Lord Deben says there is ‘no indication’ Scott Morrison has a plan
to deliver the net zero commitment ‘we’ve squeezed out of him’
The UK’s Climate Change Committee chair Lord Deben
has questioned if Australia has ‘got a proper program’
to meet its net zero commitment.Photograph: Scott Heppell/AP
The UK government’s climate change adviser has launched a scathing
attack on Australia’s net zero commitment on the eve of critical talks
in Glasgow.
Lord Deben, the Climate Change Committee chair, told the BBC
on Saturday there was “no indication” that the Australian prime
minister, Scott Morrison, had a plan to deliver on the commitment to
net zero that was “squeezed out of him”.
“It’s very sad that a great country like Australia should change our
climate,” he said.
“Because that’s what happens. If you allow people to keep on doing this, it’s
our climate as well as theirs that’s changed.”
Morrison is in Rome for the G20 summit, and on his way to Glasgow for Cop26,
after
initially appearing reluctant
to make the trip.
He says the federal government has a plan to meet the net zero target, but has
announced
no new policies,
no real details, and is relying on future technology “breakthroughs” to meet the target.
Experts say the claim carbon offsets could reduce emissions by up to 20%
relies on a “gross manipulation” of data.
Morrison’s “projection” of a 30-35% emissions reduction by 2030 is
not a new target
– Morrison is sticking with the current target to reduce emissions by up to
28% on 2005 levels.
Lord Deben says he would ‘love to see Australia rejoin the pack’
and most leaders are beginning to recognise how serious the threat
of climate change is.Photograph: Troika/Alamy
Lord Deben, who was a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government
and environment minister under her successor John Major, said most world
leaders were beginning to recognise how serious the threat of climate change
is.
“(But) not all leaders are like that. I’m afraid that if you look at
Scott Morrison
from Australia, we’ve squeezed out of him a commitment to net zero in 2050 but
there’s no indication at the moment that he’s got a proper program for that,”
he said.
“But in general the world has changed.”
Lord Deben said he would “love to see Australia rejoin the pack”, and that
climate change was an existential threat.
“If we don’t do it then we really do risk the destruction of everything we’ve
ever known,” he said.
It’s not the first time Lord Deben has singled Australia out for criticism. In
September he said Australia was “recalcitrant”. He also warned Australia would be “left behind”, and should really
understand what
needs to be done.
Back in 2015 he said the then prime minister Tony Abbott’s 2030 target – which
remains under Morrison – was “pathetic”.
“Global warming won’t wait for Mr Abbott and his government. Mr Abbott’s
hubris is staggering,” he said.
From Rome, Morrison said Australia’s policy was a “significant commitment” and
compared it to the hunt for a Covid vaccine.
“(I’m) looking forward to updating other leaders on our plans and programs,
particularly on our keenness to work with other countries on those technology
breakthroughs that frankly, when you’re talking about hitting net zero
emissions, it’s the same sort of challenge the world faced when you’re looking
for a vaccine, a vaccine to end the pandemic,” he said.
Asked if he thought Glasgow might “end up a bit of a damp squib” because China
and others were not turning up, he said: “Australia’s taking steps forward.
We’re taking strong steps forward.”
Morrison also said he would meet with Australia’s former finance minister
Mathias Cormann. In his new job as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development secretary general, Cormann has called for a price on carbon
despite sinking a carbon price plan when he was in government.
The Cop26 summit in Glasgow begins on Monday: our environment
correspondent traces the long buildup – and the implications of failure
A woman rides her
scooter through flood waters in Funafuti, Tuvalu. The low-lying south
Pacific island nation is classified as extremely vulnerable to climate
change by the UN Development Programme. Composite: Guardian/Getty Images
In the Marshall Islands
people are used to the vagaries of the ocean. But recently the monthly
“king tide” has brought new perils to this small group of islands in the
Pacific about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Waves crash over
the roads and airport runways, especially when the unusually high tide
coincides with a storm surge, cutting off communication and making daily
business dangerous or impossible.
The
islanders’ lives are now full of inescapable reminders of climate
breakdown, says Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the tiny nation of
60,000 people on 29 atolls. “We see stronger storms and storm surges.
Droughts are more frequent and more intense and longer. Growing up I
remember just one very intense drought; now they’re happening maybe
every three years. We recently had a dengue fever emergency, a problem
we’re seeing now in the winter months as they get warmer.”
