Sydney Morning Herald
- Nick O'Malley
What is a “COP”? How did we get here? And what needs to be achieved at
Glasgow?
It was the NASA scientist James Hansen who introduced the wider world to the
threat of climate change. His testimony before a US Senate committee in 1988
shook Washington and became a driving force of the global movement to address
the threat.
That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). It was to provide the world with detailed assessments of the
science of climate change, to chart the risks and lay out possible responses.
Its assessments of global warming were to become the largest scientific peer
review process in history. Based on the IPCC’s advice, the world negotiated the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was
launched in Rio in 1992.
Today, the UNFCCC has 195 national signatories, whose representatives normally
gather annually at what is now known as the COP, or Conference of the Parties.
COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995. This year COP26 will be held in Glasgow from
October 31 to November 12, the event delayed for a year due to the pandemic. The
meetings are usually attended by around 10,000 diplomats and negotiators,
scientists, activists and people from civil society groups. The particularly
significant COPs such as those held in 1997, 2009, 2015 and this year – those at
which key commitments are to be renegotiated – generally attract world leaders
as well. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced he will be going to
Glasgow.
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James Hansen in 2018, 30 years after his historic warning on global
warming. Credit: AP
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This year’s meeting will resemble something like a UN General Assembly crossed
with the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum. The COP has not yet said
which leaders have confirmed their attendance, but organisers expect more than
100 will be there, along with members of the British royal family, corporate
heavyweights and celebrities.
To many observers, COP26 is the most crucial yet because it will test whether
the framework for co-operative emissions reductions agreed to in Paris can, in
fact, curb climate change. According to the IPCC, the world has warmed more than
1 degree over pre-industrial levels. Under the Paris Agreement, the parties to
the COP undertook to hold warming to under 2 degrees. The same assessment says
that to limit warming to 2 degrees we must achieve net zero emissions by 2050,
and around 50 per cent by 2030.
Thirty years on from Hansen’s famous testimony in Washington,
The New Yorker magazine asked him if he had a message for the next
generation. His response was blunt. “The simple thing is, I’m sorry we’re leaving such a
f---ing mess.”So, how did we get here? And what needs to be achieved at Glasgow?
How did we get here? The first major climate
treaty was thrashed out at the second Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 –
the meeting at which the Conference of the Parties was also created. The central
aim of the UNFCCC was to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level
that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the
climate system”.
While this aim has not been realised so far, the COPs were the forums to try to
make it happen.
The first agreement made under the auspices of the UNFCCC was the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol, in which 36 developed nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gases during
a set period (2008 to 2012) by 5 per cent compared to 1990 levels. Acknowledging
that developed nations had already benefited from the process of
industrialisation, it allowed for poorer nations to continue to build their
carbon-intensive economies. As a result, while signatories to Kyoto managed to
reduce their emissions in keeping with the agreement, global greenhouse gas
emissions continued to rise, jumping by 32 per cent between 1990 and 2010,
according to a 2019 IPCC report.
A new approach was needed.
Have other COPs succeeded?
By the most crucial measure – the rate at which the world is warming – the
process has not yet worked, but it has seen the world agree on the scale of the
problem and a course of action.
Some meetings, such as the gathering in Copenhagen in 2009, have been standout
failures. There, divisions between developed and developing nations became even
more entrenched, with the former declining to set concrete reduction levels by
2020 and the latter insisting on their right to carbon-intensive growth.
In the dying hours of two weeks of negotiations, the US delegation couldn’t even
find key players from the major developing nations bloc, let alone negotiate
with them. At the last moment US president Barack Obama, still as much a global
superstar as politician after his election victory the year before, flew in,
hoping to force a useful outcome.
In her memoir, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton recounts discovering that
China was hosting a secret meeting attended by leaders of high-emitting emerging
economies including India, Brazil and South Africa.
She and Obama decided to crash it.
She recounts racing down long corridors with Obama, their staff in tow, before
ducking into the meeting room as White House press secretary Robert Gibbs
tangled himself up with Chinese security guards at the door. Those inside were
stunned. Despite her breezy description of diplomatic derring-do, all that came
of the Copenhagen COP was a political statement affirming the need to keep
warming to 2 degrees, with no attendant commitments as to how that might be
done.
After Copenhagen, crucial years were lost as emissions continued to rise. COP
meetings rolled on and something like a consensus formed that the replacement
for the expiring Kyoto Protocol would be negotiated in Paris in 2015.
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Then French president Francois Hollande, centre, shakes hands with
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as then US president Barack
Obama looks on at COP21 in Paris in 2015. Credit: AP
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What was agreed in Paris (and what’s the ‘ratchet effect’)?
Two principles were made central to the talks in Paris, both designed to
help overcome the critical gulf between richer and poorer nations: all nations
would commit to voluntary emissions cuts, but wealthier countries would help pay
for the developing world to meet their targets and adapt to a warmer world.
Developed nations agreed to make their emissions peak as soon as possible, and
then decline to net zero by 2050.
To achieve the goal, all nations would set “ambitious” reductions targets that
would be updated and increased over time. This is often described as the
agreement’s ratchet effect.
