A Call for Urgency
By Lucia Ravens
Lucia Ravens outside, in front of the COP.
The high-level segment of the Madrid climate talks unfolded with an opening ceremony, on the morning of 10th Dec 2019. This year’s United Nations Climate Change conference and negotiations took place at the IFEMA convention center in Madrid, Spain. The opening ceremony statement by COP 25 President-designate, Her excellency Minister of the Environment of Chile, Carolina Schmidt, said that “climate action has to be fair and this COP must mark a real change of course, a change of direction and ambition, bringing on board new players to the table to commit to carbon neutrality by 2050.” It was a call for urgency for the ambitious agenda.
Teresa Ribera, Minister of Environment of Spain stated, “there has been a social outcry as people want more action” calling for “serious soul searching”. She added that there is capacity in the international community to rise to the challenge even during difficult periods with solidarity, adding that there is a commitment to the climate agenda, commitment to multilateralism and providing a response to the profound consequences of this, while also recognizing that there is inequity, in terms of well-being, welfare and economics. Would the COP hype and agenda items for the meeting live up to the expectations of the youth and their global Friday fire drill protests and/or the globalized climate change activist groups demanding climate change action? In that regard, the chasm was just to deep to find common ground this year.
There were a few goals for the COP25, the Paris agreement, Loss and Damages and Article 6. I managed to attend a few meetings that addressed these goals yet the processes seem slow, arduous and filled with stall tactics. The placement of finishing touches and sorting out the details of the Paris agreement, which technically they have until next year, was on the agenda. In just under a year, the national climate commitments and declarations of how much each country will contribute towards decreasing emissions will have to be submitted in order to ensure the Paris agreement goal of keeping global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius is met. The commitments I speak of here are known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs in United Nations climate change talking terms. The NDC’s were a hot topic and discussed at almost every panel discussion I attended at the numerous NGO booths. They were driven, spirited and in abundance throughout the halls of the blue zone of the convention center. The world was watching, evident by the trending stories on social media. Greta Thunberg was in town to activate the youth and feed the twitter sphere. FEMA Madrid convention hall was the pulse of climate change action at the moment, energized with 25,000 plus attendees dedicated and determined to communicate and commit to climate change action. It seemed that every story or updated COP 25 news feed I read was centered on signaling the world that countries were concentrated on urgency and raising ambition.
What this translates to is there needed to be further and faster emission reduction. This became a focal point and the UN conference updates and reports informed attendees that ministers were disputing this for long hours. These debates concluded with a text that seemed to disillusion hope. The draft text stated that countries should be “invited” to “communicate” instead of “update” or “enhance”. Observing many a meeting where specific words were discussed for hours between countries; I quickly learned the importance of the hyper focused detailed discussions. The latter wording would have meant a weakening in the Paris agreement. All said and done, those advocating for ambition came out ahead but not by much.
There was a feeling among the observers that there wasn’t any sense of urgency at all in the negotiations. For instance, some nine to ten agenda items were clearly pushed to the next COP meeting by facilitators quite early on in the negotiation process. I was quite astonished to observe the push forward. Even though some of these decisions are not needed until next year, or even after that, a feeling of discontent was abound. One of the issues moved to next year was how emissions are transparently reported. I noted that these talks faltered with the blame for this going to China. Although, it seemed like at one point the negotiators were close to a resolve. The deferment was not favorable, but as long as there is a resolution next year this won’t lessen the Paris deal.
The second issue. The issue of how to deal with loss and damages caused by climate change. This was an important question and one in which the negotiation decision makers had to persevere with. There were calls for additional finance. The developed countries did not respond positively to this call due to the angst of becoming financially responsible to the developing world. These talks concluded with the wording being approved by everyone thus creating a hopeful morale amongst the island nations and the developing countries. However, the specific about who will govern this labor will be left to COP26 The final issue was labeled “Article 6”. The issue surrounds voluntary carbon emissions markets that could facilitate countries to meet their pledged CO2 cuts by trading reductions with other countries. This issue gets confusing, complicated and tricky. Around half of all national climate commitments mention some kind of market as one of the ways to achieve their emissions reduction goals. These approaches have the potential to drive cheaper emissions reductions while generating financing to transition to climate neutrality. But — and here is the complicated and tricky part — those rules must be precisely designed so it isn’t possible to defraud such a market. A pathway to deception would be by double-counting. This is when both the buyer and seller of carbon credits count the same emissions reduction in their national climate targets. Another consternation is that the emission reductions under the old Kyoto Protocol could be permitted to be carried forward and counted toward countries’ climate commitments after 2020. The stumbling block there is that “Article 6” is a completely new system with expectantly finer and more stringent rules. Thus, non government organization’s (NGOs) and many countries alike concurred that it was better to risk getting no deal, rather than a bum deal on “Article 6”. The decision has been postponed to next year with no circumvention, it was a ‘no’ deal ending.
The end of the conference was drawing near and the ambitious policy-making goals were not going to be meet but pushed forward to the next COP. The purposeful goals which were called upon for the COP25 were not met. The end result of this Madrid intervention did not even come close to meeting the call of urgency. But, there is still hope. Next year’s COP will be in Glasgow. Hopefulness was plentiful at the United Kingdom pavilion located in the blue zone booth section. I chatted with a few folks they were abuzz with a glimpse into the next COP26. The general opinion was this; due to Brexit the Brits have everything to gain in establishing that the COP26 next November becomes a bona fide triumph and to make certain that the world gets back on course. Thus, COP26 will be a great opportunity for the United Kingdom to say, never mind to Brexit. The UK will once again be able to display themselves as world leaders after the Brexit debacle — not only to the world, but also to the people of their country. I’m looking forward to November 2020 in Glasgow to see how all these issues come to a resolve. I plan on attending as I have been invited by a few new friends from the NGO community to help develop and speak on a panel at next years UNFCCC in Scotland. Cheers!