Stege
is chair of the High Ambition Coalition, a grouping at the UN climate
talks that brings together some of the world’s richest nations,
including the EU, and some of the poorest and most vulnerable, to push
for stronger climate action. Small island developing states are feeling
the impact of climate change, but so, too, are far more populous
countries, from low-lying Bangladesh to landlocked Rwanda, also members
of the HAC, which represents more than 1 billion people around the
world.
“We are a small nation, but we have
moral authority – our position on the frontline gives us that,” says
Stege. “We need to raise our voice, as these changes will affect the
whole world in time.”
(From left) Grenada’s climate resilience minister Simon Stiell, the Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege, and European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans at Pre-Cop26 in Milan on 2 October 2021.Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
These
vulnerable countries are preparing for what many see as the last chance
to save their people from devastating climate catastrophe. The Cop26 climate summit will gather more than 120 heads of state and government
and representatives of nearly 200 countries to forge a plan aimed at
holding global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Small
developing countries, and their moral authority, are a large part of
the reason delegates are meeting with that goal of “keeping 1.5C alive”,
as it is framed by the UK hosts. It means all countries must come
forward with national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, preserve
forests and other carbon sinks, and move to a green economy.
Cop26
is the biggest diplomatic event on UK soil since the second world war,
and is a crunch moment for attempts to tackle the climate crisis,
because scientists say there is just a decade left in which to take
crucial action to prevent more than 1.5C of warming. Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who is president of the talks,
told the Guardian failure at Cop26 would be “catastrophic”, adding: “I
don’t know another word for it. You’re seeing on a daily basis what is
happening across the world. Last year was the hottest on record, the
last decade the hottest decade on record.”
The
1.5C limit is the core aim of the talks; the Paris agreement of 2015
required nations to hold global temperature rises “well below” 2C, and
to “pursue efforts” to limit rises to 1.5C. That lower temperature limit
was included in the agreement at the vocal insistence of the HAC, just a few days before the Paris summit concluded.
If they had failed, the world would almost certainly already be on an
irreversible path to 2C of heating – a level that we now know, thanks to science completed after the Paris agreement was signed,
would lead to far worse impacts, including widespread drought, water
shortages for billions of people, heatwaves and sea level rises. At 2C,
small islands and low-lying coastal areas around the world would face
inundation.
The question now is: can a pathway to 1.5C be kept at the Glasgow talks?
A conference of equals
Cop26 is the 26th conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change, the treaty signed in 1992 that requires all of the countries of
the world to take action on the climate crisis. There have been 25 Cops
before now, and yet we still face a rapidly deepening catastrophe.
Extreme weather has intensified, with heatwaves in Canada and Siberia,
wildfires across the US and Australia, and devastating floods in Europe
and China in the past year alone. Last year was the hottest on record, alongside 2019 and 2016.
At
Cops, the majesty and the unwieldiness of the UNFCCC process are
immediately apparent. This is one of the last remaining forums in which
the governments of the world meet to debate global issues as equals.
Most international conferences today are a stitch-up among major
economic powers – the G7 group of the world’s biggest industrialised
economies, the G20 group of the biggest economies including the
still-developing ones – or have dwindled into ever-narrower special
interests, like the Aukus defence pact. But the UNFCCC involves every
nation, bar a few failed states, and gives each an equal say. Decisions
can be taken only by consensus, which means the poorest countries –
which are also those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate
catastrophe – have, in theory at least, as much influence as the
biggest.
Sharma recognises this: “I will ensure
that every voice is heard, that the smallest nations are sitting face
to face with the world’s great powers, as equal parties to the process.”
Then US state secretary John Kerry, left, talking with Xie Zhenhua, right, representing China, before the plenary session where the final agreement of Cop21 was presented in Paris in 2015.Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
Putting
the 1.5C target into the Paris agreement “was based on hard work by the
High Ambition Coalition and the small island developing states,” John
Kerry, climate envoy to the US president, Joe Biden, told the Guardian.
“They felt it that it was imperative – and thank heavens they did.
Science has now caught up to that fact, the IPCC [Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change] and IEA [International Energy Agency] and
others have been pretty clear, that this is what we need to try to
achieve.”
Aiming for a 1.5C limit makes this
Cop more ambitious – and perhaps in even greater danger of failure –
than the Paris summit of 2015. At Paris, 197 countries were wrangled by
masterful diplomacy into an accord that legally binds the world to limit
heating to “well below” 2C, while “pursuing efforts” to remain within
1.5C. It was the first time developed and developing countries had
agreed a specific and binding temperature goal.
