The Paris climate change agreement +2 Years
Two years after the Paris Agreement was hailed as a victory in the effort to come to grips with our planet’s rapidly changing climate, Typhoon Damrey slammed in Vietnam over the weekend as if to underline recent reports saying that countries need to do more.
Damrey is the strongest storm to hit Vietnam since 2001 and has killed nearly 30 people, sunk more than 200 boats, mostly small fishing vessels, and inundated parts of the country. It comes at the end of a year which is likely to be the second hottest on record and which saw an unprecedented number of massive hurricanes sweep through the Caribbean. Several Category 5 storms caused over $10 Billion in losses and levelled many islands, including Barbuda which was 90% destroyed by Hurricane Irma in early September. Wildfires, driven by high winds and dry conditions, killed dozens of people in Portugal, Spain, California and other places.
These and other weather-related disasters were driven by an enhanced El Niño effect this year. El Niños occur periodically and are caused by warming ocean temperatures in the mid-Pacific near the equator. Increasingly intense El Niños have been linked to climate change and can lead to droughts in some places and intense storms in others.
For the next two weeks, representatives from nearly all the world’s countries are meeting in Bonn for the 23rd meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 23) to continue the work of fleshing out the Paris Agreement. The accord commits the world to reducing greenhouse gas emissions which are driving climate change to levels that will see global average temperatures remain under 2 degrees Celsius “well below” pre-industrial levels, with efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees.
Last week UN Environment released its annual Emissions Gap Report which shows that, rather than being reduced, overall greenhouse gas releases have increased and we are on track to a 3 degree Celsius world. With this will come increasingly unstable weather and massive inundation of coastal cities which will displace millions of people around the world.
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The people of Small Island Developing States are familiar with this scenario. This year’s COP is being chaired by Fiji, the first time a Pacific country has presided over the process. Led by Fijian President Frank Bainimarama, delegates will have someone overseeing the process who understands clearly what is at stake.
“Wherever we live, we are all vulnerable and need to act,” Bainimarama has said. Climate change is quite simply “the biggest challenge humanity has faced.”
COP 23 is also the first such meeting following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement earlier this year. Nevertheless, American negotiators will be in Bonn since under the rules the withdrawal doesn’t come into force until 2020. Even before Trump made his announcement in June, other countries (and many states and cities) reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, last week the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment was released. Its conclusions are at odds with Administration spokespeople who have said the jury is still out on climate change.
“This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
The evidence may be clear but for COP 23 to make progress, countries need to increase their commitments. The Paris Agreement includes a mechanism to allow national pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to be increased. These rules need to be developed in Bonn before they are finalized next year.
In the bureaucratic parlance of climate negotiations, Bonn was labelled a “facilitative dialogue”. Fiji has renamed it the “talanoa dialogue” after a Pacific island concept of storytelling and talking designed to lead to good decisions.
One of the many decisions needed to keep greenhouse gas emissions under 2 degrees Celsius is to preserve the world’s remaining peatlands.
Peatlands cover less than three percent of the Earth’s surface but are the world’s largest terrestrial stock of organic carbon. Found in about 180 countries, peatlands hold twice as much as all forests and four times as much as the atmosphere. A new UN Environment/GRID-Arendal Rapid Response Assessment will be released next week to show that keeping peatlands intact will help meet the Paris emissions targets.