to step up climate efforts before and during the Glasgow summit, they still fall short.

Governments’ elaborate plans to curb fossil fuel emissions and deforestation between now and 2030 will lead the world to a warming of roughly 2.4 degrees Celsius this century. according to analysts He’s at Climate Action Tracker, a research group.

“Countries don’t seem to understand that we are still in an emergency and that we need to cut emissions much faster this decade, or they will lose hope of staying at 1.5 degrees,” said German climatologist Niklas Höhne. Co-founder of NewClimate Institute, which created Climate Action Tracker.

One of the main focuses of this year’s talks was how to force countries to do more. Under the last major climate agreement, the Paris climate agreement of 2015, with governments not formally scheduled to return with new climate commitments until 2025, it was too late for a major course fix, many experts said.

The new agreement in Glasgow asks countries to come back by the end of next year with stronger commitments to reduce emissions by 2030. It also makes it clear that all nations will need to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by nearly half this decade to keep warming below 1.5. degrees Celsius.

But we’ll see if countries will follow suit – there are no sanctions or penalties if they don’t. In front of Glasgow, some governments such as the United States and the European Union accelerated climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. But others – such as Australia, China, Brazil and Russia – have barely made progress in their short-term plans.

Money, meanwhile, remained a major bottleneck in the talks.

Some rapidly industrializing countries, such as India and Indonesia, have said they would be willing to accelerate the shift away from coal if they received financial aid from wealthier countries. But so far, that help has been slow to come.

A decade ago, the world’s richest economies pledged to mobilize $100 billion a year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. However, they still fall short. tens of billions of dollars a year.

At the same time, only a small fraction of climate aid to date has gone to measures to help them cope with the dangers of a warmer planet, such as seawalls or early warning systems for floods and droughts. According to a 2017 study, some African countries They spend 9 percent of their gross domestic product in terms of adaptation, while still meeting about one-fifth of their needs.

The new deal seeks to fill some of those gaps. It urges rich countries for failing to meet the $100 billion target, urging them to “at least double” financing for adaptation by 2025. It takes years, and developing countries say they may eventually need trillions of dollars by the end of the decade.

Tina Stege, climate ambassador for the Marshall Islands, described the pledge for more money as “a step towards helping countries like me who have to transform our physical environment in the coming years to survive the onslaught of climate change.”

Even as vulnerable countries like Bangladesh or the Marshall Islands begged for more climate assistance at the summit, they said they couldn’t adapt to every hurricane or famine worsened by climate change.

As these countries have contributed so little to global warming to date, they have sought a separate stream of funding to help them recover from future disasters, and these funds have been met by industrialized countries such as the United States and the European Union. they are historically responsible for most of the extra greenhouse gases now it warms the atmosphere. In diplomatic speech, this is known as “loss and damage.”

Rich countries have long opposed these efforts, fearing they could open the door to a flood of liability claims. In Glasgow they once again thwarted efforts to establish a new mechanism for loss and damage, although they agreed to initiate a “dialogue” on the issue at future talks.

“The needs of the world’s vulnerable people have been sacrificed at the altar of the rich world’s selfishness,” said Mohamed Adow, an activist with Power Shift Africa. However, he added, “loss and harm are high on the political agenda more than ever before, and the only way out is for it to be delivered eventually.”

Separately, negotiators in Glasgow announced a key agreement on how to regulate carbon offsets in the fast-growing global market, where a company or country compensates for its own emissions by paying someone else to reduce theirs. One of the most challenging technical issues is how to properly account for this global trade so that any reductions in emissions are not overestimated or counted twice.

While the summit warned, it also provided other reasons for optimism.

On the sidelines of the talks, clusters of countries announced initiatives they have undertaken on their own to accelerate action on climate change. more than 100 countries agreed to reduce methane emissionsIt’s a powerful gas that has warmed the planet by 30 percent in this decade. 130 more countries promised to stop deforestation Commit billions of dollars to 2030 and this effort. Dozens of other countries have pledged to phase out their activities. coal plants and sales of gasoline-powered vehicles over the next few decades.

Activists noted that these remarks were voluntary and often did not involve major emitters such as China. But others argued they could pressure heads of state and industry giants to do more.

Nigel Topping, who has been named a “top climate action champion” by the United Nations, said: “If you try to get every single country to agree to get rid of internal combustion engines through the official UN process, you’ll get nowhere.” “But if you get a group of countries and major automakers to stand up and say, ‘we’re doing this’, that starts to push the market and soon more companies start to sign in. We need an exponential change and this is how it starts.”

On top of that, most major economies have now pledged to achieve “net zero” emissions by a certain date, essentially a promise to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The United States and the European Union have said they will do so by 2050, and China by 2060. In Glasgow, India joined the chorus, saying it would reach net zero by 2070.

When analysts at Climate Action Tracker looked at these additional promises, estimated The world could reasonably limit global warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, but so far most countries have not implemented policies to get there.

Calculations like these have convinced many politicians and environmentalists that the dream of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is yet to come true, as long as governments are pressured to deliver on their promises.

“The docile, weak and 1.5 Celsius target is just alive, but a signal has been sent that the coal age is over,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “And that’s important.”

Experts broadly agree that the hardest part is yet to come. No single international agreement can solve climate change alone. At best, global climate summits can force countries to be transparent about what they’re doing, offer the public a way to assess their progress, and outline what needs to be done more.

Ultimately, the core business of reducing emissions will return home as policymakers devise new regulations, engineers invent cleaner technologies, and companies change their business models.

Somini Sengupta contributing reporting.

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