The
distinction between 1.5C and 2C may seem small – unnoticeable, to most
people, in everyday life. But for the planet, the difference is vast.
During the last ice age, temperatures were only about 4-5C colder than
they were today. Millions of years ago, at temperatures 4C higher than
today, the poles were ice free and covered in swampy jungle. The world
today is about 1.1-1.2C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times, and
already the impacts of extreme weather are being felt.
In
a landmark report published in August, which gave the starkest warning
yet from scientists on the climate crisis, the IPCC – the global
scientific authority on climate science – made it clear that every fraction of a degree counts.
Every seemingly small rise in global temperatures presages much greater
impacts in the climate system, and every extra bit of heat makes
weather more extreme. “You are promoting moderate extreme weather events
to the premier league of extreme events,” said Richard Allan, a
professor of climate science at the University of Reading, and an IPCC
lead author.
The IPCC findings show that the
1.5C threshold is not a cliff-edge to disaster, but the start of a steep
slope. Its assessment found there was a narrow pathway remaining to
hold warming to 1.5C, but even if we overshoot, we should be trying to
avoid anything further – warming of 1.6C is still much safer than
warming of 1.7C.
A woman watches wildfires tearing through a forest in the region of Chefchaouen in northern Morocco in August 2021.Photograph: Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images
As
Sharma put it, in a speech in Paris in mid-October: “At 1.5C, 700
million people would be at risk of extreme heatwaves. At 2C, it would be
2 billion. At 1.5C, 70% of the world’s coral reefs die. At 2C, they are
all gone. If temperatures continue to rise, we will step through a
series of one-way doors, the end destination of which is climate
catastrophe.”
Kerry adds: “The reality is that
scientists have now determined that we need to accelerate and need to do
more – the levels of damage we are already seeing have been greater
than anticipated and faster than anticipated. We have to take our cue
from that, and respond.”
‘The starting line for the rest of the decade’
Cop26 is necessary because the 2015 Paris agreement set out the goals for tackling the climate crisis but did not contain
sufficient commitments to achieve them. At Paris, countries came forward
with national plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs)
– to cut greenhouse gas emissions by varying amounts in the near-term,
most of them pegged to a 2030 deadline. But these were too weak, and
would lead to catastrophic warming of more than 3C if implemented.
For
that reason, the French insisted on including a ratchet mechanism in
the accord, forcing countries back to the negotiating table every five
years to crank up their ambition on emissions cuts with fresh NDCs.
Postponed for a year by Covid-19, Cop26 is that moment. Laurent Fabius,
the French foreign minister who presided over Paris, said earlier this
month: “This is the Cop of action, at which we apply the Paris
agreement.”
Hopes that Cop26 would produce
enough action to meet 1.5C have fallen short. The IPCC has made clear
that emissions cuts of 45%, based on 2010 levels, are needed by 2030 for
the world to stay within the 1.5C threshold. The major players – the
US, the UK, the UN – have admitted, publicly and privately, that the
cuts on offer in Glasgow will fall short of that emissions-cutting goal.
Then French foreign minister and Cop21 president Laurent Fabius (third from left) marks the adoption of the Paris agreement on 12 December 2015.Photograph: Zhou Lei/Xinhua/Alamy
However,
they hope for a deal that will show that all the major developed and
developing countries are taking strong action on greenhouse gas
emissions, are formulating clear plans with concrete measures and
policies to do so, and that pathways can be set out on key issues such
as methane reduction, protecting forests and other carbon sinks, and
phasing out coal.
“Will it be that every
country has signed on and locked in [with NDCs adequate to 1.5C]? The
answer is no, that will not happen,” says Kerry. “Glasgow has to show
strong commitment to keeping 1.5C in reach, but that does not mean every
country will get there. We acknowledge that there will be a gap
[between the emissions cuts countries offer and those needed for a 1.5C
limit]. The question is, will we have created a critical mass?”
Nor
is Cop26 the end of efforts to stay within 1.5C. Rather, we should see
the 2020s as a “decade of action”, in which the world finally brings
emissions under control: “There is not a wall that comes down after
Glasgow. It is the starting line for the rest of the decade,” says
Kerry.
