As nations push for more ambition at climate talks in Brazil, chairman says they may get it
Belem: Going into United Nations climate negotiations, the Brazilian hosts weren’t looking for big end-of-session pronouncements on lofty goals. This conference was supposed to hyperfocus on “implementation” of past promises not yet kept.
Throw that out the window.
The urgency of climate change is causing some negotiators to push for more big-picture action — on weak plans to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases, on too little money to help nations wracked by climate change, on putting teeth into phasing out coal, oil and gas. Because of that pressure to do more — including from Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — the diplomat chairing the talks said on Saturday he’ll consider a big-picture, end-of-negotiations communique, sometimes known as a decision or cover text.
“I think things have changed, which is a very good thing,” said veteran observer Jean Su of the Centre for Biological Diversity. “So I think there’s momentum that we will get some type of decision text, and our hope is that, in particular, there’s going to be some commitment on phasing out fossil fuels.” “I would say that what’s at stake now is probably higher than the last several COPs because you’re looking at an ambition gap,? Said former Philippine negotiator Jasper Inventor, international program director at Greenpeace International. “There’s a lot of expectation, there’s a lot of excitement here, but there’s also a lot of political signals that have been sent by President Lula.”
“We’re in the middle of the COP, and at the middle of COP is usually where the negotiators stare each other eye-to-eye. It’s almost like a staring contest,” the Inventor said. “But next week, this is where the negotiations need to happen, where political decisions are made by the ministers.”
Because this process stems from the Paris Climate Agreement, which is mostly voluntary, these end statements grab headlines and set global tone but have limited power. The last few COP end statements have made still-unfulfilled pledges for rich countries to give money to poor nations to cope with climate change and for the world to phase out fossil fuels.
Key among those issues is the idea of telling nations to go back to the drawing board on what experts consider inadequate climate-fighting plans submitted this year.
In the 2015 Paris agreement, which is being celebrated here on its 10th anniversary, nations are supposed to have submitted climate-fighting, emissions-curbing plans every five years. So far, 116 of 193 countries have filed theirs this year, but what they promised isn’t much. The United Nations and Climate Action Tracker, a group of scientists, calculates that these new pledges barely reduced future projections for Earth’s warming.
Even if the world does all it promises, Earth would be about seven-tenths of a degree Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, the groups estimated.
