UAE’s role as COP28 host will be judged on results. Will COP deliver an operational and meaningful loss and damage fund? Will it produce a global stocktake that invigorates international action? How will discussions on a new global finance goal shape up? And will Sultan Al Jaber’s overtures towards the private sector turn the steady trickle of pledges into a giant wave of action? Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Felix Dodds and Chris Spence
NEW YORK, May 16 2023 (IPS)

Perhaps one of the least well known among Dubai’s many attractions is surfing. Locals and visitors enjoy the sport at Sunset Beach and elsewhere, especially in winter. There is even an artificial wave pool where surfers can hone their skills. To some, the pool is just another example of the host country’s entrepreneurial outlook.

With COP28 on the horizon, the host government of the United Arab Emirates is once again promoting the virtues of business. In a recent interview with the Guardian media outlet, COP28 president-designate Sultan Al Jaber said the world needs a “business mindset” to tackle the climate crisis. What’s more, he laid out plans to use the COP to promote private sector goals as well as those for governments.

Will this focus on business signal a genuine new green wave, or will it wipe out? This article assesses the state of play and the host’s approach as we head into the official preparatory meetings taking place in Bonn, Germany, in June.

What was achieved at COP27?

To understand the situation, we need first to look at what happened at COP27. This is important not just in terms of the current landscape, but because the COP27 hosts, Egypt, technically continue to hold the presidency until COP28 officially starts on November 30th.

The main source of disappointment at COP27 was the absence of ambition on mitigation. There was a noteworthy lack of new and ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) from governments. What this means is that the critical needle has not shifted when it comes to keeping global warming to less than 1.5 Celsius, or even under 2C

While all incoming presidencies are incredibly active in the months leading up to the event they will host, the outgoing presidency has a role to play, too, and the quality of the relationship between the two governments is important.

For many UN insiders, COP27 exceeded expectations. Admittedly, expectations were not high, particularly since COP27 was viewed by many as an “in-between” COP rather than one with critical milestones of the sort that occur every few years. While all COPs matter, most insiders will tell you not all are equal in importance.

The COP in Sharm El-Sheikh had a menu of issues it was dealing with, but it was not one where, say, a new global agreement was expected (such as COP21 in Paris), or a global stock take was due (as will happen at COP28 later this year). There had been calls for governments to strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (pledges and commitments) at COP27, but few did.

The major achievement at COP27—and the reason the meeting exceeded expectations—was an agreement to establish a loss and damage fund to support vulnerable countries. Few anticipated such a positive outcome even a few weeks prior to the meeting.

Although the agreement on loss and damage did not include acceptance of historical responsibility, it was viewed as a big win for the Egyptian Presidency, small islands and other vulnerable states, as well as the Group of 77 developing countries, which in 2022 was under the presidency of Pakistan.

Under the terms of the agreement at COP27, the loss and damage fund will need to be operationalized at COP28 and a transitional committee is already working on this. In the world of multilateral diplomacy, this is an ambitious timeframe.

There was another positive development on a modest scale at COP27 on the Global Goal on Adaptation. Delegates agreed to “initiate the development of a framework” to be available for adoption in 2024. Meanwhile, on agriculture a new four-year process was agreed to carry on the work started under the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture. There is a sense now that agriculture and food security are gaining the attention they deserve in climate negotiations.

Outside the formal negotiations, many projects and alliances were advanced, including plans to accelerate the decarbonization of five major sectors: power, road transport, steel, hydrogen, and agriculture. Noteworthy initiatives included the launch of the Global Renewables Alliance, which brings together leaders from the wind, solar, hydropower, green hydrogen, long duration energy storage, and geothermal sectors.

Research released just before COP27 showed that the Global North is still not delivering on its commitment to provide $100 billion a year to the Global South. One silver lining to this dark cloud is that this goal may finally be reached in time for COP28. Still, that is three years too late. Credit: Shutterstock

What was not achieved at COP27?

The main source of disappointment at COP27 was the absence of ambition on mitigation. There was a noteworthy lack of new and ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) from governments.

What this means is that the critical needle has not shifted when it comes to keeping global warming to less than 1.5 Celsius, or even under 2C. According to the Climate Action Tracker, our long-term scenarios are still well above 2C under most scenarios, and as high as 3.4C under their most pessimistic estimate. This means things have not really improved since COP26.

What’s more, research released just before COP27 showed that the Global North is still not delivering on its commitment to provide $100 billion a year to the Global South. One silver lining to this dark cloud is that this goal may finally be reached in time for COP28. Still, that is three years too late.

Meanwhile, COP27 did less to clarify new rules for the global carbon market than many were hoping to see. While COP26 in Glasgow had provided more details about Paris Agreement Article 6 (which sets out a framework for international cooperation and carbon markets), more granular guidance is still needed.

Some fear that without more details on accountability and measurement, for instance in terms of carbon offsets, we could end up with a “wild west” when it comes to the markets.

There was also little progress in negotiations aimed at encouraging the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. On the private sector side, while many companies have made net-zero targets, research suggests many do not have robust plans to deliver this, and there is uncertainty over how the private sector will use carbon offsets. Without greater clarity, this hyped-up “wave” of pledges from businesses around COP26 and before may end up a damp squib.

Looking to the Bonn climate conference

The political backdrop to the UN Bonn climate conference in June is complex. On the downside, governments are still emerging from the COVID pandemic and many are still focused on, and feeling the impact of, the war in Ukraine.

On the positive side, the cost of solar and wind continues to fall and European countries are moving more quickly because they want to be independent of Russian fossil fuels. Although others are taking advantage of Europe’s reduced demand to increase purchases of Russia’s fossil fuels at reduced prices, the growing focus on renewable energy in many countries should be seen as a positive overall in terms of climate mitigation.

With some major milestones coming up at COP28 later this year, the Bonn conference in June will give us some signals of how close we will be to delivering success in December.

Global Stocktake: UN climate negotiators are expected to take stock of progress on the Paris Agreement every five years. COP28 marks the culmination of the first “stocktake” and will be expected to shape and catalyze future action.

The stocktake has three phases. In the first phase, which started at COP26, information is collected and prepared from various sources to help assess progress. Phase 2, which started last year, includes in-person “technical dialogues” focused on mitigation, adaptation, and implementation. These will conclude in Bonn this June.

Finally, the stocktake will end at COP28 with a presentation of findings and discussions on how to respond. The Bonn meeting will therefore present an opportunity to take the pulse of these discussions. How robust have the technical dialogues been? Is there a surge of support from governments to make COP28 a major milestone for climate action? Bonn should provide clues about this.

Loss and Damage Fund: The transitional committee has been established and had its first meeting in Luxor, Egypt, in April. It will meet again in Bonn. Its role is to make recommendations on how to operationalize both the new funding arrangements and the fund at COP28. How are these discussions proceeding? Bonn should give some indications on progress, as well as potential areas of discord and disagreement.

Global Goal on Adaptation: With significant change already “baked in” to our climate system, effective adaptation will be critical. The Global Goal on Adaptation was agreed under the Paris Agreement and recognizes the need to build adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and limit vulnerability.

Adaptation will be addressed in Bonn under both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA). It also links to the work of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, a related UN initiative which is having its “mid-term review” at UN Headquarters in New York from 18-19 May.

New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance: The goal of providing $100 billion in support annually for the Global South by 2020 was originally set in 2009. Now it is up for review. Since that earlier goal was viewed as a “floor” rather than a ceiling, many are expecting more ambitious targets in future.

A new goal is supposed to be set before 2025, meaning COP29 in 2024 should mark the moment when a new number (or set of numbers) is agreed. Again, Bonn will mark a moment to assess how those conversations are going, especially given the wide differences in the type of dollar figures being bandied about by the Global North and Global South (many of whom are calling for trillions). Those following this topic can look to the 6th Technical Expert Dialogue, which is taking place in Bonn, to get a sense of progress.

Carbon Markets: As mentioned above, in spite of progress many are still hoping for more granular details on the carbon markets. This will be vital to curtail greenwashing with offsets.

Coalitions of the Willing: Sultan Al Jaber, the COP28 president-designate, recently highlighted the private sector’s role in combating climate change. In fact, all stakeholders will need to be fully engaged if we are to have any chance of staying withing 1.5C of warming. Voluntary coalitions of governments, the private sector and many others will be vital, especially when it comes to advancing issues where all 190+ governments that are party to the UN climate treaty and Paris Agreement are not yet ready or willing to agree.

Such voluntary initiatives offer considerable scope for those who want to move ahead. In turn, this has the potential to set precedents and entrench ideas that might be taken up by all governments in future formal UN negotiations. An example of this is the methane pledge, which involved some 50 countries reporting on progress at COP27. More should be looked for at COP28. Likewise, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which has reportedly had some teething problems since its launch in 2021, will hopefully use COP28 as a moment to showcase progress and put its early difficulties behind it.

Will COP28 Launch a New Green Wave?

Eyebrows were raised when the United Arab Emirates was first named as host of COP28. Why, people asked, would a climate COP be held in an OPEC state? Furthermore, many wondered publicly whether Sultan Al Jaber, who is likely to preside over the meeting, should do so given his role as chief executive of UAE’s national oil company? Does this represent a conflict of interest?

These are fair questions that will only be fully answered by the COP and what it achieves. However, it is worth noting that the prospects of a fossil fuel-producing country hosting COP28 were always quite high.

As UN insiders know, the climate COPs are typically hosted on a rotating basis in each of the UN’s five “regional groups.” This time around, it was Asia-Pacific’s turn.

Many countries in this region, including more than a dozen small island nations, probably do not have the internal capacity to host an event of this magnitude. Of those that do, many—from Saudi Arabia to India, Indonesia to China, Iran to Australia—are fossil-fuel producers.

Furthermore, while Sultan Al Jaber has a history in the fossil-fuel industry, he has also been prominent in the UAE’s work on renewable energy and is the founding CEO and current Chair of Masdar, a UAE-owned renewable energy company. Depicting him simply as a fossil fuel “dinosaur” does not do justice to a more nuanced and complicated situation.

Ultimately, UAE’s role as COP28 host will be judged on results. Will COP deliver an operational and meaningful loss and damage fund? Will it produce a global stocktake that invigorates international action? How will discussions on a new global finance goal shape up? And will Sultan Al Jaber’s overtures towards the private sector turn the steady trickle of pledges into a giant wave of action?

Finally, will other stakeholders, like non-governmental organizations, be embraced and welcomed? We should also note the significance of appointing Razan Al Mubarak as UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for the COP28 Presidency, given she is also IUCN President and a former head of Abu Dhabi’s Environment Agency.

One early indicator in Bonn will be an expected update on COP28 logistics. This is likely to include more details on the “Blue Zone” (where negotiations are held and many stakeholders usually have pavilions and stalls). Will the Blue Zone offer easy access to all stakeholders? And how will the “Green Zone,” which at past COPs has been open to the public, operate?

Only time will tell if COP28 marks the start of a new green wave or ends in an unfortunate wipe out.

Professor Felix Dodds is Director, Multilateral Affairs. Rob and Melani Walton Sustainable Solutions Service (RMWSSS) at Arizona State University. Adjunct Professor at the Water Institute University of North Carolina and Associate Fellow, Tellus Institute, Boston City of Bonn International Ambassador.

Chris Spence is a consultant and advisor to a range of international organizations on climate change and sustainable development, as well as an award-winning writer.

Spence and Dodds recently co-edited Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage (Routledge, 2022).

Excerpt:

On the final day of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, young Ghanaian activist Nakeeyat Dramani Sam spoke about the terrible impact of climate change on her country, while holding up a sign that said, “Payment Overdue.” Credit: Kiara Worth

By Robert Sandford
HAMILTON, Canada, Dec 1 2022 (IPS)

Last year’s climate COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, was billed as the most important conference in the history of humanity. But it failed to deliver. If anything, that failure added urgency for global climate action at COP 27 in Egypt last month.

Now that it this year’s COP is over, it is useful to reflect on a few excerpts from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s opening day remarks:

• “These climate conferences remind us that the answer is in our hands and the clock is ticking.”
• “We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing.”
• “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising…and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.”
• “We are getting dangerously close to the point of no return. And to avoid that dire fate all countries must accelerate their transition now, in this decade.”
• “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.”
• “It is either a climate solidarity pact, or it is a collective suicide pact.”

Credit: UN Photo/Albert González Farran

Sadly, COP27’s outcomes make very clear that the world signed on to the one the global fossil fuel sector wanted: the suicide pact.

COP 27 did not deliver. In fact, it has been labelled by many as the worst COP ever.

What happened in Egypt puts a whole new spin on the term COP-out. But how could it have been otherwise?

COP 27 was held in a country aligned with surrounding petrostates ruled by a ruthless dictatorship and was sponsored by one of the world’s largest plastic polluters: Coca-Cola.

It did not seem to register with organizers that the company’s relentless bottled water production is widely held in the global water science and policy community as a triumph of marketing over common sense.

Did the organizers not see that Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of COP 27 was an open invitation to blatant global greenwashing?

The obvious should not be missed here: Capitalism is not out of control, capitalism is in control – and COP 27 offers clear proof of that truth.

As society’s reliance on petroleum grew and our energy demands expanded, the global fossil fuel cartel quietly evolved into a superpower unto itself. There were more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP 27. What, one might reasonably ask, could possibly go wrong? Lots, evidently.

The oil and gas lobby completely corrupted the COP process. The proceedings and outcomes of COP 27 make it clear that the fossil fuel sector now owns the COP agenda. The sole aim of their presence there was to prevent, not promote, progress on dealing with the global climate threat. And they succeeded.

None of the agreements negotiated in Egypt are binding. Like the national emissions reductions target put forward by UN Member States under the Paris Climate Accord, the commitments made at COP 27 are all merely aspirational.

There is no penalty for failing to achieve them. There have been 27 COPs since 1995 and still no formal binding agreement on cutting fossil fuel burning.

Except for a small blip during the pandemic, fossil fuel burning globally continues to rise, not fall.

As one participant pointed out, the aspirational scheme agreed upon in Sharm el Sheikh is a down payment on disaster. No one expects anyone to actually compensate developing countries that contribute little to the climate threat for the catastrophic impacts climate breakdown is now having on them.

With COP 28 scheduled to be held next year in the United Arab Emirates – one of the most notorious petrostates of them all – the only thing COP 27 accomplished was to expose what the COP summit process has become – a pointless travelling circus set up once a year out of which little but platitudes emerge.

The entire COP process is no longer fit for purpose. It is a bloated, corrupted process too moribund to come up with any measures effective enough, and binding enough, to bring about the changes we need to make to avoid climate catastrophe.

Voices calling for change get louder and louder. The COP process must be replaced with something more efficient that does its work largely hidden from the glare of the media.

It can no longer be allowed to be contaminated by corporate sponsorship. The process can no longer be allowed to be owned and corrupted by the global fossil fuel cartel and oil and gas sector lobbyists.

One suggested way of doing this is to establish an IPCC-like structure of smaller bodies, each addressing key issues, notably energy transition, restorative agriculture, transportation and issues related to damage and loss.

Each such body would be made up of representatives of majority-world countries empowered to negotiate legally binding agreements that are workable and achievable, whether it be halting and reversing deforestation, cutting carbon dioxide and methane emissions, drawing down coal use and addressing other threats to our future such as ocean acidification and deoxygenation.

These agreements can then be signed off by world leaders without the need for the hype, grandstanding and false hope now associated with COP process pronouncements.

We are witnessing a great bonfire of our heritage. Things are being lost that have not yet been found. We need to find them before they, and we, are gone.

Robert Sandford holds the Global Water Futures Chair in Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, based at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

IPS UN Bureau

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After days of intense negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, countries at the latest UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, reached agreement on an outcome that established a funding mechanism to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced disasters. 20 November 2022 Credit: United Nations

By Inge Kaul
BERLIN, Nov 29 2022 (IPS)

For decades, there have been non-conclusive deliberations regarding how the international community could support poor and vulnerable countries in their efforts to cope with and recover from the havoc wreaked on their territory by the ill-effects of global warming such as severe droughts, floods, storms, or rising sea levels.

At the COP27 climate summit, this issue figured for the first time as a separate item on the agenda; and, as one of their very last-minute decisions, delegations even agreed to establish a dedicated loss and damage fund (LDF). However, the question of how to operationalize, notably resource the fund was left open.

A “transitional committee” is to be created to examine possible funding options and report to COP28, which could then, eventually, decide on the LDF’s operationalization.

Remembering the many press photos showing the despair written into the faces of people, whose houses and fields were destroyed by floods, or the blank stares of those sitting next to the cadavers of their cattle killed by severe drought conditions,

I feel that business as usual—namely, taking it easy in delivering on funding promises (as we have seen it in the case of the $ 100 billion annual climate-finance promise) — would be an extremely immoral and unethical behavior in the present case.

Therefore, let’s waste no time and start to explore where one could find money fit for the purpose of loss and damage support.

In the following, I argue that only one – still to be established – source will generate on a relatively reliable and predictable manner the longer-term stream of public finance required, as a minimum, for creating a solid basis of LDF core funding.

The funding source to be agreed and established as a matter of highest urgency are UN assessed contributions for climate security.

Money fit for the purpose of loss and damage support

However, at the outset, it is perhaps important to clarify that support for loss and damage should not be confounded with humanitarian assistance delivered as a prompt crisis-response measure.

Disaster may strike countries haphazardly, irrespective of whether they are poor or rich, vulnerable or not. All countries may need or, at least, somehow benefit from immediate and fast-disbursing, short-term humanitarian assistance in cash or kind.

How best to organize such short-term humanitarian assistance is also an important issue that deserves more attention. However, it is an issue beyond the scope of this article.

Therefore, let’s now turn to the specific issue of what type of external support could be most useful for “climate victims”, notably poor and vulnerable countries struggling to rebuild their communities and economies.

An entity such as the newly established LDF and the money that, one day, it might have at its disposal, are governance tools. Like any other tools they should be fit for the purpose at hand.

Considering for now mainly the core funding that the LDF needs to have, it should perhaps have three key characteristics, namely be: (1) public finance; (2) patient, that is, designed for the longer-term; and (3) relatively predictable in its availability.

The reasons are that, typically, a country’s vulnerability to severe climate events is a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon to which both structural factors (e.g., the countries geographic position and size) and non-structural factors (such as its development level) contribute.

Thus, by implication, meaningful loss-and-damage support is likely to be required for several years, maybe, even for a decade or more. This should not come as a surprise, because even in developed countries rebuilding efforts have often been a lengthy process.

Moreover, in the case of small-island developing countries, it could even be that parts of the population need to be resettled to start their life anew.

Initially, patient, predictable public finance may constitute the most important source of funding. As the rebuilding process advances, the public funds could also play an important role in helping to mobilize other resource inflows, including private investments.

Or, they could be twinned with adaptation finance and other types of climate finance, as well as official development assistance.

Making the case for UN assessed contributions for climate-security, including loss and damage support

By now, there exists broad-based agreement that our security today depends on more than the security of our countries’ external borders and on more than the control of within-country conflicts and violence.

As US President Joe Biden, noted in his statement to COP27, military security today is only one dimension of our security, next to climate and food security; and, as COVID-19 taught us, next to global health security.

The security threats we are facing are global in their reach; they tie us together in a web of manifold interdependencies. They require all hands-on deck, or no one will be secure. The United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) is, therefore, correct in pushing for a “Climate Solidarity Pact.”

Thus, it is timely to ask: Why do we have, within the UN, only an established system of assessed contributions to support efforts aimed at keeping and restoring military security? Why not also assessed contributions – a solidarity-based pact – to climate security?

Among the reasons that strongly speak for this financing option are several. First, such contributions could be introduced for, say, an initial period of 20 years, subject, of course, to regular monitoring of their functioning and impact.

Evidently, they would provide the type of reliable and predictable long-term public finance that the LDF needs.

Second, agreement on a UN funding scale for climate security would help end the present continuous tussle among countries over who should contribute how much. The UN assessment scale for determining individual countries’ contributions to climate security would be based on a joint decision by member states.

Besides income (capacity to pay) one would, in the present case, certainly also consider past and current per-capita emission levels and other relevant factors.

Many aspects of the proposed funding source still need further élaboration and consultations. However, let’s start at the beginning and encourage a world-wide dialogue on the pros and cons of the following issues.

Should we: (1) consider climate security, notably that of vulnerable countries, as a global security issue; and (2) grant climate security the same financing privilege that military security enjoys, namely, to benefit from assessed contributions paid by all UN member states according to a formula that aims at promoting climate security and justice?

Why not ?

Inge Kaul is a fellow at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Qatar Tourism Authority

By Myles Benham
DOHA, Qatar, Nov 25 2022 (IPS)

The sun is shining, and the temperature sits at an idyllic 28 degrees Celsius. The Uber driver taking me to work is from Pakistan and devastated about the recent loss to England in the T20 Cricket World Cup final in Australia.

On route to the office, I stop to get a coffee and the barista is from Gambia, the server from Uganda and the cashier from Nigeria. They all smile and greet me as I travel through the line. As I enter the office, I am greeted by the Indian and Bangladeshi security guards and then pass the Filipino, Togolese and Algerian cleaning staff who are preparing for the rush of staff on what will undoubtedly be a busy morning.

The world’s real melting pot is not London, Melbourne or Los Angeles. It’s here in the Middle East. The representation of cultures here in Doha dwarfs anything outside of the Arab Gulf and many are here for the prospect of work and the opportunity brought about by the ongoing FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Qatar’s open door

As an underlying groundswell of xenophobia has permeated through much of the world – the Global West has shut its borders, limited migration and made the process of entering, let alone working, more difficult – Qatar has opened its doors. The people working here are searching for a way to improve the situation for their families.

Many are from some of the poorest places on the planet where the people are most in need. The media have filled newspapers and TV screens with negative stories about Qatar, a country they have never visited and a culture they have never experienced.

When the majority have turned their backs on these poorer countries, could the conversation surrounding workers for this World Cup not have been about opportunity? About the incredible impact and lasting legacy, the jobs generated here will have on families and communities across the globe? About the dissemination of wealth back to the areas and communities who really need it?

For decades the world has shifted industry towards regions that can provide cheaper labour. The movement of whole sectors to Asia and the sub-continent have kept many organizations afloat. This was seen as a creative way to save money, drive higher dividends for shareholders and keep prices low for consumers despite the effect it would have on local jobs.