Nicholas Stern, the climate economist whose review showed how man-made global warming could tilt the world economy into the worst recession in history.Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
Unlike
the Paris summit, which produced a binding global treaty, the outcome
of the fortnight of negotiations in Glasgow is unlikely to be clear cut,
adds Nicholas Stern, a climate economist and chair of the Grantham
Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics.
“We should hope for good progress, and for mechanisms and ways forward
on how we close that gap [between emission cuts offered and those
needed] further between now and 2025. We should look at the total
emissions targeted for 2030. But a language of success or failure
doesn’t seem to be me to be very helpful – to have a tick box doesn’t
really make a lot of sense.”
Lord Stern lists
five areas in which Cop26 needs to show progress: NDCs; climate finance;
phasing out coal; nature-based solutions to climate change, such as
preserving forests, peatlands and wetlands, and other carbon sinks; and
the goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
Nevertheless,
if Cop26 does not produce a convincing roadmap for how the world can
stay within 1.5C, it is hard to imagine how that limit will remain
feasible. In 1992, when the UNFCCC was signed, it would have been
possible to bring emissions down gradually over the course of a century,
and still stay within the 1.5C threshold (though at that time it was
not clear that 1.5C was a threshold). Now, because the climate responds
to cumulative emissions, and carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere
for about a century after emitted, every tonne emitted adds to the
heating effect. We have almost run out of road.
Villagers walking on a dried riverbed in November 2015 in Satkhira, Bangladesh, one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change.Photograph: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury / Barcro
In
nearly every year since 1992 – bar a handful of hiccups from recessions
and the pandemic – global greenhouse gas emissions have risen. Repeated
scientific warnings have failed to stop us, and even the lockdowns –
which cut carbon output by between a quarter and a third, when they bit
hardest – made only a temporary dent, as emissions have rebounded faster
than ever. We have not learned, it appears: the IEA forecasts that next
year, emissions will jump by the second-highest amount on record.
António
Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned after the IPCC report that
we were approaching the brink. “This is a code red for humanity. The
alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse
gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our
planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
Hopes and setbacks over the years
The
resolution at Paris to “pursue efforts” to limit heating to 1.5C very
nearly didn’t happen. When world leaders met in Paris in 2015, the
crowded halls were haunted by the ghosts of previous Cops, a
long-running series of largely failed attempts to forge an effective
climate treaty.
Under the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992 on a rise in environmental
optimism – the world had just, in the nick of time, rescued the ozone
layer, and even rightwing leaders like the UK’s recently deposed
Margaret Thatcher and then US president George Bush had been pressing
for climate action – nations are bound to “prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system”.
The
treaty did not set out precisely what that meant, calling for
greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere to be stabilised but without
specifying at what level, and it acknowledged that developed countries
should bear the main responsibility while developing countries continued
to prioritise economic expansion. So the “conferences of the parties”
began, seeking a way to implement these aims.
For
years, they failed. There were moments of hope, but each was followed
by setback. The Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997, placing on developed
countries specific national obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions,
adding up to a collective target of reducing carbon by about 5% by
2012.
But the US never ratified the protocol.
The deal-breaker for the US Congress was that China and other emerging
developing economies were exempt from cutting emissions. Rapidly growing
China was coming to be seen as a rival, and US lawmakers – goaded by
the powerful vested interests of the fossil fuel lobby – were persuaded
that cutting emissions would be economically burdensome and result in
jobs migrating overseas. (In the event, they migrated anyway, and
emissions rose too.)
The then German chancellor Angela Merkel, centre, with the then European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, left, and other world leaders at the final night of Cop15 in December 2009 in Copenhagen.Photograph: Getty Images
In
Copenhagen in December 2009, the world tried again. There was an added
sense of urgency: in 2007, in its fourth comprehensive assessment of
climate science since 1990, the IPCC had found it was “unequivocal” that
the climate was changing, with more than 90% certainty that this was
the result of human actions. Scientists agreed that warming greater than
2C was likely to lead to uncontrollable impacts, that if restrictions
were not imposed a rise of 6C was likely, and that time was fast running
out to keep warming within any limits.
The
signs were good for Cop15 in Copenhagen. Under a new Democratic
president, Barack Obama, the US had re-engaged in international
diplomacy and was poised to take action on its own emissions. “The US is
back!” declared Todd Stern, climate envoy to Obama.