The president of this year’s COP, British cabinet minister Alok Sharma, has
noted that the Paris summit put the world on track for a rise of global
temperatures of just under 4 degrees. Commitments made since, should they be
met, have put us on course to 2.4 degrees.
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President of COP26, Alok Sharma, during a press conference at
UNESCO headquarters in Paris in October. Credit: AP
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This level of warming would be catastrophic, and to critics it is evidence of a
failure of the process. But the decline is the point.
Loose language in the Paris agreement has also prompted criticism.
The financial commitment of the developed nations was absolutely crucial to any
agreement being secured at all. But the language of the Paris accord was
deliberately muddy. Under the agreement, rich nations would create a Green
Climate Fund to “mobilise” $100 billion for mitigation and adaptation projects
by poorer ones. But what did “mobilise” mean? And which countries would be
donors and which recipients? In order to secure agreement, negotiators were not
clear on these points.
“Mobilise,” one of Australia’s former top climate diplomats Howard Bamsey has
said, “is one of those UN verbs, so you have to parse it very carefully.”
Even the goalposts set by the IPCC shifted in Paris. Tony deBrum, a
former president of the Marshall Islands (halfway between Australia and Hawaii),
believed that while a 2-degree goal might be tolerable in some parts of the
world, it would lead to the complete destruction of many small island nations.
He quietly set about forming a bloc of nations that eventually became known as
the High Ambition Coalition, which appeared as if out of nowhere moments before
the talks’ final session.
Demonstrating the power of smart negotiators from small nations equipped with
little more than moral authority and a sense of urgency, deBrum secured 90 votes
and reshaped the Paris accord. The agreement’s intent would now be to limit
global warming to “well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to
pre-industrial levels”.
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The water off Taro in the Solomon Islands. Pacific island
representatives are a strong presence at COPs. Credit: Penny Stephens
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So, what’s on the table at Glasgow?
When the world met in
Paris in 2015, nations accepted the IPCC’s advice that it must massively reduce
emissions to keep it on a path to holding warming to beneath 2 degrees, and as
close to 1.5 degrees as possible. In Glasgow, they must reset their reductions
targets to make that goal possible.
As Sharma puts it, Paris promised, Glasgow must deliver.
For around two years, Sharma has travelled the world pressing the need for
nations to bring to the Glasgow conference emission reductions commitments in
line with that target. For vulnerable countries, Sharma said in his last major
speech before the conference, “‘1.5 to stay alive’ is not a hollow slogan. It is
a matter of survival.”
Sharma and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have been unequivocal about
their terms for success. They say COP26 must result in nations committing to new
emissions reductions targets that close the gap between our current warming
trajectory and the 1.5-degree goal raised in Paris. To get to that point, the
science suggests, most nations must not only commit to net zero emissions by
2050, but agree to 2030 reductions targets that collectively add up to 45 per
cent.
This would be a significant feat.
It would mean securing increased ambitions from more than 70 countries
accounting for 41 per cent of global emissions. They include China, Russia,
India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and Australia, which has so far neither
committed to net zero nor raised its 2030 target beyond the 26 to 28 per cent
reduction it committed to in Paris.
There is also debate about the mushy language of the agreement. Some nations
interpret the prime Paris goal to be 1.5 degrees warming, others 2 degrees.
Former French prime minister Laurent Fabius, who was president of the Paris
talks,
recently told Politico
the 1.5-degree goal was aspirational and that the Paris Agreement would survive
even if it was not met. (He and Laurence Tubiana, the former diplomat who was
France’s lead negotiator in Paris, warned Sharma over a breakfast not to allow
the issue to turn his COP26 presidency into a battle,
Politico reported.)
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John Kerry, here at COP21 in 2015, is back for COP26.
Credit: AFP
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The potential failure of the $100 billion Climate Fund could be used as an
excuse for any number of reluctant nations to abandon the agreement, experts
have warned. Sharma has confessed that the thought of the financial target being
missed keeps him up at night.
“We are now within touching distance of the $100 billion … please step forward
now in these few days before COP,” he said.
Since President Joe Biden was elected in the US, Sharma has been joined by the
US State Department – the world’s largest diplomatic machine – and US climate
envoy John Kerry, an infamously relentless negotiator, in cajoling world leaders
to commit to greater efforts.
But success is far from assured.
Well, what would success look like?
“The measure of success at Glasgow is we will have the largest, most significant
increase in ambition [on cutting emissions] by more countries than everyone ever
imagined possible. A much larger group of people are stepping up,” Kerry said
in a recent interview with The Guardian.
But there are or markers of success. There is a push for the meeting to deliver
an even faster “ratchet” mechanism, with Denmark and Grenada tasked by Sharma to
pursue an agreement for reductions targets to be reset annually rather than
every five years.
And some key decisions will be made on the sidelines of the meeting, with
Johnson making it clear he wants nations to agree to “consign coal to history”
by laying out a rapid phaseout of the world’s dirtiest source of energy. That
effort is being championed by a push known as the Powering Past Coal
alliance.
The cost of failure in Glasgow is unthinkable, says Sharma.
“At 1.5 degrees warming, 700 million people would be at risk of extreme
heatwaves,” he said in his recent speech. “At 2 degrees, it would be 2 billion.
“At 1.5 degrees, 70 per cent of the world’s coral reefs die. At 2 degrees, 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.”
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