This paradigm is alive and well. Salaries and wages are much lower in Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary or Bulgaria than in countries like Germany, Austria or France. In many cases, this has led companies based in Western Europe to build subsidiaries in Eastern Europe to take advantage of lower labour costs. Western European economies heavily depend on working migrants from the East earning low wages and working in poor, unregulated conditions. That isn’t particularly controversial in Europe.

The same can be said for Eastern European countries who replace the workforce that has departed with workers from Central Asian countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So, for all the outrage and condemnation that has been aimed at Qatar, a quick google search would show the very thing they are advocating against is happening under their own nose.

Uniting instead of dividing

However, hypocrisy is not limited to Europe. Australia, for example, became the first 2022 World Cup team to release a collective statement against Qatar’s human rights record, compiling a video message critiquing the World Cup host’s treatment of migrant workers. It may surprise those individuals to learn that Australia’s track record on human rights is not exactly squeaky clean.

More than 40 nations at the UN Human Right Council, including Germany, South Korea and the USA, have questioned Australia’s policies toward asylum seekers and refugees. Among the issues raised are Australia’s continued use of offshore processing and prolonged detention for asylum seekers.

The council accuses the Australian government of not following through on some of its key past pledges and of still subjecting refugees to immense harm.

The World Cup in Qatar is the 22nd iteration of the international tournament which was first held in Uruguay in 1930. In the 92 years since, the ‘world game’ – despite its interest across the globe – has held 15 out of 20 World Cups in Europe and South America.

Five nations have already hosted the event on more than one occasion. An incredible concentration given the participation and interest. This time things are different. The world game is branching out and reaching a new audience.

The World Cup in Qatar represents the first major sporting event in the Arab and Muslim world. The impact will not just be felt amongst the 2.7 million population of Qatar, or even across the 475 million people who call the Middle East home. This event will resonate with the 1.9 billion Muslims across the globe.

From Indonesia to Morocco, the Maldives to Egypt, roughly one quarter of the world’s population, who in almost 100 years of World Cup football have been in the background, will be front and centre.

If the focus of the next four weeks can be the incredible football played on the pitch, the generosity and kind-hearted nature of the hosts and the collective joy that bringing cultures, religions and people together – not just those from Europe and South America – this World Cup may end up being a turning point for a truly world game.

They say that World Cups are a life-changing experience for the players and teams that compete in them, and even more so for the winner. However, for this World Cup, for the first time in history, the real winners won’t be on the pitch at Lusail Stadium on December 18.

They’ll be behind the scenes, in the Ubers, coffee shops and security points across the country, taking the opportunity, the generational-altering opportunity, only the World Cup in Qatar was offering them.

Myles Benham is a Freelance Event Manager with 15 years’ experience working in Global Mega Events and is currently in Doha for the World Cup.

Read more on the debate around the FIFA World Cup.

Source: International Politics and Society, Brussels, Belgium

IPS UN Bureau

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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, chair of COP27, reads the nine-page Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan, the document that concluded the climate summit on Sunday Nov. 20, to an exhausted audience after tough and lengthy negotiations that finally reached an agreement to create a fund for loss and damage, a demand of the global South. CREDIT: Kiara Worth/UN

By Felix Dodds and Chris Spence
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 24 2022 (IPS)

It’s finally over. After the anticipation and build-up to COP27, the biggest climate meeting of the year is now in our rear-view mirror. The crowds of delegates that thronged the Sharm el-Sheikh international convention center for two long weeks have all headed home to recover. Many will be fatigued from long hours and sleepless nights as negotiators tried to seal a deal that would move the world forwards. Did all this hard work pay off? In our opinion, COP 27 was both better and worse than we’d hoped.

Failing to Follow the Science

First, the bad news. COP 27 failed to deliver what the science tells us was needed. With the window of opportunity closing fast on our goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C or less, COP 27 did far too little on the all-important issue of mitigation—that is, cutting emissions.

COP 27 failed to deliver what the science tells us was needed. With the window of opportunity closing fast on our goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C or less, COP 27 did far too little on the all-important issue of mitigation—that is, cutting emissions

The case for urgent action keeps getting stronger. The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make for grim reading about what to expect if we let temperatures rise too much. Nowadays, though, we just need to read the newspapers to catch a glimpse of the future.

The head of the key negotiating Group of 77 – 134 developing countries – was Pakistan which has been dealing with the worst floods in its history, leaving 1717 people dead and dealing an estimated $US40 billion in damage. In 2022 in the USA, there were 15 climate-related disasters which each exceeded $1 billion in costs.

Meanwhile, in Africa, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis of disaster records, “extreme weather events have killed at least 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million since the start of 2022.”

Since this COP was billed by some as the “Africa COP”, one could expect a strong response to such news.

The pressure was therefore on at COP 27 to respond to such disasters. Attending COP27 were 112 world leaders and over 300 government ministers: not as many as at COP 26, but still a good number. Something like 27,000 people from governments, intergovernmental, stakeholders, and journalists also attended the COP. This was to the backdrop of the UN Secretary General warning us that we needed to “cooperate or perish,” to take urgent action to take us off “a highway to climate hell”.

Messing up on mitigation: And yet progress on mitigation was modest, at best. While some delegations pushed hard for stronger commitments on cutting emissions, the appetite in some quarters just didn’t seem to be there. After being pressured to do more in Paris and Glasgow, China, India, and some of the oil-producing countries appeared reluctant to take much more in Sharm el-Sheikh.

They feel developed countries, which are historically responsible for the bulk of emissions, should be doing more themselves, rather than coercing others. The result was a negotiated outcome with little more on the table than we had in Glasgow. For instance, delegates could not agree to ramp up their language on fossil fuels, much to many people’s disappointment.

Finance: Likewise, there was not too much to report on the issue of climate finance. The $US100 billion annual support for developing countries initially promoted by Hilary Clinton at the 2009 Copenhagen COP and enshrined in the Paris COP in 2015 will be reviewed in 2024 with a new figure being hopefully agreed then for 2025 implementation.

The Global South has been talking of this new sum numbering in the trillions to help adapt and mitigate against climate change. And yet there were few signs of movement towards anything of that magnitude.

Given that the North has still not met its pledge of US$100 billion by 2020, it’s clear a lot of movement is needed in the next couple of years. Yet news from outside the conference, such as the US House of Representatives now having a Republican majority, does not bode well.

For a meeting billed as the “implementation COP” where climate action was taken to another level, the news on mitigation and finance was therefore disappointing.

Just prior to the start of COP27 the lead negotiator for Egypt Mohamed Nasr underscored: “science reports were telling us that yes, planning is not up to expectations, but it was implementation on the ground that was really lagging behind.”

For a meeting billed as the “implementation COP” where climate action was taken to another level, the news on mitigation and finance was disappointing. Credit: Shutterstock

Exceeding Expectations—the Loss and Damage Fund

There were some bright spots, however.

Perhaps most surprising was the agreement to create a ‘Loss and Damage’ fund to help the most vulnerable countries. This has been a key issue for almost 30 years, particularly for small island developing countries.

In Glasgow this looked very unlikely to be resolved in the Sharm COP, but with a late change of heart by the Europeans and eventually by the USA and others in the OECD, this is perhaps the most significant and surprising outcome from COP 27. Even as recently as October, the signs were that OECD countries were not on board with calls for a new fund. However, at COP 27 the “trickle” of earlier action in this area turned into a flood.

Interestingly, it was Scotland at COP 26 that started things off, with a modest, voluntary contribution. More recently, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Belgium had also financial commitments to loss and damage, now amounting to $US244.5 million. Mia Mottley Barbados’ Prime Minister has called for a 10% windfall tax on oil companies to fund loss and damage caused by climate change, which could raise around $US31 billion if it had been introduced for 2022. Still, the signs a fund would be agreed at COP 27 had not been good.

This makes the final outcome all the more welcome. The idea, the door is now open for the most vulnerable countries to receive more support. A goal has now been set to fully operationalize the fund at COP 28 in a year’s time. For the most vulnerable nations, this cannot come quickly enough.

Global Goal on Adaptation: Another positive development, albeit on a more modest scale, was in the area of the ‘Global Goal on Adaptation’. Here, delegates agreed to “initiate the development of a framework” to be available for adoption next year.

A lot of work will need to be done at the intersessional meeting of the UN Climate Convention’s subsidiary bodies in Bonn in June next year to prepare for this, including how to measure progress towards this Goal. An approach similar to the development of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 might be appropriate, perhaps?

Article 6: Another of the Glasgow breakthroughs was that on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement on carbon markets and international cooperation. COP 27 saw some solid work undertaken on how to operationalize this both in market and non-market approaches.

There are still a lot of sceptics on this will have a genuine impact and how to ensure not double counting or even that any offsets are real. An approach that is more ecosystem-based than just trees is gaining momentum. Such a change, if it happens, also offers a real chance to link the two major UN conventions on climate and biodiversity.

Agriculture: The work on the Koronivia Work Programme on Agriculture went down to the wire. The outcome was a four-year open-ended working group reporting at COP31 (2026). Some controversy on the term ‘food systems’ may see its first workshop address this issue.

It will also look at how we can better integrate the programme’s work into other constituted bodies such as the financial mechanisms of the convention. The Green Climate Fund has given only $US1.1 billion for adaptation on agriculture. It says one of the major reasons for this is the:

“Lack of integrated agricultural development planning and capacities that consider maladaptation risks and investment needs across the agricultural sector, climate information services and supply chains.”

While these outcomes on agriculture, adaptation and Article 6 may seem modest, they should be welcomed as steps in the right direction.

Coalitions of the Willing: One of the outcomes from the Glasgow COP was the launch of ‘Coalitions of the Willing’; groups of countries and stakeholders wanting to move quicker on an issue than they might under the official UN negotiations, which are consensus-driven and involve more than 190 countries. In Sharm el-Sheikh we saw a number of countries join the Methane Pledge, including Australia and Egypt. China joined the meeting on the Pledge and committed to its own national methane strategy.

In Glasgow, 137 countries had taken a landmark step forward by committing to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. With the imminent return to leadership in Brazil of President-elect Lula da Silva, there is renewed hope that real action on the Amazon forests is possible again. Lula committed Brazil to reaching zero deforestation and was hailed as a hero by many when he turned up at COP 27 during the second week.

Meanwhile, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ)—the global coalition of leading financial institutions—committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy. GFANZ, which includes over 550 of the world’s leading financial institutions, has committed to reduce their financed emissions in line with 1.5 degrees C.

With $US150 trillion of combined balance sheets, the accountability mechanism announced of a new Net-Zero Data Public Utility is yet to prove if it is effective in holding the finance sector to their commitments. However, if it can deliver on its potential, this could be a game changer.

There was plenty more activity at COP 27 where the results are harder to measure. Most people at these large UN climate summits are not negotiators and COP 27 was full of “side events” and government and stakeholder pavilions each with its own set of events and agendas.

Country pavilions provided a venue to talk about their challenges, issue pavilions on oceans, food, water, health, education, and resilience highlighted their issues and how they fit into the climate agenda. These enable critical issues to be discussed in a more open way than could be undertaken in negotiations.

Ideas were shared, connections made, and partnerships for further action shared. The upshot of all of this activity is hard to measure, but probably considerable. The thematic days organized by the Egyptian Presidency also gave space to these issues and helped bring together ideas that may ultimately find their way into future UN decisions. In this respect, too, the quality of the side events and pavilions at COP 27 exceeded our expectations.

On to Dubai and COP28

Was COP27 a success or failure? When it comes to keeping up with the science, the answer can hardly be positive. The call to “keep 1.5 alive” hangs in the balance and is still on “life support”. In that sense, COP 27 had very little impact on our current trajectory, which is a likely warming of 2.4-2.8 C by the end of the century.

On the other hand, the promise of a loss and damage fund, as well as modest successes on adaptation, Article 6, agriculture, and actions outside the official negotiations, mean COP 27 delivered some bright spots of success.

Looking ahead to next year, COP 28 will be important as it marks the first “global stocktake” to judge where things now stand. We hope this will focus world leaders to increase their pledges (or “nationally determined contributions”) significantly. It will be interesting to see how the United Arab Emirates, as COP 28 host, performs. As a major oil producer, it faces some serious challenges in transitioning to a net zero world.

At COP 27, there were rumours the UAE was ramping up its team and bringing in additional external expertise ahead of next year. This is certainly a good sign if COP 28 is to deliver the kind of groundbreaking outcomes the science now demands.

Felix Dodds and Chris Spence are co-editors of the new book, Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage (Routledge Press, 2022). It includes chapters on the climate negotiations held in Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015).

Excerpt:

Constance Okollet Achom, chair and founder of Osukuru United Women Network (OWN), an organization fighting against domestic violence using climate change solutions in Uganda, during an exclusive interview with IPS at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 23 2022 (IPS)

Constance Okollet Achom, a Ugandan woman from Tororo, a rural village located in Eastern Uganda, has helped several dozens of her peers affected by domestic violence to address the issue by equipping victims with skillsets to manufacture eco-friendly biofuels from agro-forestry waste.

“There have been a growing number of women in my village who experienced intimate partner violence. But they have always accepted to continue bearing the brunt of suffering because of their inability to deal with their finances,” Okollet, who is the chair and founder of Osukuru United Women Network, told IPS. 

With the increasing levels of domestic violence in rural Uganda, Okollet is now championing using climate change solutions to curb its occurrence in this East African nation.

The latest estimates by the World Bank indicate that 51% of African women report that being beaten by their husbands is justified if they burn or refuse to prepare food. Yet acceptance is not uniform across countries. The report shows that the phenomenon appears deeply ingrained in some societies, with a 77% acceptance rate in Uganda.

Okollet’s organization currently empowers and educates women on how climate change affects their village resources. Most importantly, it provides resources for entrepreneurship and counseling to women affected by domestic violence and advocates for their emancipation by empowering them to be self-reliant by becoming green entrepreneurs.

With 2,000 members engaged in various climate solutions, including carbon farming, clean energies, and tree planting, the tradition of abuse has slowly started to fade in rural Uganda as many women who used to depend financially on their husbands have taken bold steps in investing in green projects.

“It has traditionally been regarded as shameful for the male members of a family if a female member works outside of the home and earns a living,” Okollet told IPS on the sidelines of the just concluded global climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

To amplify support for women to build climate resilience, the African Development Bank organized the session held during COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh under the theme, “Gender-sensitive and climate just finance mechanisms.”

The panelists said facilities tailored to supporting women, who are helping to build climate resilience, must be visible, simple, and easily accessible.

During the session, the former Irish president and an influential figure in global climate diplomacy, Mary Robinson, pointed out there is not currently an appropriately dedicated climate fund or a permanent climate fund to support women entrepreneurs in combating climate change.

Robinson gave the example of some women-led projects in Uganda which could do ten times more if they had access to targeted climate resources. “They had no prospects of getting the money that could be available for their sector – they didn’t even know who was getting the money or where it was going,” she told delegates.

So far, the bank has earmarked funding for ten capacity-building projects focusing on gender and climate through the Africa Climate Change Fund.

According to Kevin Kariuki, the bank’s Vice President Vice for Power, Energy, Climate, and Green Growth, the new funding mechanism has committed $100 million in loans to public and private sector projects to address gender and climate issues across the continent.

Apart from the new funding scheme launched on the sidelines of COP27, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), and the French Development Agency (AFD) in partnership with the Egyptian government also launched the Gender Equality in Climate Action Accelerator.

It is expected that the accelerator will support private sector companies improve the gender responsiveness of their corporate climate governance.

According to the officials, the initiative will help African governments promote gender-sensitive climate sector policies, thereby accelerating their green transition to meet Paris Agreement targets, the UNFCCC’s gender action plan, and key Sustainable Development Goals.

In the meanwhile, Okollet also said that in collaboration with local administrative authorities in her remote rural village in Uganda, she has already trained several hundred women on how to develop green projects so that they become financially independent and confident to face whatever difficulties they may face in life – including domestic violence.

According to her, most rural women in Uganda must wait for their husbands to decide on land management and access, leaving many women underemployed and without any control over productive resources and services.

“These income-generating projects from green initiatives are helping the majority of these women to develop self-sufficiency in their families and stand on their feet,” she said.
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After days of intense negotiations that stretched into early Sunday morning in Sharm el-Sheikh, countries at the latest UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, reached agreement on an outcome that established a funding mechanism to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced disasters.

By Meena Raman
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 22 2022 (IPS)

COP 27 delivered on what was the ‘litmus test’ for its success – consensus on the establishment of a fund on loss and damage. What seemed impossible was made possible, largely due to the unity of the G77 and China and the role of the Egyptian Presidency. Also important were efforts by civil society groups who put pressure on the United States, the main blocker to having the fund.

Until the final hours of the climate talks, it was uncertain whether the deal would be sealed, given behind the scenes diplomacy by the COP Presidency team. The G77/China was led by Pakistan, that wielded a strong moral voice at the conference, following the catastrophic and devastating floods which was attributed to climate change.

It was a big win for loss and damage issues at Sharm el-Sheikh, to spotlight what was once seen as an ‘orphan child’ of the process, with usual priority given to mitigation (emissions reductions), while adaptation to climate impacts is treated as the ‘step child’.

However, there is nothing significantly meaningful on finance, given the overall stance of developed countries in the process, with the loss and damage fund remaining empty for now, with the hope that it will deliver more in the coming years when the fund is set up and is resourced.

The Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which is to be a technical assistance facility for developing countries also was devoid of any financial commitments. The finance decisions adopted only exhorted developed countries to deliver on the USD 100 billion per year by 2020 pledges and to double adaptation funding.

New pledges, totalling more than USD 230 million, were made to the Adaptation Fund at COP27, a small sum given the scale of the needs in developing countries.

An overarching alarm and agony of many developing countries at the Sharm el-Sheikh talks were the persistent efforts by developed countries to not own up to their historical responsibilities for past emissions, and to delete or dilute the foundational principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDRRC) between developed and developing countries under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.

This attempt was repeatedly called out by developing countries, especially from the Like-minded developing countries (LMDC), the African Group, the Arab Group and ABU (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay). The effort to remove this differentiation was at the heart of the fight on many fronts, especially on the issue of mitigation and finance, which seemed like a repeat of negotiations in Paris.

Developed countries continued their efforts at using terms such as ‘major emitters’, ‘major economies’, and the ‘G20’ in relation to who should show more ambition on mitigation, while in the discussion on finance, it was about “broadening the donor base”.

The retort from developing countries was that these issues were already settled under the Paris Agreement and that the principles and provisions of the Agreement should be respected and implemented.

The climate talks which began on Sunday, 6 Nov, were supposed to end Friday, 18 Nov, but decisions were only gavelled early morning of Sunday, 20 Nov, when the official plenary began at 4 am. Delegates were visibly exhausted and bleary-eyed following long days and nights of negotiations which were particularly intense since Wed, 16 Nov.

Apart from the loss and damage fund, other issues that were deadlocked during the week were the cover decisions (as to what they should contain), the mitigation work programme, the global goal on adaptation and matters related to finance.

Among the sticky issues in relation to mitigation were on how the temperature goal of 1.5°C should be reflected, how to advance efforts following the controversial paragraph adopted on the phase down of unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies from COP 26 decision in Glasgow, and the peaking of emissions by 2025.

In order to avoid spats in public given the wide divergence between Parties in the full glare of the public and world media, the COP 27 Presidency team resorted to informal consultations and diplomatic efforts behind the scenes to find compromises on the difficult issues with draft texts which were reviewed by Parties.

This was the reason for the delay in convening the final plenary, as Parties also wanted to gauge if they could live with the draft decisions, as they assessed the overall balance of the package of decisions among the key issues of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and finance.

COP 27 President Sameh Shoukry convened plenary and gavelled the adoption of the various decisions. Following the adoption of the decisions, he said that “despite the difficulties and challenges of our times, the divergence of views, level of ambition or apprehension, we remain committed to the fight against climate change…. and that as much as sceptics and pessimists thought that climate action will be taking a back seat on the global agenda, we rose to the occasion, upheld our responsibilities and undertook the important decisive political decisions that millions around the world expect from us.”

Minister Shoukry added that “We listened to the calls of anguish and despair resonating from one end of Pakistan to the other, a country with literally more than a third of its area flooded, a resounding alarm of the future that awaits us beyond 1.5 degrees. A bleak future…, a future that I do not wish for my grandchildren nor for any child on this planet.”

“Today, here in Sharm el-Sheikh, we establish the first ever dedicated fund for loss and damage, a fund that has been so long in the making. It was only appropriate that this COP, the implementation COP in Africa, is where the fund is finally established.”

“Millions around the globe can now sense a glimmer of hope that their suffering will finally be addressed, swiftly and appropriately,” he said further, adding that “We leave Sharm el-Sheikh with renewed hope in the future of our planet, with an even stronger collective will and more determination to achieve the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.”

Among the significant decisions adopted are highlighted below.

The cover decisions – Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan

The cover decisions adopted under the COP (Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC) and CMA (Conference of Parties to the Paris Agreement) are referred to as the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. The COP and CMA decisions are similar in many respects. Highlights of some of the main aspects of the decisions adopted under the CMA are as follows:

The decision “Stresses that the increasingly complex and challenging global geopolitical situation and its impact on the energy, food and economic situations, as well as the additional challenges associated with the socioeconomic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, should not be used as a pretext for backtracking, backsliding or de-prioritizing climate action.”

It “Reaffirms the Paris Agreement temperature goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;” and “Reiterates that the impacts of climate change will be much lower at the temperature increase of 1.5 °C compared with 2 °C7 and resolves to pursue further efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C”.

On enhancing ambition and implementation, the decision “Resolves to implement ambitious, just, equitable and inclusive transitions to low-emission and climate-resilient development in line with the principles and objectives of the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, taking into account this decision, the Glasgow Climate Pact (GCP) and other relevant decisions of the COP and the CMA.”

(The developed countries of late, have been mainly focussing on the GCP, and much less on the Paris Agreement and even less of the Convention. Some major developing countries have raised concerns that the GCP is being put at the same level as the Convention and the Paris Agreement.)

On mitigation, the decision “Notes with serious concern the finding in the latest synthesis report on nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that the total global greenhouse gas emission (GHG) level in 2030, taking into account implementation of all latest NDCs, is estimated to be 0.3 per cent below the 2019 level, which is not in line with least-cost scenarios for keeping global temperature rise to 2 or 1.5 °C” and “Emphasizes the urgent need for Parties to increase their efforts to collectively reduce emissions through accelerated action and implementation of domestic mitigation measures in accordance with Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement.” (Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement states: “Each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive NDCs that it intends to achieve. Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.”)