The
Cop15 plan was to meet for two weeks to hammer out a “political
declaration” on cutting emissions that would be signed by the world’s
political leaders, scheduled to fly in for the closing days. But it
quickly became apparent that there was a gulf too far to be bridged:
small developing countries wanted to include a commitment to stay within
1.5C, but bigger developing countries such as China and India were
reluctant.
Steam and fumes billow from the brown coal-fired Niederaussem power plant near Bergheim, Germany. Photograph: Oliver Berg/EPA
Disagreements
over the details were amplified by organisational disarray, and the
conference ended in discord, chaotic scenes and recriminations.
Copenhagen was derided as a failure, but this obscured an underlying
achievement – for the first time, countries including the US and China
had agreed a workable plan on emissions cuts, and developing countries
agreed to curbs on the future growth of their emissions. Underneath the
shouting and the blame-game, there was, as later recalled by Christiana
Figueres, the UN climate chief who took over after the conference, “a
very successful failure”.
Shifting alliances
For
small developing countries, the lessons of Copenhagen were manifold but
one stood out. The two-decade-old division of the world into developed
and developing countries – set out in the UNFCCC treaty, codified
further in the Kyoto protocol – disguised a newly evolving world order,
in which the national interests of the economic powerhouses of the
developing world were rapidly diverging from those of its poorer
members.
For two decades, the interests of
developing countries at the talks had been treated as identical. China
negotiated alongside the G77 group of poor nations, and was looked to as
their leader. Where many countries had relied on debt and loans from
the US and the west, now they could look to burgeoning Chinese overseas
investment, in roads, transport networks, mines, farms and natural
resources.
Yet by the 2010s these countries
were vastly different. China, India and a few other large developing
economies had pulled away from the pack, industrialising at a faster
pace than the world had ever seen. China overtook Japan to become the
world’s second-biggest economy, after the US, in 2010. India’s
fast-growing tech and service sectors fuelled a burgeoning middle class.
These advances came at a carbon cost – industrial expansion ran on
cheap domestically produced and imported coal.
Copenhagen
showed the first fraying of developing country consensus, in the fights
over whether 1.5C should be kept within sight. Two years later, the
split was confirmed, at a climactic conference in 2011 in Durban, South
Africa, that paved the way for the Paris agreement.
Negotiators
in Durban were exhausted after Copenhagen, and few expected to make
much progress. But the EU, sensing a closing window of opportunity, came
with a plan. Connie Hedegaard, the EU commissioner, who as Danish
environment minister had presided over Copenhagen and was unfairly
blamed for much of the chaos, was determined to make progress.
She demanded that countries sign up to a roadmap that would lead to a
new treaty, requiring developed and developing countries to share
obligations on cutting emissions – the format that became the Paris
agreement.
Ministers in a huddle at Cop17 in Durban in 2011, where agreement was reached to extend the Kyoto protocol.Photograph: STAFF/Reuters
At
the talks, she took soundings from smaller developing countries. They
were the ones with most at stake, but being lumped in with fast-growing
economies like China and India, whose priority was growth at any cost,
was not serving them well. Longstanding alliances began to shift, with
the most vulnerable countries inclined to side with the EU in a 130-plus
member “coalition of high ambition”.
The talks
dragged on for a fortnight without resolution, and wearied countries
proposed putting any resolution off for six months or another year. But
Hedegaard was adamant: postponement could be fatal to her fragile
coalition, a decision must be made. After a 50-plus-hour negotiating
session, there were three parties left standing – the EU pushing for a
roadmap, and China and India dramatically opposed.
Close
to dawn on the final Sunday morning, China and India could see they
were isolated and agreed to the timetable that four years later produced
the Paris agreement. The seeds had also been sown for a new force at
the UN talks: the “coalition of high ambition”, as one UK minister put
it.
After Durban, it became clear that the
balance of the UNFCCC talks had shifted. As nations gathered in Paris in
2015, the French were careful to keep a mention of 1.5C on the table,
despite opposition from some countries. But there was a real danger of
the commitment being watered down or left out altogether.
With just three days to go, the Marshall Islands negotiator Tony de Brum,
uncle of current Marshall islands envoy Tina Stege, made his move. He
had been quietly working with the EU, with scores of developing
countries, with the US and others, persuading them of the moral
necessity of keeping a 1.5C target. The High Ambition Coalition broke
cover, declared as a formal grouping of more than 100 countries – even
including the US, Canada and Australia (under a very different
government from today’s climate-ambivalent Scott Morrison). They
succeeded in keeping 1.5C in the Paris agreement.