The decision also “Calls upon Parties to accelerate the development, deployment and dissemination of technologies, and the adoption of policies, to transition towards low-emission energy systems, including by rapidly scaling up the deployment of clean power generation and energy efficiency measures, including accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, while providing targeted support to the poorest and most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support towards a just transition.” (This is a repeat of the decision from the GCP).

A new and significant outcome on “pathways to just transition”, where there is a decision to “establish a work programme on just transition for discussion of pathways to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement”. It also decided “to convene, as part of the work programme on just transition, an annual high-level ministerial round table on just transition, beginning at its fifth session”.

On finance, the decision “Notes with concern the growing gap between the needs of developing country Parties, in particular those due to the increasing impacts of climate change and their increased indebtedness, and the support provided and mobilized for their efforts to implement their NDCs, highlighting that such needs are currently estimated at USD 5.8–5.9 trillion26 for the pre-2030 period.”

It also “Expresses serious concern that the goal of developed country Parties to mobilize jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020…has not yet been met.

The decision also “Calls on the shareholders of multilateral development banks (MDBs) and international financial institutions (IFIs) to reform MDB practices and priorities, align and scale up funding, ensure simplified access and mobilize climate finance from various sources and encourages MDBs to define a new vision and commensurate operational model, channels and instruments that are fit for the purpose of adequately addressing the global climate emergency…”.

Loss and damage fund

In a separate decision, Parties agreed to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, in responding to loss and damage, including with a focus on addressing loss and damage by providing and assisting in mobilizing new and additional resources, and that these new arrangements complement and include sources, funds, processes and initiatives under and outside the Convention and the Paris Agreement.”

It was also decided “to establish a fund for responding to loss and damage whose mandate includes a focus on addressing loss and damage.” Parties also agreed to “Establish a transitional committee on the operationalization of the new funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage.

Mitigation work programme

Parties decided “that the work programme shall be operationalized through focused exchanges of views, information and ideas, noting that the outcomes of the work programme will be non-prescriptive, non-punitive, facilitative, respectful of national sovereignty and national circumstances, take into account the nationally determined nature of NDCs and will not impose new targets or goals.” (This was a grave concern to many developing countries).

It was also decided “that the work programme shall function in a manner that is consistent with the procedures and timelines for communication of successive NDCs established in the Paris Agreement,” and “that the scope of the work programme should be based on broad thematic areas relevant to urgently scaling up mitigation ambition and implementation in this critical decade…”

Meena Raman is Head of Programmes at Third World Network – headquartered in Penang, Malaysia.

IPS UN Bureau

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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, chair of COP27, reads the nine-page Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan, the document that concluded the climate summit on Sunday Nov. 20, to an exhausted audience after tough and lengthy negotiations that finally reached an agreement to create a fund for loss and damage, a demand of the global South. CREDIT: Kiara Worth/UN

By Daniel Gutman
SHARM EL SHEIKh , Nov 20 2022 (IPS)

They were on the brink of shipwreck and did not leave happy, but did feel satisfied that they got the best they could. The countries of the global South achieved something decisive at COP27: the creation of a special fund to address the damage and loss caused by climate change in the most vulnerable nations.

The fund, according to the Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan, the official document approved at dawn on Sunday Nov. 20 in this Egyptian city, should enable “rehabilitation, recovery and reconstruction” following extreme weather events in these vulnerable countries.

Decisions on who will provide the money, which countries will benefit and how it will be disbursed were left pending for a special committee to define. But the fund was approved despite the fact that the issue was not even on the official agenda of the summit negotiations, although it was at the center of the public debate before the conference itself.

“We are satisfied that the developed countries have accepted the need to create the Fund. Of course, there is much to discuss for implementation, but it was difficult to ask for more at this COP,” Ulises Lovera, Paraguay’s climate change director, told IPS, weary from a longer-than-expected negotiation, early Sunday morning at the Sharm El Sheikh airport.

“This COP has taken an important step towards justice. I welcome the decision to establish a loss and damage fund and to operationalize it in the coming period,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. He also described as an achievement that a “red line” was not crossed, that would take the rise in global temperature above the 1.5-degree limit.

More than 35,000 people from nearly 200 countries participated in the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) on Climate Change in Sharm El Sheikh, an Egyptian seaside resort on the Red Sea, where the critical dimension of global warming in the different regions of the world was on display, sometimes dramatically.

Practically everything that has to do with the future of the modes of production and life of humanity – starting with energy and food – was discussed at a mega-event that far exceeded the official delegations of the countries and the great leaders present, such as U.S. President Joe Biden and the Brazilian president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Hundreds of social organizations, international agencies and private sector stakeholders came here to showcase their work, seek funding, forge alliances, try to influence negotiations, defend their interests or simply be on a stage that seemed to provide a space for all kinds of initiatives and businesses.

At the gigantic Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center there was also a global fair with non-stop activities from morning to night in the various pavilions, in stands with auditoriums of between 20 and 200 seats, where there was a flurried program of presentations, lectures and debates, not to mention the more or less crowded demonstrations of activists outside the venue.

In addition, government delegates negotiated on the crux of the summit: how to move forward with the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which at COP21 in 2015 set global climate change mitigation and adaptation targets.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres (3rd-R) walks hurriedly through the Sharm El Sheikh Convention Center during the last intense hours of the COP27 negotiations, when there were moments when it seemed that there would be no agreement and the climate summit would end in failure. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

On the brink of failure

Once again, the nine-page Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan did not include in any of its pages a reference to the need to abandon fossil fuels, but only coal.

The document was the result of a negotiation that should have ended on Friday Nov. 18, but dragged on till Sunday, as usually happens at COPs. What was different on this occasion was a very tough discussion and threats of a walkout by some negotiators, including those of the European Union.

But in the end, the goal of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, established in the Paris Agreement, was maintained, although several countries tried to make it more flexible up to 2.0 degrees, which would have been a setback with dramatic effects for the planet and humanity, according to experts and climate activists.

“Rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions (are) required – lowering global net greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030 relative to the 2019 level – to limit global warming to 1.5°C target,” reads the text, although no mention is made of oil and gas, the fossil fuels most responsible for those emissions, in one of the usual COP compromises, since agreements are reached by consensus.

The Bolivian delegation in Sharm El Sheikh, which included officials as well as leaders of indigenous communities from the South American country, take part in a meeting with journalists at COP27 to demand more ambitious action. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The priorities of the South

Developing countries, however, focused throughout the COP on the Loss and Damage Fund and other financing mechanisms to address the impacts of rising temperatures and mitigation actions.

“We need financing because we cannot deal with the environmental crisis alone. That is why we are asking that, in order to solve the problem they have caused, the rich nations take responsibility,” Diego Pacheco, head of the Bolivian delegation to Sharm El Sheikh, told IPS.

Environmental organizations, which showed their power in Egypt with the presence of thousands of activists, also lobbied throughout COP27 for greater commitments, including mitigation actions.

“This conference cannot be considered an implementation conference because there is no implementation without phasing out all fossil fuels,” the main cause of the climate crisis, said Zeina Khalil Hajj of the international environmental organization 350.org.

“Together for implementation” was precisely the slogan of COP27, calling for a shift from commitments to action.

“A text that does not stop fossil fuel expansion, that does not provide progress from the already weak Glasgow Pact (from COP26) makes a mockery of the millions of people living with the impacts of climate change,” said Khalil Hajj, head of global campaigning at 350.org.

One of the demonstrations by climate activists at COP27 held in Egypt Nov. 6-20, demanding more ambitious climate action by governments, as well as greater justice and equity in tackling the climate crisis. CREDIT: Busani Bafana/IPS

The crises that came together

Humanity – as recognized by the States Parties in the final document – is living through a dramatic time.

It faces a number of overlapping crises: food, energy, geopolitical, financial and economic, combined with more frequent natural disasters due to climate change. And developing nations are hit especially hard.

The demand for financing voiced by countries of the global South thus takes on greater relevance.

Cecilia Nicolini, Argentina’s climate change secretary, told IPS that it is the industrialized countries, because of their greater responsibility for climate change, that should finance developing countries, and lamented that “the problem is that the rules are made by the powerful.”

However, 80 percent of the money now being spent worldwide on climate change action is invested in the developed world, according to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the world’s largest funder of climate action, which has contributed 121 billion dollars to 163 countries over the past 30 years, according to its own figures.

In this context, the issue of Loss and Damage goes one step further than adaptation to climate change, because it involves reparations for the specific impacts of climate change that have already occurred, such as destruction caused by droughts, floods or forest fires.

“Those who are bearing the burden of climate change are the most vulnerable households and communities. That is why the Loss and Damage Fund must be established without delay, with new funds coming from developed countries,” said Javier Canal Albán, Colombia’s vice minister of environmental land planning.

“It is a moral and climate justice imperative,” added Canal Albán, who spoke at a press conference on behalf of AILAC, a negotiating bloc that brings together several Latin American and Caribbean countries.

But the text of the outcome document itself acknowledges that there is a widening gap between what developing countries need and what they actually receive.

The financing needs of these countries for climate action until 2030 were estimated at 5.6 trillion dollars, but developed countries – as the document recognized – have not even fulfilled their commitment to provide 100 billion dollars per year, committed since 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, and ratified in 2015, at COP21 which adopted the Paris Agreement.

It was the absence of any reference to the need to accelerate the move away from oil and natural gas that frustrated several of the leaders at the COP. “We believe that if we don’t phase out fossil fuels there will be no Fund that can pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change,” Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who was at the two-week conference in Sharm El Sheikh held Nov. 6-20, told IPS.

“We have to put the victims first in order to make an orderly and just transition,” she said, expressing the sentiments of the governments and societies of the South at COP27.

IPS produced this article with support from Climate Change Media Partnership 2022, the Earth Journalism Network, Internews, and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.

Climate change activists at COP27, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Negotiators which struggled to complete reach agreement on the critical loss and damage fund demanded by developing nations most affected by climate change. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 20 2022 (IPS)

After a tense impasse and many hours of negotiations, almost 200 countries struck a deal to set up a loss and damage fund to assist nations worst hit by climate change – a demand considered not-negotiable by the developing countries.

COP27 was extended by a day after negotiators couldn’t agree on the fund – leading to UN Secretary-General António Guterres saying on Friday, November 18, 2022, that the time for talking about loss and damage finance is over. He alluded to a growing breakdown of trust between developing and developed countries.

Guterres, early on Sunday, November 20, 2022, welcomed the fund saying: “I welcome the decision to establish a loss and damage fund and to operationalize it in the coming period. Clearly, this will not be enough, but it is a much-needed political signal to rebuild broken trust.”

He added that the voices of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis must be heard.

Speaking in the closing plenary, COP President H.E. Sameh Shoukry said:

“The work that we’ve managed to do here in the past two weeks, and the results we have together achieved, are a testament to our collective will, as a community of nations, to voice a clear message that rings loudly today, here in this room and around the world: that multilateral diplomacy still works… despite the difficulties and challenges of our times, the divergence of views, level of ambition or apprehension, we remain committed to the fight against climate change… we rose to the occasion, upheld our responsibilities and undertook the important decisive political decisions that millions around the world expect from us.”

Shoukry noted: “This was not easy. We worked around the clock. Long days and nights. Strained and sometimes tense, but united and working for one aim, one higher purpose, one common goal that we all subscribe to and aspire to achieve. In the end, we delivered.”

Under the previous global climate summit, which took place in Glasgow, Scotland last year, parties agreed on the roadmap where developing countries, which did little to cause the climate crisis, arrived with a determination to win a commitment from rich nations to compensate them for this damage.

On several occasions during negotiations, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, also the COP27 President, stated that climate finance remains key for Africa since the continent contributes 4 percent to global emissions and is adversely affected to a much higher degree by global warming-relate events.

On losses and damages, some climate finance experts believe that ongoing climate talks on finance at COP27 are one of the most painful examples of the African proverb that when the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.

“Ongoing negotiations on loss and damage are the most recent iteration of this long-standing fight,” Sophia Murphy, the Executive Director of the US-based Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), told IPS.

Delegates debate climate finance on the sidelines of COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

IATP is a think tank that analyses the interconnection between agriculture, trade, and climate in developing countries.

Since 2015, loss and damage have served as the main catalyser under the UNFCCC process, especially for enhancing financial support for adaptation to avert, minimise and address climate change impacts in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

Murphy pointed out that the G77 includes a very wide range of countries and interests, and the climate crisis is not suffered equally across the South.

“Currently developing nations at COP27 are likely showing that everyone is responsible for the negative realities of climate change and loss and damage negotiations is the most recent iteration of this long-standing fight,” she said.

While many negotiators in Sharm El Sheikh believe that rich countries are lagging in measures to allocate loss and damage funding, there is a consensus that the current negotiations on climate finance did not go very well, particularly with respect to the expectations for COP27.

Dr Somorin Olufunso, Regional Principal Officer, Climate Change and Green Growth (East Africa) at the African Development Bank, told IPS that the finance negotiation is primarily a “trust” negotiation.

“Unfortunately, if the trust is broken, it may affect other issues being negotiated and ultimately affect our collective action of combatting climate change,” the senior financial expert said.

The bank published the 2022 African Economic Outlook report on the needs of African Countries for loss and damage in 2022-2030 at between USD 289.2 to USD 440.5 billion. The estimated adaptation finance needs are in a similar order of magnitude.

For many Africans, according to Olufunso, the negotiations were not aggressive enough in finding solutions urgently needed at both scale and speed.

Until the end of the summit, loss and damage fund remained a major sticking point.

“Negotiations are going well in some items and not well in other items (…) Rwanda and other vulnerable countries had much expectation in securing a decision of adopting the establishment of loss and damage fund,” Faustin Munyazikwiye, the Deputy Director General of Rwanda Environmental Management Authority (REMA) and Rwanda’s Lead negotiator, told IPS in an interview.

According to him, this item [on loss and damage] did not go well.

African negotiators at COP27 prioritised filling gaps between present risks associated with climate change and financing for adaptation.

However, most developing countries prefer to ensure that finance for loss and damages is channelled through the private sector and is not necessarily a liability for rich countries.

But other experts believe that cost of repairing these damages is staggering and the countries which should pay are the ones who contributed to climate change in the first place.

While some climate finance experts observe that the commitment by rich nations to pay the developing world $100 billion cannot even compensate what Africa’s needs, others point out that COP27 must deliver a bold finance facility to pay for loss and damage to communities already impacted by climate change on the continent.

Kelly Dent, the Global Director of External Engagement at the UK-based World Animal Protection, told IPS most vulnerable countries, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, are considering the climate emergency as a matter of life.

“Without a coherent and meaningful agreement on finance, COP27 will fall short of its mission and put millions of lives at risk,” she said.

From Dent’s perspective, a roadmap to track and deliver a doubling of adaptation finance is critical.

The 2022 UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report, released on the sidelines of COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, indicates that the continent requires 7 to 15 billion US dollars annually to enhance adaptation to climate change besides the nearly 3 trillion dollars investment that is needed to implement nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and cap emissions in line with the Paris climate deal.

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Hundreds of mangrove seedlings are growing in a small bay of an island south of Fiji's main island Viti Levu. The Pacific Island Countries are vulnerable to climate change and need resources to adapt. Credit: Tom Vierus/Climate Visuals

By Labanya Prakash Jena
Sharm El-Sheikh, Nov 18 2022 (IPS)

The Pacific Island Countries (PICs) – 14 small island developing nations in the Pacific Ocean – comprise one of the most exposed and vulnerable regions to climate change and natural calamities. The region did not cause this climate crisis; the crisis stemmed from heavy carbon emissions by developed countries. Yet paradoxically, the countries in the region are also the least resourced to adapt to climate change.

The IMF estimates that the PICs need an additional investment of an average of 9% of GDP on developing climate-resilient infrastructure over the next ten years. Some countries’ climate-resilient infrastructure needs more than 10% of their GDP. However, this much capital mobilisation is impossible for the region with low per capita income, volatile economy, lack of fiscal space, and low saving rate. Besides, these countries have also committed to ambitious targets to decarbonize their economies.

In this scenario, international climate finance mobilisation is critical to make the region resilient and prosperous. The longer the delay in building the much-needed climate-resilient infrastructure, the higher the cost and greater the risk of exposing these countries to extreme events for a longer time.

Labanya Prakash Jena, Commonwealth Regional Climate Finance Adviser, Indo-Pacific Region, argues international climate finance mobilisation is critical to make Pacific Island Countries resilient and prosperous. Credit: Commonwealth

Tackling the bottlenecks

There are two primary bottlenecks to international climate flows: institutional structure and lack of capacity at various levels. The PIC region’s institutional structure is plagued by limited administrative and financial capabilities, inadequate program management and accountability, and an obscure audit system to mobilise international public climate finance.

In addition, these countries lack the capacity to design and structure projects and develop a robust and tangible climate adaptation project pipeline. Besides, the region is not strategically allocating available capital, including budgetary outlays, international climate finance, development aid, and private finance. The primary focus of international institutions must be to address these challenges quickly.

Options for international climate finance: Grants, debt, equity

The total GDP of the PIC region is only about USD10 billion, with an average per capita income of approximately USD4,000 and a gross capital formation rate of 20%, according to the World Bank. This translates to a maximum domestic capital mobilisation of USD 2 billion per year. Meanwhile, the IMF estimates that the region needs an additional capital of USD 1 billion per annum for climate resilience infrastructure investment.

International grant capital is the only option to fund climate adaptation projects in the region. The reason is that any form of debt capital, even if in the form of concessional debt capital over the long term, is not an economical one. The PIC region cannot pay back debt, and it is unlikely the region’s economic size will increase at a rapid rate in the future to pay back debt.

Although the region’s primary sources of international climate finance – the Green Climate Fund (GCF), World Bank, and Asian Development Bank (ADB) – provide grants, it is only for project preparation and capacity development. These financers mostly provide debt financing, albeit at a better rate than private financers.

However, the low debt servicing ability of the region arrests them, raising foreign debt capital. It is even more problematic if the debt capital is in foreign currency (e.g., USD) – the borrowers face huge foreign currency due to expected and unexpected devaluation in the local currency, and borrowers face currency risk.

Equity capital is not the best form of financing for climate adaptation projects. Unlike climate change mitigating projects, they do not generate clear cash flows as the beneficiaries are difficult to identify to monetize climate adaptation projects. Hence, equity capital is not an efficient source of capital for climate adaptation projects.

Strategic allocation of capital is key

Unlike developed and developing countries, the PIC region does not have a have strong domestic financial and banking sector, and it rarely attracted foreign capital for large-scale investment. So, it is futile to expect large-scale private financing flows to bridge the financing gaps for their climate actions.

Moreover, the public goods nature of climate adaptation projects does not attract private financers. Hence, public financing, including capital Government budgetary outlays, international climate finance, and other development aids must be spent judiciously.

The crux is strategically allocating the available capital and aligning projects’ needs with the mandates of the public finances. One of the most efficient ways is to carve out the climate financing as a separate portfolio and decide where and how the capital would be used in various climate adaptation projects.

In addition, the climate change divisions of these countries can work closely with the Ministry of finance to mainstream climate adaptation in national development plans and sector policies and bring climate change perspectives in economic decision-making. The countries can also need to identify the projects which offer dual benefits of climate migration and adaptation, which brings a lot of attention to global climate financers.

For example, nature-based carbon sequestration through ocean conservation, forestry, and wilding (wetland, grassland) sequestrates carbon, offers natural shields, and protects human life and properties in extreme weather events. The global impact investors will find these projects attractive as they help the region become climate-resilient and create a global public good, helping everyone, including the financer’s country.

Way forward

International institutions must support Pacific Island countries to strengthen administrative and financial structures for better transparency and accountability, which can help the PICs access global public capital. In addition, Governments in the region must strategically allocate climate finance, prioritise climate actions in decision-making, integrate adaptation projects with national climate action plans, and identify suitable projects offering dual climate mitigation and adaptation benefits.

The international institutions can also help the countries identify and design projects to develop pipeline projects for funding. There is a dire need to develop institutional and local capacity to meet the needs of climate change-related economic activities in the region. But if addressed, the region will be able to finally make headway in addressing the deep adaptation challenges they face due to climate change.

• Labanya Prakash Jena is the Commonwealth Regional Climate Finance Adviser for the Indo-Pacific Region.

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Karen Mapusua, SPC’s Director of the Land Resources Division, would like to see food high up on the loss and damage fund if it is agreed to. Credit Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 18 2022 (IPS)

Food is everything to the culture and identity of the Pacific island countries.

Climate change impacts of rising sea levels and higher temperatures threaten islanders’ food security, which is largely dependent on fisheries and subsistence agriculture. Almost 70 percent of islanders rely on agriculture for their livelihood.

Pacific island countries at the COP27 summit, taking place at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, say agriculture is high on their agenda, with parties to the UNFCCC calling for a decision to protect food security through the mobilisation of climate finance for adaptation.

Activists at the COP27 summit demand food and agriculture remain on the negotiation’s agenda. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

At the COP negotiations, agriculture features on many levels, including during discussions on the ongoing Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA) – a formal process established to highlight the potential of food and agriculture in tackling climate change. However, there has been no progress in countries making commitments to placing agriculture and food systems in the final text.

The agriculture sector accounts for 37% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with land seen as a potential major carbon sink that can be considered for capturing emissions.

Could agriculture be off the menu?

“Not yet,” says Karen Mapusua, Pacific Community’s (SPC) Director of the Land Resources Division. “Unless the parties can come together and through their work demonstrate the value of the Koronivia work programme and a clear way forward for it, then that is a risk.”

She explains that it was critical to keep the Koronivia plan alive and secure a global strategy for agriculture and food systems to be considered solutions for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

“Agriculture contributes 30 percent of emissions, and everybody has to eat, and if we do not take this seriously, then we are in trouble,” said Mapusua, who is also the President of IFOAM Organics International, a global organisation specialising in changing agricultural practices.

Pacific countries are very low emitters of harmful carbon emissions – except for a few high-input industries like sugar production in Fiji and the commercial production of exotic horticulture for export.

“We are losing productive land to sea level rise, inundation and salination of soils near the coast,” she said. Farmers have experienced increased pests and diseases due to a change in temperatures and weather conditions. For example, the islands have been hit by an infestation of the coconut rhinoceros beetle, an invasive pest that can destroy coconut plantations.

Farmers are also experiencing changes in fruiting patterns for major crops. Farmers are relocating their vanilla plantations in Vanuatu because it no longer flowers in the area where it was once most productive.

Developing countries are also pushing for the establishment of a loss and damage facility where they can be compensated for damage caused by climate change, particularly to infrastructure. However, no decision has been reached on this demand.

“There will be a lot of competition on what goes in the loss and damage fund, but I am hopeful that because food is so essential, it will be higher up the priority list when it comes to accessing finance through such a facility, if it is agreed on,” Mapusua, told IPS.

Fish eaters but threatened fisheries

Islanders are also dependent on fisheries for food security. This sector has also been affected by rising sea levels and high temperatures, which have led to the bleaching of coral reefs, which are a key habitat for fish.

Scientific research projects a decline in coastal fisheries of up to 20 percent by 2050 in the western Pacific and up to 10 percent by 2050 in the eastern Pacific, which would impact heavily on the diet of islanders who, on average, consume 58 kg of fish annually.

Mapusua said the island countries were building aquaculture at a local level and poultry to compensate for the projected loss of fisheries.

In Vanuatu, the government was deploying fish aggregating devices (FADS), which are offshore floating objects to attract fish. The project has enabled farmers to harvest fish from the locations where the devices have been installed without travelling far from the coast to fish. In addition, a fishponds system has been promoted at the household level, encouraging families to build their own fishponds to harvest fish.

Nelson Kalo, a Senior Mitigation Officer in the Ministry of Climate Change in Vanuatu, adds there are other projects too.

“Vanuatu is also promoting climate resilience projects working with the United Nations Development Programme to replicate climate resilient root crops that communities when climate condition change.”

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres with COP27 President Sameh Shoukry.

By IPS Correspondent
Sharm El-Sheikh, Nov 17 2022 (IPS)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the negotiators at COP27 that time for talking about loss, and damage finance is over.

“We need action. No one can deny the scale of loss and damage we see around the globe. The world is burning and drowning before our eyes. I urge all parties to show that they see it – and get it.”

He echoed the words of COP27 President Sameh Shoukry, who spoke about how emergent and developing countries had not reached an agreement on loss and damage – and urged the negotiators to put in extra efforts to reach agreements here.

Guterres said it was clear that there was a breakdown in trust between North and South.

This was no time for finger-pointing.

“The world is watching and has a simple message: stand and deliver. Deliver the kind of meaningful climate action that people and the planet so desperately need,” he said.

Global emissions were at their highest level and rising, and “climate impacts are decimating economies and societies – and growing.”

He said it was not possible to deny climate justice to those who contributed least to the climate crisis and are getting hurt the most.

“The 1.5 target is not simply about keeping a goal alive – it’s about keeping people alive.”

He said the Just Energy Transition Partnerships were important pathways to accelerate the phasing out of coal and the scaling up of renewables – and should be expanded.

Guterres also said the parties should act on the crucial question of finance.

“That means delivery of the $100 billion in climate finance for developing countries.

It means clarity on how the doubling of adaptation finance will be delivered through a credible roadmap. And it means acting on the consensus to reform multilateral development banks and international financial institutions.”

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Activists say governments should be urgedto put agriculture onto the negotiating table at COP27 especially to diverse,resilient agroecological farming are crucial for farmers which will enablefarmers to adapt to climate chaos. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 17 2022 (IPS)

At a time when sustainable farming approaches such as agroecology have been removed from the text at ongoing global climate negotiation (COP27) taking place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, activists are urging African governments to explore new steps to integrate agriculture into the UN climate agreement.

According to the most recent assessment of climate impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), loss and damage can broadly be split into two categories: economic losses involving “income and physical assets”; and non-economic losses, which include – but are not limited to – “mortality, mobility and mental wellbeing losses”.

Million Belay, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty coordinator in Africa, says green revolution solutions have failed the continent. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

In the agriculture sector, estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicate that despite overall gains in food production and food security on a global scale, many countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, have failed to make progress in recent decades.

According to UN experts, the region produces less food per person today than it did three decades ago, and the number of chronically undernourished people has increased dramatically.

“This must change because many of Africa’s agricultural and food security problems have been related to misguided policies, weak institutions in the context of climate crisis,” said Million Belay, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty coordinator in Africa (AFSA).

Belay pointed out that the industrial food system is a major culprit driving climate change but is still not being taken seriously by climate talks.

“Real solutions like diverse, resilient agroecological farming are crucial for farmers [in Africa] to adapt to climate chaos, but they are being sidelined and starved of climate finance,” he told IPS on the sidelines of COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

While COP27 in Egypt is trying to address food systems, for the first time, new suggested solutions by multinational companies and global philanthropists by providing new technologies and systems that reward African farmers for mitigating emissions have become a new point of anxiety among climate activists.

The industrial food systems such as monocultures, high-fertilizer and chemical use are described by experts as an enormous driver of climate change in Africa, while small-scale, agroecological farming and indigenous systems comparatively have significantly less GHG emissions and can even work to sequester carbon in healthy ecosystems.

“Historically, these philanthropists and multinationals have been considering Africa as a continent facing an agriculture productivity crisis, yet the serious problem is instead related to resilience crisis,” Belay said.

As global warming patterns continue to shift and natural resources dwindle, agroecology is considered by climate experts as the best path forward for feeding the continent. Most experts agree that under current growth rates, Africa’s population will double by 2050 and then double again by 2100, eventually climbing to over 4 billion by the end of the century.

The latest estimates by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) show that feeding this growing population will require significant advancements in Africa’s food systems.

Martin Fregene, the Director of Agriculture and Agro-Industry at the African Development Bank, told delegates at COP27 that the power of agricultural technologies to raise productivity and combat malnutrition on the continent are desperately needed.

Speaking during a session that focused on major solutions for a sustainable Agriculture sector in Africa, Fregene pointed out that the inadequate public investment in agricultural research, training and infrastructure and the limited mobilization of the private sector are some major contributing factors to food insecurity affecting Africa because of Climate Change.

In May this year, the African Development Bank launched an African Emergency Food Production Facility to provide 20 million African smallholder farmers with seeds and access to fertilizers in a bid to enable them to rapidly produce 38m tons of food – a $12bn increase in production in two years.

The programme aims especially at providing direct subsidies to farmers to buy fertilizer and other inputs, as well as financing large importers of fertilizer to source supply from other regions.

While climate-induced shocks to the food system used to occur once every ten years on average in Africa, experts show that they are now happening every 2.5 years.

Estimates show by 2050, warming of just 1.2 to 1.9℃, well within the range of current IPCC projections, is likely to increase the number of malnourished in Africa by 25 to 95 percent–25 percent in central Africa, 50 percent in east Africa, 85 percent in southern Africa and 95 percent in west Africa.

Both activists and climate experts agree that the public sector in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa can do more to engage the private sector to ensure that smallholder farmers are taking ownership of established adaptation strategies.

Matthias Berninger, the senior Vice-President of Global Public and Government Affairs at Bayer, a global Life Science company with core competencies in the areas of health care and agriculture, told IPS that yet there are positive examples showing how the private sector is getting involved in agricultural adaptation to climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, there is still a long way to go.

“The continent has adaptation projects that are now demonstrating their potential, but there is still a pressing need to reshape Africa’s food system to be more resilient, productive and inclusive,” Berninger said.

A new study by researchers from Biovision, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the United Kingdom-based Institute of Development Studies shows that such sustainable and regenerative farming techniques have either been neglected, ignored, or disregarded by major donors.

One of the major findings is that most governments, especially in Sub-Saharan still favour “green revolution” approaches, believing that chemical-intensive, large-scale industrial agriculture is the only way to produce sufficient food. “Green revolution solutions have failed,” said Belay.

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Water scarcity in the Middle East is impacting on lives and causing diplomatic tensions in between countries. The Turkish dam project, which includes the large Ataturk and Ilisu dams, has reduced water flow to the Tigris River’s natural channel impacting Syria and Iraq. Pictured here is Koctepe - a village covered by water in the Ilisu dam project. Credit: Mustafa Bilge Satkın/Climate Visuals Countdown

By Hisham Allam
Sharm El Sheikh, Nov 17 2022 (IPS)

The Middle East and North Africa are the world’s most water-scarce regions – with 11 of the 17 water-stressed countries on the globe.

According to UNICEF, nine out of 10 children live in areas with high or very high-water stress, resulting in significant consequences for their health, cognitive development, and future livelihoods.

Now climate change is resulting in less rain for agriculture and a decline in the quality of freshwater reserves due to saltwater transfer to fresh aquifers and increased pollution concentrations.

Maha Rashid, Middle East managing committee member for Blue Peace, which works for water cooperation among borders, sectors, and generations to foster peace, stability, and sustainable development, says the situation in the region is dire.

“More than 60% of this region’s population lives in areas of high or very high-water stress, compared to the global average of about 35%. While the Middle East and North Africa have continued to experience water scarcity for thousands of years, several interconnected challenges today threaten environmental sustainability and security for the region’s water supply.”

Water scarcity is expected to impact development in the Middle East. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

As COP27 negotiations continue at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, people in the Middle East are dealing with the impacts of climate change. Rashid explained that Iraq relies on water from Turkey and Iran, as well as rain and snow, to feed its rivers, especially in the spring. Water revenues to Iraq’s rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, dropped for the third season in succession. The current season has experienced a more severe and unprecedented fall not seen for several years, and water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers declined, and drought conditions are experienced in the rivers and lakes in Diyala Governorate.

The Turkish dam system, which includes the large Ataturk and Ilisu dams, has reduced water flow to the Tigris River’s natural channel. It will result in a 10 billion cubic metre annual reduction in water flow for downstream countries – like Syria and Iraq.

Despite having large amounts of arable land, Iraq will not be able to achieve food and water security. Instead, over the long term, water will confine development, plans, and programs and not bring food or water security, says Rashid, who is also a professor at Tigris University, told IPS.

Water insecurity in the region had also impacted international relations, with tensions arising over Ethiopia’s building of the Renaissance Dam for irrigation and electricity generation without considering the significant effects on Egypt and Sudan. Now the threat of water scarcity is growing for the two countries, followed by food security and potential future natural disasters.

The Middle East is now experiencing rising temperatures, which is one of the effects of climate change. As a result, North Africa is now experiencing drought in some regions and torrential downpours in others.

According to Rashid, since 2010, which set new temperature records in 19 countries, many of which were Arab nations, countries are experiencing summertime temperatures of up to 54 degrees Celsius, including in Iraq and Morocco, where two-thirds of the oases have vanished as a result of decreased precipitation and increased evaporation. Saudi Arabia and Sudan are also experiencing fierce sandstorms.

These climatic changes are predicted to get worse unless the inhabitants and governments of the area deal with them properly and urgently over the course of the next fifty years.

Rashid contended that doing this calls for more prudent resource management as well as adjustments to sectoral and economic models, mindsets, and behaviours. While she is optimistic about the outcome of the climate negotiations, most countries have not committed to implementing the recommendations and reducing carbon emissions since the COP 26 climate summit in Scotland.

“I believe that COP27 will address climate change issues and, in the end, will insist on finding a method that works to save poor communities.”

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One of the many activities held on Energy Day (Nov. 15) at COP27, where discussions are taking place for two weeks on how to make further progress on global climate action. The consensus among observers is that the energy transition away from fossil fuels will accelerate in the wake of the war in Ukraine and its impact on oil and gas supply and prices. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 16 2022 (IPS)

COP27 is unlikely to produce new commitments to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases, but the global energy crisis will eventually prompt more action by countries to move away from fossil fuels. That is the positive feeling that many observers are taking away from the annual climate summit being held in Egypt.

“The rise in energy prices due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set back many countries in the transition to renewable energies in 2022,” Manuel Pulgar Vidal, global leader of Climate & Energy at WWF, told IPS. “But this is not going to last, because developed nations have proven that the best path to energy security is to accelerate the abandonment of fossil fuels.”“…(D)eveloped nations have proven that the best path to energy security is to accelerate the abandonment of fossil fuels." -- Manuel Pulgar Vidal

The issue is seen from the same point of view in some countries of the developing South.

Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy Franz Tattenbach Capra was emphatic in an interview with IPS: “Countries like ours, which don’t have oil or gas, are appalled by the price increases. This will lead us to try to become less dependent on imports.”

The close relationship that has been established between climate action and economic development is easy to see at the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has drawn more than 33,000 people to this seaside resort town on the Sinai Peninsula.

This link goes far beyond the negotiations between the 193 States Parties on climate change mitigation and adaptation, which this year focuses on climate action, as highlighted by the summit’s slogan: “Together for Implementation”.

A demonstration is held at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center at COP27 to remind the world of the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals aimed at boosting global peace and prosperity, fighting climate change and making the transition to clean energy by 2030. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Global fair

COP27 is very much like a trade fair and a multitudinous meeting place, with an overwhelming number of talks, activities and document sharing, where the task of choosing where to be is very difficult and everyone constantly feels they are missing out on something more interesting happening at the same time.

While world leaders give speeches and technical officials discuss the next steps for climate action, countries, organizations and companies seek and offer financing, in public and private meetings, for all kinds of projects, ranging from energy, agriculture and infrastructure to the empowerment of indigenous communities.

“This process has been very skillful in connecting climate change and economics. We all know that countries that do not act responsibly with regard to the climate are going to slide backwards in the coming years,” said Pulgar Vidal, who co-organized and chaired COP20, held in Lima in 2014, when he was Peru’s environment minister.

The energy sector is definitely the master key to finding solutions to climate change, as it is responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions and is still primarily fossil-fuel based.

According to a report presented here by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), only 29 percent of generation comes from alternative sources and carbon emissions continue to rise.

And the past year “frankly, has been a year of climate procrastination,” said United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) executive director Inger Andersen on Nov. 15, the day dedicated to energy in the never-ending agenda of side events taking place at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Center.

In the official negotiations, however, the energy discussion appears to be in the background, behind the debate on the creation of a fund to compensate for loss and damage in the countries of the South that have suffered the most from droughts, floods, hurricanes, forest fires and other phenomena that have accelerated in recent years.

COP26, held a year ago in Glasgow, Scotland, ended with a bitter taste with respect to energy when, following an intervention by India, a commitment was made to reduce, rather than eliminate, the use of coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.

For now, there is no indication that this summit will end with a better agreement in this area.

Manuel Pulgar Vidal, a former Peruvian environment minister and the chair of COP20 on climate change, held in Lima in 2014, poses for photos in one of the corridors of COP27 at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center in Egypt, where he is participating as global leader of Climate & Energy at WWF. CREDIT: WWF

Effects of the war

Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, chair of the largest multilateral fund for financing climate action in developing countries, is also convinced that the energy crisis generated by the war in Ukraine will, in the medium and long term, trigger a faster transition.

“The conflict made many people understand how vulnerable the global energy system is and how harmful dependence on fossil fuels is,” the CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) told IPS in one of the wide corridors of the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center, where the heavy traffic of people does not stop between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM.

Rodríguez, the former Costa Rican environment minister, said that “With an energy mix based more on renewable sources, there would have been more resilience to the impact of the events in Ukraine. European countries have already understood this and I am confident that they are understanding it in other regions.”

Reports circulating in Sharm El Sheikh support the theory that the impact of the crisis could be beneficial for the energy transition in the long run.

In the four largest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and India – public and private investment in transport electrification and renewable energy is growing due to market mechanisms and concerns about energy security, says a paper presented by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an independent advisory organization based in the United Kingdom.

“The pace at which the green transition is speeding up…is remarkable….no-one who genuinely understands the interconnected crises facing the world believes that more oil and gas represent anything more than a very short-term solution,” Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU, said at the climate summit.

Harjeet Singh, of the Climate Action Network International, which brings together more than 1,800 environmental organizations, takes part in a demonstration at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center. The demand is to ensure that the necessary efforts are made so that global temperature does not increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Pressure from civil society

A broad spectrum of organizations are taking part in COP27, aiming to influence the negotiation process and seek funding.

Harjeet Singh of the Climate Action Network International (CAN-I), an umbrella group of more than 1,800 organizations in 130 countries, told IPS that “the war in Ukraine shifted the focus of many developed countries from climate action to energy security.”

Singh has called for a commitment to halt the expansion of fossil fuels to be included in the outcome document of COP27, which is due to end on Nov. 18 if it is not extended by one day as is customary at these summits.

At the same time, he lamented that, because of the impact of the war, “we see the fossil fuel industry taking advantage of this space to sell itself as sustainable, which is unacceptable.”

Evidence of the need to appear as part of the oil sector’s climate action is everywhere in this gigantic Convention Center, where the organization Global Witness denounced that 636 lobbyists for oil interests and companies are registered as participants.

One of the hundreds of organizations with booths at Sharm El Sheikh is the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) Fund for International Development.

“We came here to make ourselves visible, as we want to contribute to making the energy transition in all countries inclusive,” Nadia Benamara, Head of Outreach & Multimedia for the Vienna-based Fund, told IPS.

Benamara said the Fund pledged 24 billion dollars up to 2030 to finance climate action because “oil producing and exporting countries are also victims of climate change and want to contribute to the solution.”

IPS produced this article with support from Climate Change Media Partnership 2022, the Earth Journalism Network, Internews, and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.

By External Source
Nov 16 2022 (IPS-Partners)

What happens to a country without land?
As rising sea levels threaten to submerge our home, we have made a radical plan for the survival of our nation.
Watch Tuvaluan Minister Simon Kofe’s address at COP27 and visit https://www.tuvalu.tv to find out how you can help.

In 2021, the world experienced four mega weather events that each cost $20+ billion in economic loss: Hurricane Ida, flooding in Europe, flooding in China and unprecedented winter weather in Texas and parts of Mexico. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS

By Peter Schlosser and Michael Dorsey
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Nov 16 2022 (IPS)

Climate change is an existential threat to humans and our ability to thrive on a healthy planet. But when it comes to rising temperatures, the inability of humankind to slow emissions and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius isn’t because we lack knowledge or need new technologies.

Consider: Humans have been warned for more than a century about the dangers of a warming climate and its adverse impact on human health and planetary systems, including but not limited to loss of biodiversity, decreased soil and ocean health, increased sea-ice melt and corresponding sea-level rise, and amplified disasters such as hurricanes, floods, heat waves and droughts.

The IPCC estimates that globally, $1.6-3.8 trillion (USD) must be invested every year through public and private climate-related finance to keep warming well below warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the International Monetary Fund reports that fossil-fuel subsidies in 2020 were $5.9 trillion (USD) when summing up explicit and implicit subsidies

Fifty years ago, “The Limits to Growth” warned humans of the serious need to live in balance with Earth’s systems. The science is settled. Likewise, technologies that drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions are available and increasingly cost-competitive–particularly in energy production and transportation, two of the most significant contributors to global emissions.

What is missing? This is not a difficult physics equation. While we live in a complex world, the laggards in this area are observable: money and societal will.

As countries enter the second week of the global negotiations at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, typically referred to as COP27, success will depend on the ability of the negotiators to mobilize investments and advance policy at the conference to accelerate opportunities for progress in altering the trajectory of climate change.

Even discussions on “loss and damage”–a signature issue of this conference that is historically neglected–are defined by these two needs. Underlying the issues of loss and damage are questions about processes for addressing loss (policy) and determinations of who is financially responsible (investment).

The price tag to address climate change is not small, but viewed in the right frame, it is a bargain. Take climate-enhanced disasters. In 2021, the world experienced four mega weather events that each cost $20+ billion in economic loss: Hurricane Ida, flooding in Europe, flooding in China and unprecedented winter weather in Texas and parts of Mexico.

These types of human-induced disasters are now increasingly frequent, occurring at more places and at higher amplitudes, and are more costly without considerable investment to curtail rising greenhouse gas emissions. The 5th High Level Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Finance takes place during the second week of COP27, where ministers will discuss achieving the annual $100 billion support mark for lower-income countries, a total those countries already note as too little, too late. The real need is in trillions of dollars, not billions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that globally, $1.6-3.8 trillion (USD) must be invested every year through public and private climate-related finance to keep warming well below warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the International Monetary Fund reports that fossil-fuel subsidies in 2020 were $5.9 trillion (USD) when summing up explicit and implicit subsidies.

Combining policy with public investment can dramatically amplify results. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s most dramatic attempt to reorient its infrastructure and electricity production to lower emissions, could spend as much as $800 billion (USD) in tax credits, spurring on private investment to the tune of $1.7 trillion (USD) over the next decade, according to a Credit Suisse review of the policy.

The same report estimates that with the manufacturing and consumer tax credits, the cost of solar electricity could fall below one U.S. cent, possibly as soon as 2025. The investment bank declared that the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act “definitively changes the narrative from risk mitigation to opportunity capture” for corporations to take advantage of the law’s positive impact on the economy.

We have fallen behind the timeline set by the Paris Climate Accords and the 1.5 degrees Celsius target no longer seems to be achievable. The international negotiations must push the agenda to define aggressive mitigation policies, with incentives and disincentives, to scale known solutions on the fastest timescales possible for manufacturing and distribution throughout the world.

This needs real investments, private as well as public, for a chance to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. The time is now to show the most marginalized countries the money.

Peter Schlosser is one of the world’s leading earth scientists, with expertise in the Earth’s hydrosphere and how humans affect the planet’s natural state. He is the vice president and vice provost of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures at Arizona State University.

Michael Dorsey is a globally recognized expert on sustainability, finance, renewable energy and environment matters. He is the chair of the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service at Arizona State University.

Yamide Dagnet, Senior Vice President, International at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

By Busani Bafana
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 16 2022 (IPS)

Climate change is worsening injustice globally, and the poor and vulnerable communities are the most affected. It is time the world acted on fulfilling human rights and building a liveable planet, says Yamide Dagnet, director for Climate Justice at Open Society Foundations.

“We are so slow to take climate change seriously,” she told IPS in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the COP27 conference in Sharm El Sheikh, in which she speculated that greed and doubts have crept in about solutions.

“The solutions are there,” Dagnet says. “But we need to organise ourselves and create blended solutions in tackling climate change and upholding human rights.”

COP27 is in its final week to hammer agreements on saving the world from climate change doom.