Some
countries were not pleased. China “hated the High Ambition Coalition”,
said a developed-country diplomat. But the commitment now has legal
force, and the twin goals of “well below” 2C and “pursuing efforts” to
1.5C point in a similar direction, according to Kerry. “It was not 2C,
it was well below 2C, so what was settled on was not 1.9C or 1.8C or
1.7C but well below 2C, and 1.5C is not so far off that,” he says.
For
the UK, the key to success at Glasgow and presenting a convincing case
that 1.5C will be met will be holding together the coalition of
developed and developing countries that carried the day in Durban and
Paris. To get the consensus the UN process demands, the hosts will also
need some countries that oppose climate action to stay quiet.
The
key countries that are antagonistic are the fossil fuel producers –
Russia, Saudi Arabia, Australia – and Brazil, which under Jair Bolsonaro
is intensifying the destruction of the Amazon. At previous talks some
of these countries have flung obstructions into the negotiations behind
the scenes, held up progress on technical issues or held out on aspects
of the agreement.
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, right, in a bilateral meeting with the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, at the UN general assembly in New York on 20 September 2021.Photograph: Andrew Parsons/No10 Downing Street
Questions over UK presidency
The
tortuous history of the climate negotiations and the efforts it took to
get to this point clearly illustrate how pivotal the UK’s role is, as
host and president of Cop26. That role began in September 2019, but was
disrupted by the pandemic. Despite the wearying nature of zoom diplomacy – “breakfast in Seoul, Berlin for lunch and New York for dinner,” as
one UK diplomat tells the Guardian – the talks have progressed
virtually.
Even getting countries to agree that
1.5C should be the aim of Cop26 represents significant progress, given
that many of the main players – China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia – had
balked at or questioned the 1.5C goal in the past. Kerry points to
statements China made at a pre-Cop26 climate summit held by Joe Biden in
April. “China came onboard with entirely new language – that the
[crisis] is urgent and we have to take action in the 2020s and 2030s,
that we need to cooperate with each other, we need to work to 1.5C and
well below 2C. China embraced [1.5C] in that context,” he says.
The
UK has arguably already succeeded in several of the aims of the
conference. Staying within 1.5C will require annual greenhouse gas
emissions to be stabilised at net zero by mid-century, according to
scientific advice. The term “net zero” was scarcely used in Paris, and
is found nowhere in the agreement, but means reducing greenhouse gas
emissions as far as possible then offsetting any remaining irreducible
emissions by fostering carbon sinks, such as forests.
Countries
responsible for about two-thirds of global emissions have now declared
national targets to reach net zero emissions around mid-century,
including China, which has set the goal for 2060. That is a major step
forward, given that two years ago only the UK and a handful of others
had a net zero target in law.
Thousands of heavy-duty trucks loaded with coal travelling along the sole road on the Mongolia-China border in the Gobi desert in 2017. The journey can take more than a week.Photograph: Rentsendorj Bazarsukh/Reuters
Net
zero, though, is not enough. The atmosphere responds to cumulative
carbon, so unless emissions are brought down swiftly, we could reach net
zero by 2050 but have emitted so much in the meantime that we burst
through the 1.5C limit anyway.
Another
win for the UK is on climate finance. At Copenhagen in 2009, developing
countries were promised $100bn (about £73bn) a year would flow to them,
from public and private sources, to help them cut greenhouse gas
emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. That promise has
so far gone unmet: a recent OECD report found only about $80bn was
provided in 2019. A report from the German and Canadian governments,
commissioned by the UK, published just ahead of Cop found that the
$100bn target would be met in 2023, on current pledges.
Alok Sharma, Cop26 president, delivering a speech via video link to the World New Energy Vehicles Congress (WNEVC) for alternative-fuel vehicles in Haikou, China, in September 2021.Photograph: China News Service/Getty Images
Sharma
recognises that the NDCs are at the core of Cop26 and has spoken
frequently of climate finance as “matter of trust – which is fragile”.
But in the quest to keep 1.5C alive, the UK is also pursuing several
side deals. These include an agreement to halt deforestation by 2030;
deals to phase out the use of coal; moves to cut methane, a powerful
greenhouse gas; potential measures on phasing out fossil fuel vehicles
and cutting transport emissions; and commitments from banks to provide
green finance and from leading businesses, sub-national governments,
cities and other “non-state actors” to cut their carbon.