Injustice is a key factor needing addressing because climate change is crippling the most vulnerable communities and countries that contribute the least to the problem.

“This is injustice. In every country of the world, the social justice sentiment is that the most marginalised communities are suffering the most. You also have the intergenerational aspect, which means that the youth will pay the consequences for what is happening now,” says Dagnet, who co-founded and launched Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025, a consortium that amplifies the voice and priorities of vulnerable countries and communities.

Climate change activists at COP27, currently underway in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Excerpts of the interview:

IPS: You are advocating for climate justice. Does climate change have anything to do with human rights?

YD: We need to understand why vulnerable nations and communities are frustrated and demanding legitimate social justice from the Paris Agreement and climate talks. One of the objectives of the UNFCCC is to first stabilise global temperatures. We have obviously failed to do that. Temperatures have increased.

Another objective is to protect the most vulnerable. Over the past decades, there has been a focus on how to stabilise and reduce emissions and maximise the means that were to be provided to populations dealing with the impacts of climate change.

If you reduce emissions, you reduce the impacts of climate change. But we failed. We have even slid backwards since the Glasgow COP, which goes against human rights.

At this COP in Sharm El Sheikh, frustration is at its highest because, as science has it, there has not been a lot of reduction in emissions at all. Even if we were taking the radical step now to reduce emissions, we would still have to deal with a changing climate and have intensified and more frequent disasters.

You have everywhere the notion that the delays and prioritisation of some issues over others and the neglect of the priorities in developing countries and communities exacerbate vulnerability resulting in losses and damages. Now there is an effect on livelihoods as some (communities) are displaced and can’t rely on their water sources, like in Chad. (This results in) conflict between pastoralists. Or (in the Pacific) atoll nations that know that unless something radical is done, they will be underwater – (and ask) what will happen to their cultural heritage. You have so much at stake beyond economic damage.

IPS: Are human rights and justice at stake at the COP27 talks?

YD: Absolutely. Everything is at stake. Every human does not need to (just) survive. Human beings have a right to thrive and be protected. Another human rights issue is that some of our most unsung heroes, protecting our forests, and demanding justice from global corporations, are the most affected. The number of environmental defenders being killed is increasing. This is a human rights issue too.

IPS: Would you say climate change laid bare the inequalities in the world today?

YD: Yes. It is a vicious loop. Unfortunately, inequalities in the world (and) within each country will be exacerbated because of climate change. The impact of climate change will affect the most vulnerable populations from class and gender, with intergenerational impact and from a race point of view. All aspects of inequality will be amplified.

When you do not even have the issue of inequality, you will see that climate change and security are going to be exacerbated because climate change is a threat multiplier when it comes to security and economic vulnerability. For example, a country can do everything that the International Monetary Fund asks it to do to reduce debt and have a good GDP, and within eight hours of a hurricane (hitting), it can lose 200 percent of its GDP. The victims are the people and their livelihoods, which are changed in eight hours.

IPS: On the agenda of the COP27 talks is the issue of loss and damage, with developing countries seeking support from developed countries for the damage they have suffered due to climate change. Do you think the current negotiations can unlock funding crucial for developing countries to get help?

YD: We have already made history. Thirty years ago, the small islands brought up the issue of losses and damages, but nothing was done. They were told to reduce emissions first, and then there was no compensation liability. All progress was hindered because of the fear developed countries had of (paying) compensation and liability when developing countries were asking first and foremost for solidarity. (The developed world) promised to help them be more resilient and reduce emissions, but none of those commitments was fulfilled. This is now why the issue of reparations is coming. They have been asking for space to discuss this issue and how to finance those different losses and damage. The type of finance you need to deal with a disaster like a hurricane or a drought is very different from what you need when a whole nation (displaced and needs to) deal with the loss of cultural heritage.

Vulnerable countries are fighting hard to get a financial mechanism, but we need to figure out how to resource this mechanism. We know that trillions are needed. Look at (one country like) Pakistan; we are talking of billions. We have failed since 2009 to mobilise $100 billion a year when we know we need trillions. The more we wait it will be difficult to achieve, and we need to think pragmatically and forcefully not only to create the fund but also about how it will be replenished.

What will it come to? Should developing countries go to the International Court and have developed countries tried for climate crimes against humanity, or can we wait for COP200 for a solution?

Vanuatu has not waited to start. (They’re) saying: Hey! Enough is enough, and we need to take this to the International Court of Justice. So, whether this will result in a country, or seven countries being sued for not doing what they promised to do and taking action and providing reparations remains to be seen. We know this is creating a lot of anxiety because developed countries do not want any liability or (pay) compensation. The other aspect is that the polluters who need to pay are not just the governments but also the corporate sector. Fossil fuel companies are profiting the most from the current energy crisis, for example, so this is why there are discussions about a windfall tax and how to use such a tax on fossil fuel companies to compensate for loss and damage.

IPS: Are the voices of those suffering the most from the impacts of climate change being heard by COPs?

YD: I think at COP27, the UNFCCC is putting on one of the most inclusive COPs, but there is still a lot of work to make it more inclusive and effective. This is why philanthropies like us also have a responsibility and can use catalytic funding to really support and protect the movement of those voices that need to be heard. The supporting accountability mechanism outside the countries is to empower civil society to hold their governments and companies accountable, to use naming and shaming, and litigation is important, but it is also important for international platforms like the UNFCCC to have the right accountability mechanism to create the pressure.

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Credit: EBRD

By Vanora Bennett
LONDON, Nov 16 2022 (IPS)

As it moves to increase its climate adaptation finance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has launched the EBRD Climate Adaptation Action Plan (CAAP) at COP27, the global climate summit taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Climate adaptation – adapting to already existing climate change and anticipating future changes in long-term planning – has been an increasing focus of attention in recent years as the current level of global warming is already causing extreme weather events to multiply and intensify. It is one of the core themes of COP27.

The EBRD is a leader on climate finance but its business model, with a focus on the private sector, means that it has done more mitigation than adaptation, which is often publicly financed.

The EBRD Climate Adaptation Action Plan brings together a number of elements to strengthen the Bank’s adaptation work: integrating adaptation into project and policy design, building partnerships, developing business and mobilising private finance.

“We don’t have one single answer on adaptation; our response is a combination of a number of different tools and approaches,” said Harry Boyd-Carpenter, EBRD Managing Director, Climate Strategy and Delivery. “We increasingly see adaptation not as a cost but rather as an investment that protect economic development and preserve the competitiveness of our clients.”

At last year’s climate summit, COP26, the Glasgow Climate Pact included a commitment from developed countries to at least double – from the 2019 levels of US$ 20 billion – the collective adaptation finance to developing countries by 2025. Increased adaptation finance is particularly important to address the climate vulnerability of EBRD regions

Several EBRD countries – especially those in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEMED) and Central Asia – are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Between 2008 and 2018, insured losses to extreme weather events in EBRD economies totalled US$ 25 billion.

Chronic water stress has already changed the landscape, and warming in the region is expected to exceed the global average. In the face of these risks, the EBRD is building new partnerships to identify and support opportunities for investing in greater resilience.

During COP27, the EBRD signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to expand its partnership with the Global Centre on Adaptation. In line with the Bank’s conviction that Africa has strong potential as a global leader in climate adaptation, it also endorsed the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Programme (AAAP), which aims to mobilise US$ 25 billion over five years to scale climate adaptation action.

President Odile Renaud-Basso spoke at multiple events on the need for more adaptation finance, including the COP27 World Leaders event, Accelerating Adaptation in Africa, and discussed adaptation with the African Development Bank’s President Akinwumi Adesina.

Over the past decade, the EBRD has financed over 350 climate resilience investments with a business volume of more than €10 billion and adaptation finance exceeding €2.8 billion.

Since issuing the world’s first dedicated climate resilience bond in 2019, the EBRD has also prepared the Guide for Issuers on Green Bonds for Climate Resilience, together with the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) and the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI), to provide practical guidance to sovereigns, sub-sovereigns, financial institutions and corporates on raising capital in the green bond market to invest in climate adaptation and resilience.

At the forefront of climate finance, the EBRD has committed to make more than half of its investment green by 2025 and to align all its operations with the goals of the Paris Agreement by 1 January 2023. In preparation, the Bank now screens every project for its climate resilience and systematically identify adaptation opportunities.

Footnote: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) was established to help build a new, post-Cold War era in Central and Eastern Europe. It has since played a historic role and gained unique expertise in fostering change in the region – and beyond – investing €170 billion in more than 6,400 projects.

At COP27, the EBRD launched its Climate Adaptation Action Plan to boost adaptation finance. The plan involves integrating climate resilience into project design, building new and enhanced partnerships, and mobilising private finance. Adaptation finance is deemed crucial to address climate vulnerability of EBRD regions.

Vanora Bennett is EBRD green spokeswoman / Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Georgia and Armenia

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Credit: Parents for Future UK

By Paul Virgo
ROME, Nov 15 2022 (IPS)

Lea is a three-year-old from Mexico who loves ladybirds. Siddhiksha, a six-year-old from India, has a passion for trees and wild animals. Rachelle is a 12-year-old Tanzanian who is wise beyond her years. They are smart and adorable and they are among the stars of a short film that is aiming to remind the leaders taking part in the COP27 UN Climate Conference that they have a duty of care towards young and future generations.

“My biggest anguish is literally not knowing what the world is going to be like,” says Cora, 13, from Brazil, in the film.

“I’m afraid the world could suck, with a lot of species not being able to survive 50 years from now”.

Meera, a 15-year-old from Chennai, India, says she sees the effects of the climate crisis every day.

“Lately, I’ve noticed that it’s very hot in Chennai and there are many unseasonal floods in Bangalore.

Parents for Future Global’s demands for COP27 are that nations must agree to no new coal, oil and gas projects and to stop subsidising existing fossil-fuel projects and that they pledge to start paying for loss and damage

“There are forest fires all over the world almost every day.

“This is actually becoming scary and serious”.

The video was produced by the Our Kids’ Climate and Parents For Future Global networks to send the message that it’s time to put ‘Kids First’ and deliver real climate action.

“The aim was to create a film that the kids could identify with, using a kids’ perspectives, making kids feel empowered and recognised,” Sandra Freij, the photographer and filmmaker who directed and produced the short, told IPS.
“We wanted to put kids’ voices before the decision-makers at COP because their voices need to be heard and they have so much to say”.

Children from 16 different countries feature in the film, speaking about their dreams and fears for the future.
Freij had the tough task of selecting them from contributions from almost 100 children sent in by parents from all over the world.

“It was super important for us to make sure we did not put words into their mouths. When we invited them to speak about their dreams we encouraged them to speak about simple things like football or rainbows,” she said.

“I never imagined we’d receive messages of such a grown-up nature.

“It was an emotional few months receiving message after message from kids that have connected the dots and who experience grief and fear about what the future holds”.

Our Kids’ Climate and Parents For Future Global are among several groups of people who are channelling their concerns about the impact the climate crisis will have on their children into action to bring about positive change.

Other groups include India’s Warrior Moms, who focus on the need to fight air pollution, and Britain’s Mothers Rise Up.

The latter group hit the headlines in June when they staged a spectacular song-and-dance protest outside the headquarters of Lloyd’s of London, inspired by the Let’s Go Fly a Kite scene in Mary Poppins, to tell the insurance giant to stop underwriting the fossil-fuel projects that endanger our children’s future.

Parents For Future is a network of independent national groups from countries both in the Global South and North.
The national and local groups take action that is most fitting to their contexts.

Parents for Future Italia, for example, prepared an ‘eco-manifesto’ outlining the policies the country needs to adopt to deliver climate action ahead of Italy’s general election in September.

Then these groups join forces at the global level.

Among other things, Parents for Future Global has been working hard to support the campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. What makes this cooperation between different national groups possible is the recognition by all involved that you cannot solve the climate crisis unless you tackle the injustices that cause it.

And that means the countries of the Global North owning up to being largely to blame and taking action to remedy that via, among other things, loss-and-damage compensation.

Parents for Future Global’s demands for COP27 are that nations must agree to no new coal, oil and gas projects and to stop subsidising existing fossil-fuel projects and that they pledge to start paying for loss and damage.

The actions of these determined parents have not gone unnoticed.

“World leaders better watch out,” Dr Maria Neira of the World Health Organization said at the launch of the #KidsFirst film at COP27. “There is nothing worse or better than a mom fighting for the health of her children. “Now I have a lot of hope. This battle will be the one that we are going to win.”

This photo was taken a month after Cyclone Pam hit Tuvalu. It shows the main square of Nui Island was still underwater. The tropical storm went onto Vanuatu, impacting nearly half the island's inhabitants. Credit: Silke von Brockhausen/UNDP

By Busani Bafana
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 15 2022 (IPS)

Pacific island countries are highly vulnerable to climate change, and several have disappeared – and more could sink under the sea owing to a rise in water levels.

According to UN figures, severe climate-change-induced weather conditions are already leading to the displacement of about 50 000 people each year. Urgent assistance is needed to help them adapt and lessen its impacts.

COP27 opened with an impassioned plea by Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano, who called for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at COP27. Addressing the world leaders, he said: “Tuvalu has joined Vanuatu and other nations in calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to steer our development model to pursue renewables and a just transition away from fossil fuels.”

A losing battle against climate damage

In 2015, the Island of Vanuatu was hit by a category five cyclone that killed residents, displaced thousands and damaged infrastructure. It was not to be the last. Another severe cyclone hit the island in 2020 after buffeting the neighbouring Solomon Islands.

Vanuatu is one of 20 countries that make up the Pacific Islands. They have a population of more than 2 million whose livelihoods are tied to the sea. The island nations face a future underwater if they cannot cope with the impacts of climate change and repair the damage it has already caused.

Nelson Kalo, a Senior Mitigation Officer in the Ministry of Climate change in Vanuatu, says resources are needed to build adaptive capacity. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“In Vanuatu, adaptation is a core issue to ensure we build resilience; otherwise, we will continue to see Vanuatu destroyed by cyclones and going under the sea,” says Nelson Kalo, a Senior Mitigation Officer in the Ministry of Climate change in Vanuatu, on the sidelines of COP27.

Kalo says climate change-induced natural disasters are impacting the area.

“We need resources to build our adaptive capacity so that in the future, we will be resilient to climate change,” he said.

Sea level rise, increasing temperatures and frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones, and storm surges are some of the climate change impacts facing island nations, some of which are in low-lying areas of just 5 meters above sea level at the highest point.

“In the Pacific Islands, the people are dependent on primary sectors, particularly agriculture and fishing, for their livelihoods, and we are seeing a variety of climate change effects across the region which are having impacts on livelihoods,” says Dirk Snyman, Coordinator of the Climate Finance Unit at the Pacific Community (SPC). The SPC is an international scientific and technical organization in the region that supports the rights and well-being of Pacific islanders through science and knowledge.

Ocean acidification and warming are affecting fisheries and causing the bleaching of coral reefs, which provide habitat for fish, a key source of food for islanders.

“In the Pacific islands, climate change is not some predicted future scenario based on projected models; it is a daily lived reality,” Snyman tells IPS. “It is becoming more and more difficult, particularly with crops and drinking water, for people to meet their daily needs that they now rely on imported food and drinking water, which come at a high cost.”

Snyman said the island nations had incurred economic and non-economic losses, such as cultural losses, and that a loss and damage facility is a timely intervention for them. The issue of loss and damage fund has made it on the agenda of the COP27 negotiations, which intensify this week in Egypt.

Mitigation

Pacific island countries have very low emissions and emit less than 1 percent of global emissions as a region. But despite these low emissions, the countries have developed ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement to be fully renewable in terms of energy by 2030.

“Compare that to any NDCs throughout the world … (Yet) Pacific island countries are struggling to get money for transitioning to renewable energy because the argument is always that they are too small or they have too little emission reduction, so they are not receiving the money to finance their NDCs,” Snyman said.

The climate financing needs for the Pacific Islands are estimated at between 6.5 and 9 percent of GDP per year, which is around 1 billion US dollars per year.

Snyman said current estimates of approved financing are around 220 million US dollars annually, which is only 20 percent of the 1 billion US dollars needed. He said multilateral mechanisms take up to five years to get financing, by which time countries would have experienced the worst impacts of climate change.

“Pacific countries feel very strongly that money should be made for loss and damage to compensate for these economic and non-economic losses that are unavoidable and that they cannot adapt to and that will continue to affect communities for decades,” said Snyman.

Espen Ronneberg, Senior Adviser, Multilateral Climate Change Agreements at SPC, says loss and damage will occur without ambitious mitigation action and reductions in GHG emissions.

Espen Ronneberg, Senior Adviser, Multilateral Climate Change Agreements at SPC, ambitious mitigation action and reductions in GHG emissions are needed. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We are already experiencing some of these things to a certain extent in that the impacts are being felt right now, but we are also looking into the future and how those impacts will get much worse unless mitigation is ramped up and unless technical assistance, finance, for instance, are also ramped up,” said Ronneberg, who explained that available resources were not fit-for-purpose in addressing the current impacts of climate change in pacific island countries.

Ronneberg said Pacific island countries were ambitious regarding mitigation as they have some of the world’s highest energy costs due to fuel and natural gas importation costs. They have looked at energy efficiency through solar voltaic technology and are exploring wind and wave power.

“We have to look at the slow onset of impacts like sea level rise and changes in rainfall patterns. There may be opportunities for adaptation, but there is a point where you can no longer adapt – where an island becomes unliveable because of conditions,” he said.

Anne-Claire Goarant, Manager of the Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability Division at the SPC, said adaptation was vital for implementing the NDCs in the Pacific islands but that there is a need to focus on robust mitigation programmes.

“We need the flexibility to describe the adaptation objectives to reflect the reality on the ground, and at this stage, we need transformative action,” Goarant told IPS. “We have to speed up the scale and amount of money that is available to implement action that will deliver some results in the short and long terms, for example, planting trees on a massive scale along the shores.”

“It is not just a small dot of adaptation action; we really need a global goal that can be implemented at a local level by local communities because the work will be done locally by the people who need to understand what climate change is and why it is important to adapt and how they can be supported.”

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The latest annual climate conference has begun in the face of a worsening climate crisis and further retreats by rich nations following the energy crisis induced by NATO sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Copping out again
The 27th Conference of the Parties (COP 27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is now meeting in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, from 6 to 18 November 2022.

Hezri A Adnan

The looming world economic recession is likely to be deeper than in 2008. The likely spiral into stagflation will make addressing the climate crisis even more difficult.

Invoking the Ukraine war as pretext, governments and corporations are rushing to increase fossil fuel production to offset the deepening energy crisis.

Resources which should be deployed for climate adaptation and mitigation have been diverted for war, fossil fuel extraction and use, including resumption of shale gas ‘fracking’ as well as coal mining and burning.

War causes huge social and economic damage to people, society and the environment. The wars in Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere impose high costs on all, disrupting energy and food supplies, and raising prices sharply.

Russia’s Ukraine incursion has provided a convenient smokescreen for a hasty return to fossil fuels, as military-industrial processes alone account for 6% of all greenhouse gases.

The future is already here
All these have worsened crises facing the world’s environment and economy. The most optimistic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario expects the 1.5°C rise above pre-industrial levels threshold for climate catastrophe to be breached by 2040.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

But the future is already upon us. Accelerating warming is already causing worse extreme weather events, ravaging economies, communities and ecosystems.

Recent floods in Pakistan displaced 33 million people. Wildfires, extreme heat, ice melt, drought, and extreme weather phenomena are already evident on many continents, causing disasters worldwide.

In 2021, the sea level rose to a record high, and is expected to continue rising. UN reports estimate women and children are 14 times more likely than adult men to die during climate disasters.

Popular sentiment is shifting, even in the US, where ‘climate scepticism’ is strongest. Devastation threatened by Hurricane Ida in 2021 not only revived painful memories of Katrina in 2005, but also heightened awareness of warming-related extreme weather events.

Stronger climate action needed
In international negotiations, rich nations have evaded historical responsibility for ‘climate debt’ by only focusing on current emissions. Hence, there is no recognition of a duty to compensate those most adversely impacted in the global South.

Last year’s COP26 Glasgow Climate Pact was hailed for its call to ‘phase-out’ coal. This has now been quickly abandoned by Europe with the war. And for developing countries, Glasgow failed to deliver any significant progress on climate finance.

At COP27, the Egyptian presidency has proposed an additional ‘loss and damage’ finance facility to compensate for irreparable damage due to climate impacts.

After failing to even meet its modest climate finance promises of 2009, the rich North is dithering, pleading for further talks until 2024 to work out financing details.

Meanwhile, the G7 has muddied the waters by counter-offering its Global Shield Against Climate Risks – a disaster insurance scheme.

Get priorities right
What the world needs, instead, are rapidly promoted and implemented measures as part of a more rapid, just, internationally funded transition for the global South. This should:

• replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, including by subsidizing renewable energy generation for energy-deficient poor populations.
• promote energy-saving and efficiency measures to reduce its use and greenhouse gas emissions by at least 70% (from 1990) by 2030.
• implement a massive global public works programme, creating ‘green jobs’ to replace employment in ‘unsustainable’ industries.
• develop needed sustainable technologies, e.g., to replace corporate agricultural practices with ‘agroecological’ farming methods, investment and technology.

Another world is possible
Another world is possible. A massive social and political transformation is needed. But the relentless pursuit of private profit has always been at the expense of people and nature.

Greed cannot be expected to become the basis for a just solution to climate change, let alone environmental degradation, world poverty, hunger and gross inequalities.

The COP27 conference is now taking place in Sharm-al-Sheikh, an isolated, heavily policed tourist resort. Only one major road goes in and out, as if designed to keep out civil society and drown out voices from the global South.

The luxury hotels there are charging rates that have put COP27 beyond the means of many, especially climate justice activists from poorer countries. The rich and powerful arrived in over 400 private jets, making a mockery of decarbonization rhetoric.

Thus, the COP process is increasingly seen as exclusive. Without making real progress on the most important issues, it is increasingly seen as slow, irrelevant and ineffective.

Generating inadequate agreements at best, the illusion of progress thus created is dangerously misleading at worst.

By generating great expectations and false hopes, but actually delivering little, it is failing the world, even when it painstakingly achieves difficult compromises which fall short of what is needed.

Multilateralism at risk
Multilateral platforms, such as the UNFCCC, have long been expected to engage governments to cooperate in developing, implementing and enforcing solutions. With the erosion of multilateralism since the end of the Cold War, these are increasingly being bypassed.