Of
these, coal will be the hardest to achieve. Countries including China,
Japan and South Korea have agreed to halt the financing of new
coal-fired power plants overseas, which is a big step forward, but not
enough. In response to rising energy prices, China recently announced
plans to accelerate its programme of building new coal-fired power plants. India is also moving to increase its coal use.
Bernice Lee, the research director for futures at Chatham House, says: “It is not easy for China to move away from coal.
A lot of the economy is dependent on it, and people outside China
underestimate how deeply embedded it is in the Chinese system.”
The biggest question mark over the UK presidency is whether there is real engagement from the prime minister and the rest of the cabinet. Sharma has won plaudits from green
campaigners and negotiators, world leaders and Cop veterans. But he has
often seemed alone in the UK cabinet.
At the
Conservative party conference, just a few weeks before the start of
Cop26, the prime minister gave only a glancing reference to the summit,
while the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the new foreign secretary, Liz
Truss, managed not a word.
Waves crash over the main Exeter to Plymouth railway line that was closed after parts of it were washed away by the sea in 2014 in Devon, south-west England.Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Contrast this with the French “360-degree diplomacy” ahead of Paris,
when President François Hollande and his key cabinet ministers –
including the foreign minister, Fabius; the environment minister,
Ségolène Royal, ambassadors and a legion of officials – spent 18 months
in a round of visits, conferences, speeches, public and private
meetings.
The cabinet’s neglect of the issue even tipped over into farce: when Kerry chose London to make his biggest foreign policy intervention on the issue,
a speech in Kew Gardens in June, not one member of the government came
to greet him. Ed Miliband, the Labour shadow business secretary, and
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, received Kerry’s warm words from
the podium instead.
It got worse. Boris
Johnson, having said little on Cop26 all year, finally devoted his
speech at the UN general assembly to the climate, but anyone expecting a
reprise of Thatcher’s stirring call to climate action in 1989 was
disappointed, as he veered off into quips about Kermit the frog.
With three weeks to go before the UK’s chance to portray “Global
Britain” as a climate saviour, he chose a holiday in Spain over the
round of frantic last-minute diplomacy that the French employed before
Paris.
Other moves by the UK government have
also seemed designed to undermine Sharma’s mission rather than to help
him. Proposals, green-lit by ministers, for a new coalmine in Cumbria attracted the anger of the former Nasa climate scientist James Hansen,
provoking a storm before the issue was put out to public inquiry, and
new oilfield licensing is going ahead, despite legal action and
protests. The government’s lawyers argued climate commitments were “not
relevant” to the decision, despite a report by the IEA, commissioned by
the UK government, that showed all new fossil fuel development must cease this year, to stay within 1.5C.
Most
difficult of all, the government decided to slash overseas aid to
developing countries from 0.7% to 0.5%, a bitter disappointment to poor
nations as they struggled with the pandemic.
Activists hold banners and placards in Parliament Square, London, to mark 100 days until Cop26.Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images
The
government did manage to produce its net zero strategy just over a week
before Cop26, setting out measures on heat pumps, nuclear, technology
investment and tree-planting that it said would attract more than £60bn
in private funding and generate 440,000 green jobs by 2030. Green
experts worried that the £26bn from the government was insufficient, but
it was clearly a relief to have a plan.
Overall,
the impression given by the host nation in the last two years has been
patchy at best, with Sharma the only consistent cabinet voice. If the UK
succeeds in pulling off a deal at Cop26, much of the credit is likely
to be due to Kerry, the EU and other key figures assisting the
presidency behind the scenes.
The long road ahead
In the village of Hore Mondji, in southern Mauritania on the banks of the Senegal River, a women’s cooperative uses solar energy to operate the borehole that supplies water to the market garden.Photograph: Raphael Pouget/Climate Visuals Countdown
For
Stege, going to Cop is a moral obligation, to warn the world and speak
for those who are rarely heard. “The High Ambition Coalition is critical
to this process. Sometimes, in the past year, when I have seen leaders
of some of the biggest countries on national podiums talking about 1.5C –
it still boggles my mind. We are so far now from where we were in 2009
and 2015. When 1.5C was inserted in the Paris agreement, at the push
from the vulnerable countries, with the help of the High Ambition
Coalition – it was politically significant at that time, it seemed
radical at the time. But now it has become reality, based on the
science.”