Instead, self-appointed private interests, with means, pretend to speak for world civil society. Strapped for resources, multilateral platforms and other organizations are under pressure to forge partnerships and other forms of collaboration with them.

Thus, inadequate ostensible private solutions increasingly dominate policy discourses. Widespread fiscal deficits have generated interest in them due to the illusory prospect of private funding.

Private interests have thus gained considerable influence. Thus, the new spinmeisters of Davos and others have gained influence, offering seductively attractive, but ultimately false, often misleading and typically biased solutions.

Meanwhile, global warming has gone from bad to worse. UN Member States must stiffen the backs of multilateral organizations to do what is right and urgently needed, rather than simply going with the flow, typically of cash.

Hezri A Adnan is an environmental policy analyst and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. He is author of The Sustainability Shift: Reshaping Malaysia’s Future.

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Climate activist Taren Chilia knows firsthand the impact of climate change on the island of Vanuatu. Cyclone Pam hit the South Pacific Ocean island in 2015, displacing nearly half of its 270 000 people. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
SHARM EL SHEIK, Nov 14 2022 (IPS)

The only thing Taren Chilia remembers about Cyclone Pam was that it flattened his school in Vanuatu, washing away books, equipment, and – well, almost his dreams too.

Cyclone Pam – a category 5 cyclone, was one of the worst to hit the South Pacific Ocean island in 2015, displacing about 45 percent of its 270 000 people. It also left several people dead and destroyed property, houses, and crops. Scientists say human-induced climate change is warming ocean temperatures, fuelling tropical storms driven by warm, moist air.

In Vanuatu, the cyclone tore through the Efate Island in Shefa Province, close to Port Vila’s capital.

Chilia, now 20, from Mele village, recalls fleeing rising water as the storm swept through his village.

“I was at home with mum and dad, and the school was closed, and everyone was in the house. We could not go outside, but we could hear the wind howling and the thunder strike when my neighbour came to fetch us to leave our house, which was not safe from the storm,” Chilia, who was then in his primary school, narrated to IPS on sidelines of the COP27 summit.

On the agenda of the global meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the issue of loss and damage and how developing countries can be compensated for the losses as a result of the severe impacts of climate change.

“As we rushed out of our house, I heard a loud roaring wave, and our village was flooded. The school was washed away, just like everything else around,” said Chilia, who was chosen to lay the first brick to rebuild the first block of classrooms in his village after the devastating Cyclone Pam.

With donations by well-wishers in Australia after Cyclone Pam hit, villagers were challenged to rebuild Chilia’s school within three days, and they did.

“We used big white tents donated by UNICEF as classrooms until we built the school. The whole village pitched in to build on day one (which was) on a Friday. On the second day, we painted the school, and on the third day, we celebrated as we opened the school. On Monday, we were back to school,” he said.

Climate Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Chilia believes that Pacific Islands like Vanuatu need to be compensated to repair and restore infrastructure lost to the impacts of climate change. He says developed countries responsible for high carbon emissions that have led to global warming should take responsibility for their action and pay up.

“I am calling on all countries of the world to step up on climate justice for the Pacific Islands by supporting (the creation of) a loss and damage facility at this COP27,” Chilia told IPS. He explained that the Vanuatu government should seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in settling the issue of payments for loss and damage caused by climate change.

Developing countries arguing that they have suffered the impacts of climate change to which they have not contributed are pushing for a loss and damage fund to compensate them for climate impacts.

Espen Ronneberg, Senior Adviser, Multilateral Climate Change Agreements for the Pacific Community (SPC), says loss and damage will continue without ambitious mitigation action and reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. He says the impacts of climate change are already being experienced.

“We are also looking into the future and how those impacts will get much worse unless mitigation is ramped up and unless technical assistance, finance, for instance, are also ramped up,” said Ronneberg, who explained that available resources were not fit-for-purpose in addressing the current impacts of climate change in pacific island countries.

“The type of loss and damage that we are seeing now and that we are anticipating given the different scenarios is not really going to address those impacts. We know there is humanitarian assistance available, there is the Green Fund and the Adaptation Fund, but these do not meet the needs we are seeing,” he said.

“The loss and damage facility is a key to the Pacific Islands, but there are a lot of unknowns at the moment. We know what we do not want. This has to be worked out in common with our development partners, and everyone has to be on the same page regarding loss and damage issues. We are not quite there yet.”

For Chilia, the impact of climate change is real.

“Climate change has hit me personally and has impacted human rights,” Chilia said. “My mother used to be a tourism sales lady, but she is back home because the cyclone destroyed her stall.”

Chilia says he now supports his family.

“I am the breadwinner of the house with seven of us in the family, and I work the one job at the restaurant and bar just to feed the family.”

Chilia could not complete his secondary school after he was forced to drop out when his mother lost her tourism business. His father is unable to work after developing a painful back. He used to take on seasonal jobs picking apples in Australia and New Zealand.

He said coming to COP27 was his first opportunity to travel, but the experience left him enriched. He had learnt so much about climate change and could not wait to tell his village about restoring lost coral reefs.

“I love snorkelling, and when I go snorkelling, I do not see any coloured reefs anymore, but we can do a lot to restore our coral reefs that we are losing because of climate change.”

The Island of Vanuatu relies on coral ecosystems for their economic, livelihood, and coastal protection benefits. A rise in ocean temperatures has led to coral bleaching, while acidification has reduced the availability of calcium minerals in the water that corals need to grow and repair themselves.

“I have a dream – even though my dream has been broken because I did not get to finish my year 10 at school and had to get a job to help my family,” said Chilia. “But I want to bring (the world’s) attention to climate change,” said Chilia, who believes that his activism as a member of Greenpeace Australia Pacific will help make a difference.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Excerpt:

UN Resident Coordinator on his SDGs outreach discussing Goal 13 with boat owners in Tombo, a coastal fishing community not far from Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Credit: RCO Sierra Leone

By Babatunde A. Ahonsi
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, Nov 14 2022 (IPS)

Sierra Leone is among the 10 percent of countries in the world that are most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of climate change, and presently one of the least able to cope with the effects.

Unpredictable weather patterns, severe flooding, mudslides, and associated crop failures are becoming more frequent even as the country is witnessing trees being cut down at a faster rate than being planted.

And climate scientists tell us that if the world does not achieve a sharp drop in global warming in the next eight years, the natural calamities that we have seen in recent times around the world will be child’s play compared to what is to come.

COP27, the 27th Conference of State Parties, taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt is the annual gathering by the United Nations of governments, scientists, and other key stakeholders from all countries of the world to review progress in efforts to avert environmental catastrophe, against commitments contained in global climate action agreements.

Africa, the global region which has contributed the least to the ongoing climate crisis, has experienced some of the worst losses and damages attributable to human-induced climate change.

So, as the continent hosts this year’s COP, the key preoccupation will be generating a roadmap for the implementation of unfulfilled promises from previous COPs. This is especially in relation to the pending financial pledges made by rich countries to support developing countries like Sierra Leone to lessen the impact of and adapt to climate change.

A bird’s eye view of Lumley beach, Aberdeen community in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Credit: RCO Sierra Leone

The point must be made that the issue of fulfilling climate finance obligations of high-income countries to developing countries is far less a matter of aid dependency than of climate justice.

There will justifiably be a significant push for increased funding for adaptation and resilience projects in low- and lower-middle-income countries to generate positive impacts towards economic growth, social progress, and enhanced resilience to climate change.

A specific demand will be for wealthier countries to make good on their $100 billion annual climate finance commitment and on the doubling of adaptation support to $40 billion by 2025 agreed to in Glasgow last year during COP26.

Among the other concrete proposals to be strongly canvassed at COP27 is the establishment and activation within the next five years of an early warning system for climate emergencies that would cover the whole world.

Another is a pipeline of bankable climate-smart projects (around 400) in areas such as agriculture, energy, transportation, digital technologies and platforms, and organic products. There will also be much attention to decisions and actions, especially financing, to address ‘loss and damage’ that are beyond countries’ abilities to cope with.

Sierra Leone, like many developing countries, is today beset by a multi-faceted crisis of food insecurity, near-debt distress, galloping cost of living, and energy deficit which may be limiting attention to the clear and present danger posed by the climate crisis to humanity.

But, given that the prevailing challenges cannot be addressed with presently available development finance and usual ways of doing things, now is the time for the country to maximally exploit opportunities to benefit from innovative climate finance and sustainability solutions.

There must be a shift in policy mindset towards integrated approaches that simultaneously address two or more issues related to livelihoods, employment generation, human capital development, public health, environmental protection, gender equality, food security, and energy access.

One simple example is solar energy interventions that directly link with improved agro-processing operations, potable water sources, health care delivery, and Internet connectivity for secondary schools in targeted districts.

Even more innovative and ambitious nature-positive examples of integrated sustainable development solutions will be highlighted, discussed, and promoted at COP27.

As the top UN leader in Sierra Leone, a key part of my role has been to bring together a diverse set of stakeholders including the national authorities, international organizations and partners from across civil society to advance dialogue on climate action and map out the country’s shared goals ahead COP27.

Earlier last month, I convened a Climate Action Dialogue together with the Government of Sierra Leone, the UK High Commission and the European Union to strengthen the participation and enhance the coordination of Sierra Leone’s high-level delegation to COP27.

This Dialogue was born out of discussions I had with the British Government – who held the Presidency of the previous UN Climate Conference- COP26 in Glasgow last year.

Building on the momentum from Glasgow, I carried on these discussions with the British Government and European Union this year to develop a diverse program of speakers for the Climate Action Dialogue, which highlighted key priorities and potential actions for the private sector, NGOs, development partners, and government.

By convening these top authorities in Sierra Leone together, this Dialogue helped focus efforts on the concrete ways Sierra Leone could leverage its impressive natural assets (including forests, agricultural assets, water resources, biodiversity, and solar endowment) to generate access to climate finance and advance nature-based solutions for driving its economic recovery and long-term development plan.

The Dialogue also provided an important platform for stakeholders to discuss how Sierra Leone could benefit more from global climate funds. Ahead of this engagement, my team at the Resident Coordinator’s Office prepared a Climate Action Partnerships Brief that was provided to all attendees.

It was clear from these open discussions and constructive exchanges that Sierra Leone’s rich natural resources could be better used to leverage the finance and technologies the country needs for inclusive, green, and sustainable economic growth, rather than exporting key resources cheaply as primary products.

Discussions are now underway between the three hosting development partners- the UN, UK, and EU- to plan follow-up events which delve deeper into specific areas of Sierra Leone’s climate commitments.

It is our hope that Sierra Leone’s participation in COP27 (which concludes November 18) will help to fast-track implementation of the crucial next steps agreed at the Dialogue related to climate finance models, and prompt the rapid scaling up of ongoing climate-smart projects around the country.

This includes forest conservation, solar and hydro energy generation and distribution, fisheries and coastal management, and agriculture and agro-processing. It should also strengthen commitment to deliver on the promise the country has made to end deforestation by 2030.

As with the rest of the world, climate change is affecting every aspect of the Sierra Leonean economy and society. COP27 will therefore also serve to underline for everyone the fact that urgent climate action is not the responsibility of government alone.

So, we encourage delegates to the Conference, not only from government, but also from civil society organizations, the private sector, mass media, international development agencies, and higher educational institutions, to return to the country with renewed commitment and ambition to join hands to pursue urgent climate actions and engage fully on climate finance.

Only in this way, can the country truly address the climate crisis in a manner that safeguards national environmental resources, builds resilience to climate-related shocks, and advances sustainable development that leaves no one behind.

Babatunde A. Ahonsi is UN Resident Coordinator in Sierra Leone.
Source: UN Sustainable Development Group

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A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Credit: UNICEF/Asad Zaidi

By Mariz Tadros
BRIGHTON, UK, Nov 14 2022 (IPS)

Climate change reductionism – assuming the causes and the redress for those suffering the worst impacts of extreme weather lies with climate change alone – undermines the rights of religiously marginalised persons, but broadening whose rights are being advocated for in climate change can offer redress.

As COP27 negotiations continue, we must be alive to the widespread discrimination behind why some face more devastation than others, and pursue climate justice policies sensitive to the religiously marginalised and to the freedom of religion or belief (Forb).

Climate change and religion

In response to the devastating floods in Pakistan, a top political leader in the Sindh province of Pakistan attributed the destruction caused as a punishment by God, and added that the situation will improve if the people turn away from their sins.

This is just one example of how across the globe now power holders are weaponising religion to cover up unaccountable governance. But power holders’ use of religion to cover up for their failures only worsens the situation for the vulnerable, many of whom happen to be religious minorities.

Sindh province has one of the largest concentrations of people living in extreme poverty in Pakistan, and one of the highest religious minority populations (Hindu and Christian), in the country. This religious minority population also happen to be among the poorest, especially since they belong to the scheduled castes.

Secretary-General António Guterres (right, back to camera) along with Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan visit the National Flood Response and Coordination Centre in Islamabad. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Like other Pakistanis in Sindh, the religiously marginalised poor have lost everything due to the unprecedented monsoon floods but they experience an added vulnerability: systemic discrimination on account of their religious identity.

This is manifest in their exclusion from large scale poverty alleviation programmes as found in recent research. This underlying vulnerability and discrimination is why it is wrong to attribute the devastation that religiously ‘otherised’ people experience in the face of natural disasters to climate change alone.

Climate change reductionism

A recent report by the UK’s International Development Committee argues that climate change is also a driver of religious discrimination and mass atrocities because of competition to control natural resources and wealth in conditions of scarcity.

The recognition the report gives to the interconnections between environmental, political, economic and social phenomena is very much welcome, but attributing the causes of atrocities or religious cleansing to climate change alone is anathema to the protection of persons’ freedom of religion or belief.

Climate change reductionism in this way assumes the causes – and therefore redress – of all evils lie with climate.

As Rigg and Mason suggest, climate science reductionism omits the role that structural factors such as “market forces, discriminatory policies, state corruption and inefficiency, and historical marginality play in people’s lived experience”.

Climate change may in some circumstances accentuate the impact of religious inequalities but we need to press on for accountability of power holders who deliberately exclude and ‘otherise’ those who are different through their discourses, policies and practices.

Religious and cultural beliefs benefiting the environment

In the name of countering climate change, we should also never pit sustainability against inclusivity in development policies and practices. Highlighted by an Amnesty International warning ahead of COP27, there are risks from climate protection strategies that exclude indigenous people, whose norms and beliefs are held sacred, even if it is not termed “religion”.

Research from the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development (CREID) showed how the Uganda Wildlife Authority forbade indigenous people access to particular territories containing religious shrines, out of the belief that they were destroying the flora and fauna.

When the Bamba and Bakonjo people of Uganda were allowed to practice some of the religious and customary knowledge, this actually led to greater protection of the biodiversity and integrity of the habitat.

This shows that when people experience intertwining inequalities, including marginalisation based religion or belief, it’s not only that they become vulnerable to prejudice, but opportunities for building resilience to the effects of climate change are missed.

This does not mean that all expressions of people’s religious practices or beliefs are conducive to preserving the environment, we know this is not the case. However, another example can be found in the Middle East where extreme weather events have wreaked havoc on crops.

Here, the Copts – the largest religious minority in the region – have developed a system of how the land is to be harvested to remove social stigma and make sure that no one – Muslim or Copt- goes without.

While we know a multitude of measures are needed to minimize the impact of climate change on crops, the benefits of adapting the knowledge and heritage practices of those whose religious heritage has been side-lined are for everyone- not just the members of the religious minority.

So, whether it is powerful leaders wrongly weaponizing religion in order to avoid accountability and when climate change-related disasters strike, discrimination against religious minorities driving greater vulnerability to its impacts, or beliefs and knowledges of the land – prejudice against the religiously marginalized actually has a great deal to do with climate change.

Therefore, during this month’s COP27 climate summit (which concludes November 18) , freedom of religion or belief must be considered in policies to redress climate inequalities if we are serious about going beyond climate change reductionism and truly advancing climate justice.

Professor Mariz Tadros is Research Fellow at Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Director of CREID

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Representatives of native women from Latin America and other continents pose for pictures at COP27, taking place in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh. Some 250 indigenous people from around the world are attending the 27th climate conference. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
SHARM EL-SHEIKH , Nov 12 2022 (IPS)

Indigenous peoples are no longer content just to attend as observers and to be seen as victims of the impacts of the current development model, at the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) on Climate Change. That is why they came to the summit in Egypt with an agenda of their own, including the demand that their communities directly receive funding for climate action.

Billions of dollars in aid funds are provided each year by governments, private funds and foundations for climate adaptation and mitigation. Donors often seek out indigenous peoples, who are now considered the best guardians of climate-healthy ecosystems. However, only crumbs end up actually reaching native territories.

“We are tired of funding going to indigenous foundations without indigenous people,” Yanel Venado Giménez told IPS, at the indigenous peoples’ stand at this gigantic world conference, which has 33,000 accredited participants. “All the money goes to pay consultants and the costs of air-conditioned offices.”

“International donors are present at the COP27. That is why we came to tell them that direct funding is the only way to ensure that climate projects take into account indigenous cultural practices. We have our own agronomists, engineers, lawyers and many trained people. In addition, we know how to work as a team,” she added.

Giménez, a member of the Ngabe-Buglé people, represents the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama (CONAPIP) and is herself a lawyer.

That indigenous peoples, because they often live in many of the world’s best-conserved territories, are on the front line of the battle against the global environmental crisis is beyond dispute.

For this reason, a year ago, at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, the governments of the United Kingdom, Norway, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and 17 private donors pledged up to 1.7 billion dollars for mitigation and adaptation actions by indigenous communities.

However, although there is no precise data on how much of that total has actually been forthcoming, the communities say they have received practically nothing.

“At each of these conferences we hear big announcements of funding, but then we return to our territories and that agenda is never talked about again,” Julio César López Jamioy, a member of the Inga people who live in Putumayo, in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest, told IPS.

“In 2021 we were told that it was necessary for us to build mechanisms to access and to be able to execute those resources, which are generally channeled through governments. That is why we are working with allies on that task,” he added.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro (grey suit) poses for pictures with a group of Latin American indigenous people at the end of a meeting they held in Sharm el-Sheikh during COP27. CREDIT: Courtesy of Jesús Amadeo Martínez

López Jamioy, who is coordinator of the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), believes it is time to thank many of the non-governmental organizations for the services they have provided.

“Up to a certain point we needed them to work with us, but now it is time to act through our own organizational structures,” he said.

Latin American presence

There is no record of how many indigenous Latin Americans are in Sharm el-Sheikh, a seaside resort in the Sinai Peninsula in southern Egypt, thanks to different sources of funding, but it is estimated to be between 60 and 80.

Approximately 250 members of indigenous peoples from all over the world are participating in COP27, in the part of the Sharm el-Sheikh Convention Center that hosts social organizations and institutions.

From there, they are raising their voices and their proposals to the halls and stands that host the delegates and official negotiators of the 196 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the organizer of these annual summits.

The space shared by the indigenous people is a large stand with a couple of offices and an auditorium with about 40 chairs. Here, during the two weeks of COP27, from Nov. 6 to 18, there is an intense program of activities involving the agenda that the indigenous people have brought to the climate summit, which has drawn the world’s attention.

Panamanian indigenous activist Yanel Venado Giménez poses for a photo at the stand that indigenous peoples from around the world share at COP27, at the Sharm el-Sheikh Convention Center in Egypt. She leads a fund to help indigenous women, one of the few that receive direct financing for Latin American indigenous peoples. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

At the start of the Conference, a group of Latin American indigenous people were received by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. They obtained his support for their struggle against extractive industries operating in native territories and asked him to liaise with other governments.

“Generally, governments make commitments to us and then don’t follow through. But today we have more allies that allow us to have an impact and put forward our agenda,” Jesús Amadeo Martínez, of the Lenca people of El Salvador, told IPS.

The indigenous representatives came to this Conference with credentials as observers – another crucial issue, since they are demanding to be considered part of the negotiations as of next year, at COP28, to be held in Dubai.

The proposal was led by Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, a representative of the Kurripaco people in Peru’s Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), who told a group of journalists that “We existed before the nation-states did; we have the right to be part of the debate, because we are not an environmental NGO.”

Eric Terena of the indigenous people of the same name, who live in southern Brazil, stands in the corridors of the 27th Climate Change Conference in Egypt. He is hopeful about President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, but argues that indigenous peoples must have direct access to environmental and climate funds. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

From beneficiaries to partners?

Native communities have always been seen as beneficiaries of climate action projects in their territories, channeled through large NGOs that receive and distribute the funds.

But back in 2019, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) issued a Policy for Promoting the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (PRO-IP), which explores the possibility of funding reaching native communities more effectively.

Among the hurdles are that project approval times are sometimes too fast for the indigenous communities’ consultative decision-making methods, and that many communities are not legally registered, so they need an institutional umbrella.

Experiments in direct financing are still in their infancy. Sara Omi, of the Emberá people of Panama, told IPS that they were able to receive direct financing for Mexican and Central American communities from the Mesoamerican Fund for capacity building of indigenous women.

“We focus on sustainable agricultural production and in two years of work we have supported 22 projects in areas such as the recovery of traditional seeds. But we do not have large amounts of funds. The sum total of all of our initiatives was less than 120,000 dollars,” she explained.

Omi, a lawyer who graduated from the private Catholic University of Santa María La Antigua in Panama and was able to study thanks to a scholarship, said indigenous peoples have demonstrated that they are ready to administer aid funds.

“Of course there must be accountability requirements for donors, but they must be compatible with our realities. Only crumbs are reaching native territories today,” she complained.

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will participate in the second week of COP27, and this is cause for hope for the peoples of the Amazon jungle, who in the last four years have suffered from the aggressive policies and disregard of outgoing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro regarding environmental and indigenous issues.

“In the Bolsonaro administration, funds that provided financing were closed,” Eric Terena, an indigenous man who lives in southern Brazil, near the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, told IPS. “Now they will be revived, but we don’t want them to be accessed only by the government, but also by us. The systems today have too much bureaucracy; we need them to be more accessible because we are a fundamental part of the fight against climate change.

“We see that this COP is more inclusive than any of the previous ones with regard to indigenous peoples, but governments must understand that it is time for us to receive funding,” said Terena, one of the leaders of the Terena people.