The countries on the frontlines of
the climate crisis must be listened to, she said, because their reality
today is what the rest of the world will experience tomorrow without
swift action. “It has been a big arc to get to the 1.5C target. We have
come a long way to get here, but we still have a much longer way now to
go,” she says.
For Tishiko King, a Kulkalaig woman from the Torres Strait, the
slow catastrophe of climate change is personal.
The 33-year-old
Melbourne resident from Masig Island, also called Yorke Island, recently
returned for the first time in 20 years and heard first-hand from her family how
climate change was affecting their island home.
Tishiko King is headed to Glasgow. Credit:Jason South
Fruit crops weren’t as plentiful, the fishing grounds previously used for
coming-of-age rituals no longer hosted fish, and their burial grounds had
eroded, exposing the remains of family members, they told her.
“First
Nations people have done the least to cause the climate crisis, but we are hit
the first and the worst,” Ms King said.
As well as juggling school,
university and other commitments, many of Australia’s young people are also
trying to tackle the biggest crisis: climate change. Concerned about the type of
world they will inherit prompts many young activists to push governments to take
stronger action to protect their futures.
In the past two years, new records have been set for natural disasters
across the world. And the IPCC warns this may only be the beginning. 4min
29sec
By 2090,
temperatures along Australia’s east coast
could increase by 2.8 to 5 degrees, and some areas in the region could
experience around two to three times the average number of days above 35
degrees. Meanwhile, southern parts of the country, including Victoria, could see
temperatures increase by 2.7 to 4.2 degrees.
“It’s important for me to stand up for my people and other First Nations people
and represent those traditional people ... they are passing the stick along and
we’re the ones inheriting this responsibility,” Ms King said.
She
hoped countries would set deeper emissions-reduction targets for this decade at
COP26, and that Australia would be held to account for failing to follow the
ambition of Britain and the United States. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, she
will be among the few Australians heading to the summit in Glasgow.
Also going to COP26 is Australian climate activist Louis Mitchell. The
18-year-old said the absence of many young Australian activists at the summit
would be keenly felt.
“I genuinely feel so lucky to be here, but I
wish I was here with other people who have been marginalised: bushfire survivors
and Indigenous people. COVID-19 has made COP inaccessible,” he said. “I have to
take what I’ve got and do whatever I can to ensure their voices are heard.”
Australian climate activist Louis Mitchell will head to COP26.
Mr Mitchell, like many youth activists, will participate in protests outside the
Glasgow summit, including a global day of climate action where thousands are
expected to march through the Scottish city on November 6.
In
Australia, the Uni Students for Climate Justice group is organising protests in
most capital cities. The group’s national convenor, Anneke Demanuele, said local
efforts were just as important as international action. “It’s not just COP26
that matters, there have been 25 COPS before it,” the 26-year-old Melbourne
student said. “We actually need a movement in Australia.”
It’s
the first time for nearly 18 months when there wouldn’t be many cities locked
down, Ms Demanuele said. “It’s the first cog starting to move towards ... a big
movement on the streets again.”
Uni Students for Climate Justice group members Sam Rathnaweera,
Anneke Demanuele, Liza Stephens, Bella Beiraghi and Winnie Zheng
are organising protests across Australia in line with the global
day of climate action on November 6. Credit: Chris Hopkins
Young people’s voices have been instrumental in increasing the visibility of the
climate protests, with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg leading the
way. The 18-year-old, whose school strike sparked a global movement, will attend
COP26.
Ms Thunberg told AFP this month she was doubtful it would lead to any
significant changes and activists would have to continue fighting.
Ms Demanuele agrees: “I don’t think it will be an easy fight because so much
money and power are invested into the fossil-fuel industry, but if anything is
going to shake them up, it is going to be young people and their supporters.”
The teenagers argued the mine expansion would endanger
their future because climate hazards would cause them injury, ill health and
economic losses.
The Federal Court dismissed the teenagers’
application in May to prevent the minister approving the coal mine extension,
but it found Ms Ley owed a duty of care to Australia’s young people.
While
Ambrose has always been interested in environmental issues, in 2018 he started
to become aware of climate change through the media and decided it was time to
act.
Sydney student Ambrose Hayes is part of a class action suing
federal environment minister Sussan Ley over a coal
mine. Credit: Louise Kennerley
“We can’t vote yet ... but there are so many different ways young people can
make a change, whether that’s through talking to local MP or being involved in
legal action, or joining a local political group or being involved in some sort
of protests — there are so many things you can do,” he said.