IPS produced this article with the support of Climate Change Media Partnership 2022, the Earth Journalism Network, Internews, and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.

The 7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Nov 9 2022 (IPS)

In this year’s COP 27 two-weeklong summit in Egypt, which concludes November 18, a rough count indicates there will be 40 different sessions organised by, for, and about, religious engagements in/on climate change and related issues. This is likely the highest number of events by and around religious actors, organised at a COP event.

The reason? Religions, religious engagement, interfaith, etc., are the flavour of our geopolitical times. For better or worse.

His Holiness Pope Francis and His Eminence the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar were just addressing a major conference in Bahrain on East-West relations, with the King of Bahrain. After also putting in a similar appearance and speaking together with the President of Kazakhstan, in September. Both countries were hosting major international meetings of religious leaders, in the fanciest of hotels, convened from many corners of the world, replete with lavish food banquets and generous hospitality and care for their every need.

I should know, as I am a most grateful recipient, albeit not a religious leader, but an aspiring servant to religious multilateralism. But I run ahead of myself here.

In convening, countries appear to be competing with Saudi Arabia, which hosted such a seminal gathering (in May 2022, bringing together Buddhist and Hindu faith leaders, for the first time, as equals with their Muslim, Christian and Jewish brethren), as well as with the UAE, Qatar, and Oman, who are also hosting international gatherings of religious leaders this very month.

This year alone, there have been over 50 meetings of religious actors, that is more than 2 per month, and this is not a comprehensive tally.

Each of these major and rather expensive conferences, provides a platform not unlike the UN General Assembly, where each leader gets his (for invariably they are mostly men) time to speak, often eloquently, about their own faith tradition.

Each of these speeches regales with how diligent the efforts of faith/community/organisations are, to secure peace and human dignity for all people. As they remind of the spiritual wisdom each faith upholds, they also speak of past and upcoming initiatives, meant to safeguard dignity for all. Sometimes they also remember to speak about the planet and our responsibility to save it.

As someone who spent decades serving at the United Nations and in diverse international academic and development organisations, and now listening to the religious actors speaking, I find myself asking the same question: if each of these governments, and now these religious bodies, are working so hard and serving so amazingly, why is our world the way it is?

Why are so many governments and peoples and communities at war with one another inside and outside nation-state boundaries? Why are we listening to hate speech from every type of mouth and all types of platforms given ample media attention? Why are arms and drugs the biggest industries?

Why are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer while our planet becomes more bare and parched in one part, and flooded to death, in another? Why is violence of all kinds, inside families and within all communities, a pandemic? Why are medicines, and now even values, a commodity to trade power and privilege with?

Why is nuclear war back on the agenda of consciousness and politics? In short, why do we hate/fear one another one another so much, and so deeply?

Because what ails our multilateral system, in spite of the speeches (and efforts) of political leaders (in and out of electoral times for those fortunate enough to have genuine elections of their national leaders), and now also in spite of the speeches and works of religious actors, is fundamentally the same: each to his own. Multilateral – as an adjective defined by the Oxford Dictionary, where “three or more groups, nations, etc. take part”, is an endangered species.

The United Nations, the premier multilateral entity of 193 governments, is struggling to strengthen multilateralism, yet not necessarily by looking internally at its own behemoth infrastructures, or culture. Ever seen an organogramme of the United Nations system? One should. It is a universe of wonder where every human and non-human thought and action appears to have a dedicated office or structure of some sort.

But before we point fingers at the political multilaterals (who are remarkably good at either ignoring faith communities, or using them to the hilt, or both), we need to ask ourselves, how often do we see or hear of “three or more” religious institutions (not of the same faith) working together to actually deliver needs to diverse peoples around the world?

The answer is, that beyond the speeches, the lavish meetings and innumerable projects, multilateral religious collaboration (where money and efforts from many and diverse are pooled to serve, together, the needs of all, regardless of gender, national, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation) remains rare.

Please do not misunderstand: religious institutions are working to serve hundreds of millions of people on every area of need, humanitarian and development – and now also political. Just as Indigenous Peoples are the original carers of all nature, religious leaders and institutions are the original carers for myriad human needs.

There is plenty of evidence about this. HIV and AIDS, Ebola and the Covid pandemic highlighted how critical religiously managed health infrastructure is to communities – rich and poor. A glance at the education sectors, psycho-social care, migrants and displaced peoples, and other humanitarian areas of need, will show clearly that religious institutions still serve many, widely, and in the remotest areas.

So, it is not a dearth of service to humanity that diverse faith actors need to come to terms with. It is the famine of multireligious collaborative services – as in giving and doing together. At Religions for Peace, for over half a century of supporting interreligious platforms serve the common good in over 95 countries, we live the challenges of multi religious collaboration, on peace mediation, food and human security, migration and displacement, education, gender and women’s empowerment, and trying to save together, the world’s remaining rainforests, through, among other efforts, the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative.

We know that even within the realms of religion, the manner of dealing with these challenges tends to mirror prevailing colonial mindsets, with tendencies to give prominence to one religion, insistence on singular branding, and jockeying for more political influence and financial resourcing.

More and more faith leaders – young and older – are (rightfully) expecting financial remuneration for their time and energies spent in international work, thus slowly but surely reversing a trend of volunteerism that used to uniquely characterise religious service and giving.

Just as governments are failing to systematically work together as inhabitants and leaders of one planet, and just as too many civil society groups and corporations compete for branding and ‘market share’, so too, do religious organisations.

Some religious entities are replicating a secular catastrophic practice of seeking to build other/new/different/more ‘specialised’ entities and initiatives, rather than shoulder the heavy cross of seeking to work together in spite of the damning challenges (both puns intended). In so doing, many of these religious actors are effectively dispersing efforts.

One of the many lessons of failed multilateralism is that more, or different, or new and/or specialised, may well be the well-intentioned road to hell.

When it comes to actually investing in one another’s work so that they are speaking as one and serving together, many religious leaders and leaders of religious organisations will smile, say some nice words, and move on to the next sermon/meeting/international conference, or nevertheless doggedly pursue their own special/unique initiative(s).

Such that we have now so many religious initiatives, dominated by one or a bilateral religious partnership, or two and a half (relatively tokenistic representation of another faith), working on the same challenges, facing all of humanity.

What ails multilateralism is not the absence of resources, tools, values, the clarity of the crisis, or even the will and creativity to serve. Multilateralism fails when some want only their values, truths, communities, nations, cultures, security needs, and/or specific institutions, to prevail.

And with the failure of multilateralism is a failure of common humanity, and planetary survival.

Prof. Azza Karam is Secretary General, Religions for Peace

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The Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. June 2022. Credit: CIAT/Neil Palmer

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Nov 9 2022 (IPS)

The electoral defeat of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is a triumph for everyone who is concerned about the peril of climate change. Bolsonaro’s well-deserved defeat could help save the Amazon rainforest, which has been ravaged under his criminal rule, and the process of reversing the looming climate change catastrophe can begin

Righting the Wrong

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil represents a historic chance to begin undoing some of the great harm that was inflicted on Brazil’s Amazon rainforest over the last four years.

Since taking office in January 2019, Bolsonaro has ravaged the earth for short-sighted gains, turning back environmental regulations that any thinking human being would wish to preserve in the face of such unprecedented global degradation.

Bolsonaro systematically dismantled environmental protections so that those who could not care less about the environment would be free to clear the land and turn it into pastures without any accountability. The unfolding crisis of the Amazon is a catastrophe for climate change, biodiversity, Indigenous people of the region, and the untold wonders that human science has yet to understand.

A 2020 study published in the journal Nature has shown that if the systematic destruction of the Brazilian Amazon continues unabated, much of it could become an arid savannah, or even “dry scrubland,” within decades given the rate of deforestation, largely due to deliberate and illegal fires that are meant to permanently convert forest into pastureland.

With the devastation of the rainforests has also come the devastation of those Indigenous people whose homelands and livelihood are being destroyed by deforestation.

Just imagine, between August 2020 and July 2021 over 5,000 square miles of rainforest were lost in the Brazilian Amazon – that is an area larger than the land area of Connecticut. In fact, under Bolsonaro the rate of destruction reached a ten-year high, as his administration turned a blind eye to illegal logging, the deforestation of Indigenous land, and, as Amnesty International notes, the “violence against those living on and seeking to defend their territories.”

Under Bolsonaro’s reckless and corrupt rule, his government deliberately “weakened environmental law enforcement agencies, undermining their ability to effectively sanction environmental crime or detect exports of illegal timber,” as Human Rights Watch describes. Fines for illegal logging in the Brazilian Amazon were suspended by presidential decree at the beginning of October 2019.

Illegal seizures of land on Reserves and Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon became routine, as Bolsonaro slashed the budget of agencies that protected the jungle from unauthorized clearing.

Criminal organizations, aptly called “rainforest mafias,” allow cattle ranchers to operate with impunity, and according to the US State Department possess the “logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to protect their interests.”

It is hard to fathom the sheer scale of destruction that was wreaked by Bolsonaro upon the Amazon. Such rampant deforestation is tragic on many levels — it is destroying habitats and countless species being pushed to the brink of extinction when we are already in the midst of a mass extinction of this planet’s animals, insects, and plants.

It is hastening the onslaught of climate change when we are already facing the dire effects of a warming planet. And it is obliterating the lands of Indigenous people who have already suffered and been persecuted and murdered for decades.

To be sure, the extent of devastation of the rainforest under Bolsonaro was so enormous that we can barely begin to comprehend the loss to humanity, to science, and to our knowledge of undiscovered plants and animals that hold the answers to questions of which we have not even dreamt. This is a shameful loss to the entire world and to generations hence.

The Bolsonaro government failed miserably to act as a responsible custodian of the Amazon and Pantanal (the world’s largest tropical wetland located mostly within Brazil, which along with the Amazon has some of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems) — instead it helped in every way it can to hasten this unimaginable devastation.

Dr Michelle Kalamandeen, a tropical ecologist on the Amazon rainforest, observed that “When a forest is lost, it is gone forever. Recovery may occur but never 100% recovery.”

We must bring this travesty to a halt. By this wanton and dismally short-sighted decimation of the rainforests we are depriving humanity of knowledge which could alter medicine, improve our lives and transform the world, from the way we build our cities to the ways we make our homes.

Plant and animal species inspire new technologies, new forms of architecture, new kinds of design and materiality. Yet probably less than 1 percent of rainforest trees and plants have been studied by science — though not less than 25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients. By allowing rampant deforestation to continue, we are doing ourselves and future generations untold and unconscionable harm.

Let us remember that the Amazon does not simply belong to the countries in which it happens to be found – it is not the exclusive resource of those companies that are able to exploit it, appropriate its resources, and destroy it with impunity.

The Amazon is part of our collective patrimony, a heritage beyond price which we are duty-bound to pass on to future generations, regardless of the profits that we may yield from its systematic rape.

And let us make no mistake, or mince words—the Amazon is being raped hour by hour, month by month, year by year, and the world is watching in silence as this violation is repeated daily. The time is running out for us to act in a meaningful way to stop this mindless decimation of one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

With the election of Lula as President of Brazil, we now have a historic opportunity to support and encourage him to immediately start working on a plan to reverse Bolsonaro’s disastrous policies in three main areas: the environment, public security, and scientific discoveries.

First, President Lula should start by prohibiting deforestation, illegal logging, and land grabbing. To that end, he must stop short of nothing to pass a new law to be enshrined in the Brazilian constitution that puts an end to the systematic destruction of the rainforest. The law should include mandatory prison sentences as well as heavy fines to prevent cattle ranchers and illegal loggers from committing such crimes ever again with impunity.

Second, he must develop a comprehensive plan to protect the human rights of Indigenous communities from the criminal networks that use violence, intimidation, and terror to cow the locals into silence. He should make such a plan the center of his domestic policy while improving security and providing the necessary funding for environmental agencies to perform their tasks with zeal.

Third, President Lula should invite the global scientific community to further study the wonders of the Amazon and in partnership with them initiate scores of scientific projects from which the whole world would benefit, while preserving the glory of the Amazon as one of the central pillars in the fight against climate change.

Finally, President Biden, who understands full well the danger that climate change poses, should provide political support and financial assistance to President Lula to help him reverse some of the damage that was inflicted on the Amazon by his predecessor.

President Lula must view his rise to power and the responsibility placed on his shoulders as nothing less than a holy mission that will help save the planet from the man-made looming catastrophes of climate change.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

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Young climate activists take part in demonstrations at the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland last year. Credit: UN News/Laura Quiñones
 
In a statement released last month a group of UN independent human rights experts said authorities in Egypt must ensure civil society can safely and fully participate in the COP27 UN climate change conference, expressing alarm over restrictions ahead of the summit.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 8 2022 (IPS)

The COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh has triggered a negative fallout for Egypt’s authoritarian regime which stands accused of human rights abuses — and has been widely condemned for its longstanding repressive campaign against dissidents and civil society organizations (CSOs).

Writing in the current issue of Time magazine, Sahar Aziz, a professor at Rutgers University in the US, says “the Egyptian government has given summit access only to local governmental NGOs that support the regime”.

The Egyptian regime, he points out, has treated civil society as “enemies of the state”.

COP27 should be an opportunity for Egypt to lead by example. Instead, hosting the event seems like a political cover for its self-defeating repression of civil society, writes Aziz, author of ‘The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom’.

In a hard-hitting statement released last week, Amnesty International (AI) said the arrest of hundreds of people in the past two weeks alone, in connection to calls for protests during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), is a reminder of the grim reality of Egypt’s policy of mass arbitrary detention to crush dissent.

At least 151 detainees are currently being investigated by the Supreme State Security Prosecution, while hundreds more have faced shorter arrests and questioning.

“The arrest of hundreds of people merely because they were suspected of supporting the call for peaceful protests raises serious concerns over how the authorities will respond to people wishing to protest during COP27 – an essential feature of any UN climate conference”.

“The Egyptian authorities must allow peaceful demonstrators to gather freely and refrain from using unlawful force or arbitrary arrests to deter protests,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director.

“World leaders arriving in Sharm El-Sheikh for COP27 must not be fooled by Egypt’s public relations (PR) campaign. Away from the dazzling resort hotels, thousands of individuals including human rights defenders, journalists, peaceful protesters and members of the political opposition continue to be detained unjustly,”

“They must urge President Abdelfattah al-Sisi to release all those arbitrarily held for exercising their human rights. As a matter of urgency, this should include imprisoned activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, who today escalated his hunger strike to stop drinking water.”

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, told IPS that hosting a global conference such as COP 27 places a special obligation on Egypt’s government to respect and enable the exercise of fundamental freedoms as per international law.

“The right to protest peacefully and the right against arbitrary detention are essential elements of international law. In the present instance, Egypt’s government can easily order the release of arbitrarily imprisoned prisoners of conscience and allow protests to take place without impediments as a sign of good faith,” he declared.

In a joint op-ed piece last week, Gadir Lavadenz, Global Coordinator, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice and Lidy Nacpil, Executive Director, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, write: climate conferences are increasingly becoming spaces for greenwashing of not just the big polluters’ crimes, but also of the regimes and presidencies hosting COP.

“COP27 is taking place in the Southern Sinai city of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and as all eyes turn to Egypt, the campaigns to Free Alaa and other political prisoners, as well as for civic space to open up in Egypt, is gaining momentum”.

At a UN press briefing November 7, several questions were raised about reports that the official COP app apparently requires access to the user’s location, their email, and their photos.

“This is in Egypt, but it’s a UN run conference. What is the UN’s view on the fact that this seems to be trolling for sensitive data and could be tracking people?”

And secondly, the wi fi at COP, which is a UN conference, is apparently restricting access to human rights organizations and some news organizations. What’s your reaction to those?”

In her response, Stéphanie Tremblay, Associate Spokesperson, said: “We have seen these reports. Let me start with the app. First of all, this app does not belong to the UN, so I will not have more comments on that.”

“But one thing that is important to note is that the UN itself through the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] has an app, and everyone at the UN has been encouraging everyone to download and use this app”.

And then, as a general rule, “we advocate freedom of information, freedom of the press. That applies to everywhere around the world. For us, access is important, and we want to make sure that everyone that has to work is able to do the work they are there to do to the best”, said Tremblay.

Meanwhile, in its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said Egyptian authorities escalated the use of abusive Emergency State Security Courts to prosecute peaceful activists and critics who joined thousands of dissidents already in the country’s congested prisons.

And Courts issued death sentences in mass trials, adding to the sharply escalating number of executions.

“The government in January issued implementing regulations for the 2019 NGO law that codified draconian restrictions on independent organizations. The authorities failed to appropriately investigate a high-profile gang-rape, and key witnesses remain under extrajudicial travel bans after being jailed for months in apparent retaliation for coming forward.”

HRW also said the army continues to impose severe restrictions on movement and demolished hundreds of buildings in north Sinai in the name of fighting Wilayat Sinai, a local affiliate of the Islamic State (ISIS).

“These demolitions likely amount to war crimes,” HRW said.

In the run up to the climate summit (6 November-18 November), Egyptian authorities released 766 prisoners following a decision by President al-Sisi to reactivate a Presidential Pardons Committee (PPC) in April, said Amnesty International.

Yet over the same period, Amnesty International has documented the arrest of double that number; 1,540 people who were questioned over the exercising of free speech and association.

In the past six months, Amnesty International has gathered data from dozens of lawyers who regularly attend interrogations and detention renewal hearings, reviewed court decisions and other official documents, and interviewed former prisoners as well as relatives of detainees.

In recent weeks, security forces have arrested and detained hundreds of people in downtown Cairo and town squares across Egyptian cities over content on their phones — a tactic often employed by police ahead of expected protests.

While most were released within hours or days, some were taken to prosecutors, while others remain subject to enforced disappearance according to 11 lawyers in Cairo, Alexandria, Sharqiya and Dakahliya.

In September, Abdelsalam Abdelghani, 55, was arrested at his home on the outskirts of Cairo. Prosecutors questioned him about a Facebook group called “Our right”, including posts calling for protests on 11 November.

The prosecutor questioned him on accusations of spreading “false news” and being “a member of a terrorist group” before ordering his detention pending an investigation, according to Amnesty International.

According to the website of the Egyptian presidency for COP27, anyone wishing to organize protests in Sharm El-Sheikh must inform the authorities 36 hours in advance and show the organizers a COP27 badge.

Protests will only be allowed between 10:00-17:00 in an area far from the conference and monitored by cameras. The authorities have also limited the content of protests to climate related issues.

Amnesty International finds these measures to be unnecessary and disproportionate, aimed at restricting the ability of individuals to protest safely in a way that allows them to be seen and heard.

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A farmer in Nkayi, Zimbabwe, looks at an empty granary following a poor rainy season. Africa is experiencing massive impacts due to climate change. Credit Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
Bulawayo, Nov 7 2022 (IPS)

Africa is counting on COP27 to deliver it from climate change. But will it?

Global leaders from more than 125 countries gather in the resort city of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), from November 6-18, 2022. The UNFCCC is a global treaty mandating signatories to prevent “dangerous human-induced interference with the climate system by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations”.

The Convention puts the responsibility of cutting dangerous carbon emissions on the shoulders of developed countries. The major carbon emission emitters are China, the European Union, the United States, Australia, Japan, India, and Russia.

Africa contributes 3.8 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels and industry. However, it is experiencing significant impacts from climate change.

From Angola to Zimbabwe, cyclones, floods, high temperatures, and droughts are killing and displacing millions of Africa as climate change upends a continent unable to cope with its devastating impacts.

Dubbed the ‘African COP’, COP27 convenes in a changed world experiencing a combination of economic and political crises, including food and fuel crises. There are mixed expectations on how to save the world from a fiery Armageddon as climate change rises. For Africa, more is expected from COP27 than at any other time.

The money and adaptation COP

The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) says Africa is expecting to see the implementation of commitments made at COP26 for advancing the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and addressing the adverse climate change.

“African countries have committed the most ambitious NDCs under the Paris Agreement now the priority should be how to implement these targets. And for these, developed countries should deliver on their climate finance pledges,” Selam Kidane Abebe, Legal Advisor to the AGN, explained.

Abebe contended that the special needs and special circumstances of Africa are a priority for the AGN, as the recognition was reflected under the UNFCCC decisions. Such recognition is also important as Africa contributes less of the total historical and current emissions, and climate change is impacting Africa’s development trajectory, so even if African countries have strong development plans, their trajectory is going to be impacted by the adverse impacts of climate change,” she said, noting that African countries were investing up to 9% of the GDP on adaptation, money that should be invested in development sectors.

In 2009, developed countries committed to giving $100 billion annually until 2020 to help developing countries reduce emissions and cope with climate change. The money never came, and this target has been moved to 2023. Will it ever arrive?

“We hope so because it is the responsibility of developed countries to come forward with it,” Ambassador Wael Aboulmagd, Special Advisor to the COP27 President, told a media briefing in the buildup to COP27 last week.

“In all reality $100 billion is not going to solve the problem; it is not even close to addressing a fraction of the climate needs… the numbers are in trillions. The overall financial landscape needs to be revisited,” Aboulmagd noted, convinced that developed countries must be nudged to find a workable solution in climate finance.

Loss and damage

Finance is at the heart of the COP27 negotiations. Africa is anxious for a solution to the issue of loss and damage and is pushing for finance to address loss and damage as a result of global warming.

At COP27, the argument is that developed countries largely responsible for climate change should pay for the loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure, not to mention economic and cultural losses endured by developing countries that do not have the means to deal with the impacts of climate change.

An argument has been toyed with is that why not allow African countries to raise their emissions levels and develop their economies as developed countries did in industrializing? In Egypt, Africa is hoping to get commitments towards a specific loss and damage facility. Developed countries are reluctant to pick up the tab.

While countries have strengthened their commitments to tackle the climate crisis, climate change is not letting up. Floods in Nigeria,  Pakistan, and South Africa, droughts in Kenya and Somalia, and food crises in the Horn of Africa have led to massive deaths and huge damage to homes and infrastructure that cannot be recovered. Who will pay for the climate damage?

“COP27 must provide a clear and time-bound roadmap on closing the finance gap for addressing loss and damage, ” UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said last week at the launch of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report. He argued that: “This will be a central litmus test for success at COP27”.

Climate change is hitting Africa hard, and extreme weather could cost the continent $50 billion annually by 2050, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Human activities, largely the burning of fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil, have released emissions that are causing global warming.

According to scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), life would be threatened should global temperatures rise beyond 1.8C. The Paris Agreement pledges have meant to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

The COP Presidency is convinced a balanced approach that meets various interests is needed. Questions abound on what should be the arrangement for loss and damage,  what kind of funding entity will be there, and who shoulders liability and compensation.

“As the COP27 Presidency, we are impartial and want all parties to be on the same page to agree and address all these issues. I  think we have a good chance of doing that at this COP,” he said, expressing optimism that loss and damage will be on the agenda.

Hot energy finance

Despite some countries developing new and revising their NDCs, to raise their emission reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement, switching to clean energy and phasing out coal has been slow. Rising fuel prices as a result of the Ukraine war have flipped the script. Some developed countries are increasing subsidies for fossil fuels, while others have fired up coal plants and natural gas lines to fill the energy gap. Even China has recently approved new coal mines.

But should Africa – yearning to boost industrialization – abandon fossil fuel dependence and join the race for renewables?

“The speed of this energy transition should not be the same for every country around the world, many African countries are languishing in extreme poverty, and they make the case that if we are being told to keep that resource underground for the global good then the international community has to come up with a package to allow us otherwise to eliminate poverty and pursue our sustainable development goals,” opined Aboulmagd.

He said while there is a global case for emissions reduction targets and transition to renewables, developing countries cannot just be told to quit fossil fuels without financial support to go green. A tailored approach for every country, depending on its circumstances, is called for.

“It is essentially telling people to stop having energy; by the way, Sub-Saharan Africa has less than 20 percent access to energy in their entire population. We need to make sure that when we make a demand of a country it is a reasonable one that they can reasonably be expected to do without almost devastating their development objectives and poverty reduction elimination objective,” he urged.

Time for talking is over; action now

A UN report released last week found that the world is off track in meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures below 1.5°C by the end of the century.  The Emissions Gap Report 2022 warns that the window is closing and that the world must cut carbon emissions by 45 percent to avoid global catastrophe because governments have failed to effect adequate cuts as pledged since COP26 in Glasgow.

The report finds that, despite a decision by all countries at the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, UK (COP26) to strengthen Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), action has been poor and ambition low that the world could be facing a temperature rise of above the Paris Agreement goal of well below 2°C. The report shows that current policies alone will lead to a 2.8°C temperature rise highlighting the gap between actions and promises.

“Climate adaptation may not seem like a priority right now,” says Inger Andersen, United Nations Environment Programme, Executive Director, opined. “Even if all commitments are implemented immediately, the reality is that climate change is going to be with us decades into the future. And the poorest keep paying the price for our inaction. It is, therefore, imperative that we put time, effort, resources, and planning into adaptation action.”

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A Clean Energy Ministerial coalition designed to stimulate global demand for low carbon industrial materials. Credit: UNIDO

By Rana Ghoneim
VIENNA, Nov 7 2022 (IPS)

Ahead of this year’s COP27 in Egypt, industry and government representatives from 15 developing countries across Asia, Latin America and Africa met in a series of consultations about the challenges and opportunities they face in decarbonizing some of their most energy intensive industries like steel, cement and concrete.

A report from these consultations – which were organized by the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), where I work – will be released during COP27’s Decarbonisation Day (Friday 11 November) and should be widely-read by decision-makers across energy, environment and industrial sectors.

During these meetings, it was evident that the pace of progress so far is too slow and that puts us at real risk of not meeting global climate commitments. It simply won’t be sufficient for industrialized countries to lower emissions within their boundaries and enforce restrictions for products entering their markets. This must happen everywhere.

Global action and new forms of inter-sectoral cooperation are urgently needed to address critical questions including: what are the opportunities for emissions reductions, and what is needed to deliver these reductions in the fastest and most economical way?

How do we speed up the development and implementation of new carbon-cutting technologies – and ensure that they are widely accessible and affordable, including to small and medium sized enterprises?

Currently, many developing country governments do not have reliable and up-to-date data on the emissions of their different industries and how they compare internationally. Relatively little has been established so far in the way of infrastructure to facilitate the widespread introduction of new and emerging technologies for industrial decarbonization.

Access to and know-how about low-carbon technologies is largely concentrated within industrialized countries and large multinational companies.

This must change. For industrial decarbonization efforts to succeed, we need to see significantly increased investments in research and development into new technologies – but we also need to scale up the deployment of technologies that exist but are not yet widely available, including those for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS).

We also need to much more widely implement strategies and technologies that are already available and affordable – including on energy efficiency, which lowers the demand for energy including from renewable sources.

This likely requires new funding for technical assistance to help make markets in developing countries ready and able to implement low-carbon technologies. It’s not just about funding individual projects, but about really coming up with more meaningful ways to partner around spreading technology our planet urgently needs. Industrialized countries cannot leave developing ones to ‘do this on their own’.

Some of the steel and cement (which is also used to make concrete) businesses working in developing countries are multinational companies which are bringing decarbonizing technologies into their operations from abroad. This is a good thing.

But there are also local companies – including within the supply chains of these multinationals – which need to be involved in order to make decarbonization succeed.

In India, for example, more than half of the steel manufacturing industry is small and medium sized enterprises without the same access to these technologies. Does this local market currently have the technical capacity to adopt and service new hydrogen fuel installations, for example?

Unfortunately, the answer is: Not really.

In many cases, these local companies will likely be unaware of the need to actually change their practices to move towards something that’s low-carbon – let alone how to do this and what technology options exist to help them. The speed of change needed means that the world cannot wait for them to do this alone.

Governments everywhere have a role to play here, in ensuring that their policy frameworks drive decarbonization, promote the right technologies and prevent the proliferation of production processes that aren’t low-carbon.

Imagine: If construction products are in demand in a developing country and they’re not already or sufficiently available on the market, a company or investor may see an opportunity to set up a new business – and if stringent regulations aren’t in place, they might do this using outdated technology with higher emissions.

Decarbonization is not the mandate of small steel and cement manufacturers, as participants noted in the pre-COP27 Asia consultation, or their area of expertise.

It is an area that requires collaboration across different sectors – including to get better and more detailed data, and measurement, reporting and verification frameworks on emissions that can help guide government, and industry, decision-making.

Steel and cement companies might often be seen by some of the public as ‘bad guys’. Globally, these sectors do currently contribute about 50% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

But they produce essential materials to build our houses, schools and cities and are needed for our growing communities. The demand should not be to stop production today, but to make it low-carbon today.

Without more meaningful global partnerships on industrial decarbonization, there’s a big risk that we won’t be able to deliver on our climate commitments. We cannot afford this.

Countries and industries globally need to move all together towards the same climate goals at the same time. Cooperation – including on policy, infrastructure development, and technology – will be key to doing this.

Rana Ghoneim is the Chief of the Energy Systems and Infrastructure Division, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna.

Country consultations mentioned in this op-ed, which will be released during COP27’s Decarbonization Day (Friday 11 November), will be available on the website of UNIDO’s Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator.

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Aerial view of the dwindling ice on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten
 
Some of the world’s most iconic glaciers are set to disappear by 2050, according to a new study by UNESCO, which highlights the accelerated melting of glaciers in World Heritage sites. November 2022

By Gadir Lavadenz and Lidy Nacpil
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 7 2022 (IPS)

The 27th Conference Of Parties (COP27) on Climate Change comes at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges due to the magnitude and the interconnected nature of our multiple structural crises. The world’s average temperature is now at 1,1℃.

For many years now, we have been experiencing irreversible damage to the planet, and the loss of homelands, cultures, ecosystems, on a daily basis. Record-breaking heat has hit North America, Europe, China, Australia, India and Pakistan, sparking wildfires in many places. More than a third of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991 to 2018 occurred as a result of human-caused global warming.

European and Latin American cities are among the worst affected by summer heat deaths due to the climate crisis. Terrible floods have swept Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, and South Africa. Super typhoons have brought untold damage to people and communities in the Philippines, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the gulf and southern areas of the United States.

But does COP really hold any value anymore?

We have been seeing consistent efforts to dilute the outcomes of previous climate change conferences, often driven by the world’s fossil fuel addiction and intensive lobbying of big polluters prioritizing their agenda of greed and profit over the lives of billions of frontline communities suffering the devastating impact of climate crisis daily.

At COP 26, the Glasgow Outcomes were presented as if they were more relevant than the Paris Agreement (which is legally binding). The UK presidency had enough time to build up a narrative around false solutions, including the charade of net zero targets for all by 2050 (undermining again the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) through carbon offsets and nature-based solutions that further continue with the agenda of commodification of nature for the profit of the same usual polluters.

World governments, especially rich countries have consistently failed to deliver on their climate finance commitments of $100 billion per year. This annual goal urgently needed by grassroots communities to mitigate and adapt to climate change has not been met even once by the governments.

There has been constant pushback for a loss and damage finance facility and mechanism that can support vulnerable countries and peoples on the ground recover from climate change induced disasters. Loss and damage were only introduced in the COP27 agenda after consistent push by civil society groups globally.

The climate conferences are increasingly becoming spaces for greenwashing of not just the big polluters’ crimes, but also of the regimes and presidencies hosting COP. COP27 is taking place in the Southern Sinai city of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and as all eyes turn to Egypt, the campaigns to Free Alaa and other political prisoners, as well as for civic space to open up in Egypt, is gaining momentum.

As the world leaders and negotiators gather for the summit, it is not only communities in Sinai that continue to suffer from the increasing violence of climate impacts but peoples everywhere, with the most marginalized – peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples, communities in the Global South, frontline communities, women and children – hit first and hardest.

It is imperative that we stand in solidarity with impacted and frontline communities everywhere and reiterate our demands for urgent and drastic action to justly address the climate crisis.

At COP27, DCJ will continue with its struggles and demands for profound social transformation and the achievement of immediate concrete results in terms of drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and enabling peoples to deal with the impacts of the climate crisis.
Like other global crises, climate change arises principally from historically unequal economic and social structures, from practices and policies promoted by rich, industrialized countries, and from systems of production and consumption that sacrifice the needs of the many to the interests of a few.

And it is the communities around the world that have contributed the very least to climate change that are paying the highest price–their lives and livelihoods.

We demand from all governments that if international negotiations are to mean anything, they must deliver outcomes that will prevent catastrophic climate change and ensure just and fair sharing of drastic emission reductions in keeping with the goal of limiting the rise of global average temperature to below 1.5º C.

We demand an end to pursuit and implementation of false solutions disguised in the form of nature-based solutions. We demand that rich countries deliver fully on their obligations to provide adequate and appropriate climate finance on the basis of countries’ responsibility for climate debt and as part of reparations to all affected peoples.

We demand mechanisms that ensure climate finances are rewound to the empowerment and benefit of peoples and communities most impacted by the climate crisis. We demand that developed countries support appropriate technology transfers without intellectual property rights barriers.

Will COP27 be another COP where rich countries and big polluters gather to impede the calls of communities fighting for their lives and livelihood every day? No, we cannot stand back and let that happen. COP27 must deliver a strong message to the world that the multilateral system can still play a role in fighting the climate crisis.

It cannot be remembered as just another meeting, but as a moment to show major progress through real solutions. It must generate outcomes towards an urgent reset of the system. A moment to abandon the old, profiteering, polluting world order, and a time to reimagine and rapidly implement global collaboration that centers equity, science, humanity.

We don’t have to tell you what another failed COP will mean for people and the planet.

Gadir Lavadenz is Global Coordinator, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice;
Lidy Nacpil is Coordinator, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, Manila

IPS UN Bureau

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Corals and coral reefs are found around the islands and atolls of the Pacific. In Vanuatu, the government, with the support of SPC, implemented a coral reef climate change adaptation project based on coral gardening. Photo credit: SPC

By Catherine Wilson
Sydney, Nov 5 2022 (IPS)

Today, the window of opportunity for scaled-up global climate action to prevent disastrous global warming and build resilience in the most vulnerable nations is closing fast. And a major impediment to reducing emissions and accelerating climate adaptation is both lack of financial investment and major bureaucratic hurdles to accessing those funds that are available.

For Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS), the failure of the international community to provide US$100 billion per year to address climate change impacts in the developing world, a pledge made thirteen years ago, has grave consequences. And it will be a major issue for Pacific leaders at the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference due to start in Egypt on Sunday.

On Kadavu and Ra Islands in Fiji, SPC supported the implementation of an Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) and climate change resilience project. Photo credit: SPC

“The Pacific is at the frontline of the impacts of climate change. Climate finance is critical to allow mitigation and adaptation actions, yet the region is suffering from a lack of access to the climate finance already committed to global mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. Due to global priority setting or global priorities, it is not flowing to where it is needed most,” Dr Stuart Minchin, Director-General of the regional development organization, Pacific Community, in Noumea, New Caledonia, told IPS. “It seems the polluters are setting the rules, and consequently, the flow of climate finance is more like a drip feed than the torrent that is required to meet the challenges of the region.”

Island nations scattered across the Pacific Ocean are among the world’s most exposed to climate extremes, such as rising air temperatures, ocean acidification, more damaging cyclones, heatwaves and the critical loss of biodiversity, water and food security, the IPCC reported this year. The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat estimates that the region needs US$1 billion per year to implement its climate adaptation goals and US$5.2 billion annually by 2030.

“Without global funding, Pacific Island countries and territories will not be able to identify and implement climate solutions,” Anne-Claire Goarant, Programme Manager for the Pacific Community’s Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability Programme in Noumea told IPS, adding that the costs will be high. “Already climate-induced disasters are causing economic costs of 0.5 percent to 6.6 percent of annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pacific Island countries. This trend will continue in the future in the absence of urgent climate action. Without adaptation measures, a high island, such as Viti Levu in Fiji, could experience damages of US$23-52 million per year by 2050.”

The unique characteristics of islands, such as small land areas, the very close proximity of many communities, infrastructure and economic activities to coastlines and precarious economies, means that severe weather events can have disastrous impacts. Fifty-five percent of the Pacific Islanders live less than 1 kilometre from the sea, and every year more villages face relocation as their existence is endangered by flooding and sea erosion.  Excessive heat, drought and rainfall are predicted to threaten crop and food production, and by the end of the century, important revenues from Pacific tourism could plummet by 27-34 percent.

The costs of climate adaptation could reach more than 25 percent of GDP in Kiribati, 15 percent of GDP in Tuvalu and more than 10 percent of GDP in Vanuatu. Yet Pacific Island nations are ‘among the least equipped to adapt, putting their economic development and macroeconomic stability at risk,’ reports the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

One of the two largest global sources of climate finance is the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has the mandate to focus on the needs of developing countries, and another, the Adaptation Fund, supports tangible adaptation projects. However, most of the global funding tracked by Oxfam in 2017-2018 did not reach the most fragile nations. Only 20.5 percent of reported finance was allocated to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and 3 percent to Small Island Developing States.

“On financing adaptation in developing countries, what’s happened thus far is not good enough. We need to scale up quite dramatically the ambition within the multilateral development banks and bilateral donors. And we need to work on blended finance, where some public finance leverages private finance, and there is a proper sharing of risks between the private and public sectors,” Mark Carney, the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Finance, has stated.

The Pacific Community is working closely with nations across the region to develop and submit climate funding proposals and support them in implementing projects once finance is approved. In Fiji, Nauru, Tonga and the Solomon Islands, for example, it is supporting projects on the ground to build climate resilience expertise and capacity among smallholder farmers with a Euro 4.6 million grant from the multi-donor Kiwa Initiative.

But many countries in the region are experiencing limited success with funding applications. In the Federated States of Micronesia, financial support is needed for increasing resilience in health, protecting coastal areas, lifeline access roads, and critical infrastructure from climate destruction and improving water security, Belinda Hadley, Team Leader in FSM’s National Designated Authority for the Green Climate Fund explained. But funding remains elusive as the island states struggle with overly difficult and resource-intensive application processes.

“The processes to apply for multilateral climate finance are heavy and complex. This makes accessing climate finance a slow and onerous process. In-country capacities within governments and other institutions are insufficient in the face of such complex processes. Many countries don’t have enough sufficient personnel to meet the burdensome requirements set by the donors,” Dirk Snyman, Co-ordinator of the Pacific Community’s Climate Finance Unit told IPS. “Even after project approval, disbursement of funds can still take one to two years. This does not allow countries to implement their adaptation and mitigation actions within the timeframes required.”

Funders need “to facilitate faster and easier access to climate finance in such a manner that the climate change priorities of Pacific communities, rather than the priorities and policies of the donors, are driving the regional portfolio of climate change projects,” Maëva Tesan, Communications and Knowledge Management Officer for the Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability Programme emphasized.

Snyman said that the situation could be improved if multilateral finance providers made application procedures more streamlined and flexible, changed the current compliance-based approach to a focus on positive project impacts and a dedicated climate fund was established for losses and damages in the region.

These views are echoed by the IMF, which recommends that climate finance providers should recognize ‘the shrinking window of opportunity to address the climate crisis’ and ‘consider further efforts to rebalance the risks to shareholders with the urgency of climate adaptation needs of small and fragile countries.’

The COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on 6-18 November.

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“To force poor countries to repay a loan to cope with a climate crisis they hardly caused is profoundly unfair. Instead of supporting countries that are facing worsening droughts, cyclones and flooding, rich countries are crippling their ability to cope with the next shock and deepening their poverty.” Credit: Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS.

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Nov 4 2022 (IPS)

Just a few days ahead of the UN Climate Conference (COP27) in Egypt (6-18 November), new revelations show how far rich, industrialised countries –those who contribute most to the growing catastrophes- have been lying over their real contributions to climate finance.

The True Value of Climate Finance Is a Third of What Developed Countries Report unveils that many rich countries are using “dishonest and misleading” accounting “to inflate” their climate finance contributions to developing countries – in 2020 by as much as 225%, according to investigations by Oxfam International.

Inflating the figures

The report estimates between just 21-24.5 billion US dollars as the “true value” of climate finance provided in 2020, against a reported figure of 68.3 billion US dollars in public finance that rich countries said was provided (alongside mobilised private finance bringing the total to 83.3 billion US dollars).

Rich countries' contributions not only continue to fall miserably below their promised goal but are also very misleading in often counting the wrong things in the wrong way. They're overstating their own generosity by painting a rosy picture that obscures how much is really going to poor countries

Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International Climate Policy Lead

The global climate finance target is supposed to be 100 billion US dollars a year, an amount which is slightly more than the 83 billion US dollars the world’s biggest nuclear powers spent in one single year– 2021, on such weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, “the combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to 100 billion US dollars,” said already last august the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, adding that it was “immoral” that major oil and gas companies are reporting “record profits”, while prices soar.

“Very misleading”

Moreover, “rich countries’ contributions not only continue to fall miserably below their promised goal but are also very misleading in often counting the wrong things in the wrong way. They’re overstating their own generosity by painting a rosy picture that obscures how much is really going to poor countries,” said Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International Climate Policy Lead.

Mostly loans

“Our global climate finance is a broken train: drastically flawed and putting us at risk of reaching a catastrophic destination. There are too many loans indebting poor countries that are already struggling to cope with climatic shocks.”

There is too much “dishonest” and “shady” reporting. The result is the most vulnerable countries remain ill-prepared to face the wrath of the climate crisis, warned Dabi.

Rich countries’ “manipulation”

Oxfam research found that instruments such as loans are being reported at face value, ignoring repayments and other factors. Too often funded projects have less climate focus than reported, making the net value of support specifically aiming at climate action significantly lower than actual reported climate finance figures.

Currently, loans are dominating over 70% provision (48.6 billion US dollars) of public climate finance, adding to the debt crisis across developing countries.

“To force poor countries to repay a loan to cope with a climate crisis they hardly caused is profoundly unfair. Instead of supporting countries that are facing worsening droughts, cyclones and flooding, rich countries are crippling their ability to cope with the next shock and deepening their poverty.”

Least Developed Countries’ external debt repayments reached 31 billion US dollars in 2020.

Such ‘funding’ is primarily based on loans

“A climate finance system that is primarily based on loans is only worsening the problem. Rich nations, especially the heaviest-polluting ones,” said Dabi.

A key way to prevent a full-scale climate catastrophe is for developed nations to fulfil their 100 billion US dollars commitments and genuinely address the current climate financing accounting holes. “Manipulating the system will only mean poor nations, least responsible for the climate crisis, footing the climate bill,” said Dabi.

Stalling all efforts

Other findings by this global confederation which includes 21 member organisations and affiliates reveal that an average of 189 million people per year have been affected by extreme weather-related events in developing countries since 1991 – the year that a mechanism was first proposed to address the costs of climate impacts on low-income countries.

The report, The Cost of Delay, by the Loss and Damage Collaboration – a group of more than 100 researchers, activists, and policymakers from around the globe – highlights how rich countries have repeatedly stalled efforts to provide dedicated finance to developing countries bearing the costs of a climate crisis they did little to cause.

Six fossil fuel companies

“Analysis shows that in the first half of 2022 six fossil fuel companies combined made enough money to cover the cost of major extreme weather and climate-related events in developing countries and still have nearly $70 billion profit remaining.”

The report reveals that 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries have suffered climate-induced economic losses totalling over half a trillion dollars during the first two decades of this century as fossil fuel profits rocket, leaving people in some of the poorest places on earth to foot the bill.

Super profits. And massive deaths

It also reveals that the fossil fuel industry made enough super-profit between 2000 and 2019 to cover the costs of climate-induced economic losses in 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries, almost sixty times over.

The report estimates that since 1991, developing countries have experienced 79% of recorded deaths and 97% of the total recorded number of people affected by the impacts of weather extremes.

The analysis also shows that the number of extreme weather and climate-related events that developing countries experience has more than doubled over that period with over 676,000 people killed.

The entire continent of Africa produces less than 4% of global emissions and the African Development Bank reported recently the continent was losing between five and 15% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth because of climate change.

Enormous gains

Lyndsay Walsh, Oxfam’s Climate policy adviser and co-author of the report said: “It is an injustice that polluters who are disproportionately responsible for the escalating greenhouse gas emissions continue to reap these enormous profits while climate-vulnerable countries are left to foot the bill for the climate impacts destroying people’s lives, homes and jobs.”

Meanwhile, in addition to manipulating the figures and further indebting the poor, business continues as usual. The largest polluters–the fossil fuels private companies make more and more profits, and rich countries’ politicians are set to increase their subsidies to these fuels to nearly seven trillion by 2025.