Tag: COP16

The Climate Show #3: Cancun and cooling

Climate talks heat up in Mexico, snow blankets Britain and much of Europe, and The Climate Show is at the heart of the action. Glenn and Gareth set the scene for COP16 in Cancun and then interview Oxfam NZ’s Barry Coates at the conference to find out how things are shaping up. Gareth explores the link between Arctic climate change and cold winter weather in Western Europe, John Cook debunks that favourite sceptic myth — that the world’s cooling — and we look at the potential for nuclear power to provide part of the solution to decarbonising the power economy.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, or listen direct/download here:

The Climate Show

Follow The Climate Show on Facebook and Twitter, and soon at The Climate Show web site.

Show notes below the fold.

Continue reading “The Climate Show #3: Cancun and cooling”

Coates in Cancun: the stakes are high

This is the first in a series of guest blogs from the Cancun climate conference by Oxfam NZ’s executive director Barry Coates.

I’m sitting in the warm evening air of Cancun after the first day of the climate change talks. It was quite a trip getting here – I came from Timor Leste and the journey took 60 hours!

It was a great preparation for me to go to Timor Leste first. It is the poorest Asian country, still recovering from a bloody and traumatic struggle for independence. I visited some remote rural agricultural cooperatives with Oxfam’s partner, Movimento Cooperativo Economico Agricola (MCE-A). These were small growers, generally farming a hectare of customary land and working on a larger plot with other members of the cooperative. They have recently increased their income through support from MCE-A. They use a revolving loan scheme to invest in hand-tractors and milling machines, and have dramatically improved yields from sustainable rice intensification using permaculture techniques. It is a really inspiring programme that is driven by the cooperatives themselves. You can read about their work here.

 

But in a country with high levels of malnutrition and months without enough food, these farmers have just experienced a disaster. This is not one we read about in the papers but one of the many thousands of disasters that happen around the world, affecting farmers such as those in Zumalai in Timor Leste. During the dry season they had unprecedented levels of heavy rainfall that caused floods and damaged their irrigation canals. The communities of Zumalai live a tenuous existence and disasters like this are the difference between them and their children having enough food for their needs – or not.

This is a typical situation faced by farmers around the world. Weather has become more extreme and unpredictable, and seasons have changed significantly over recent years. This is the backdrop for Oxfam’s new report Now More Than Ever: Climate talks that work for those who need them most, which says that 21,000 people died due to weather-related disasters in the first nine months of 2010 – more than twice the number for the whole of 2009. This year is on course to experience more extreme-weather events than the last ten-year average. Many countries have also broken heat records, with Pakistan logging 53.7°C – the highest ever in Asia.

These are the people who did little to cause climate change. But they are the ones suffering most. This is a good reminder of why we are in Cancun.

Behind these numbers are the stories of people’s lives. Not only millions of people suffering from the massive flooding in Pakistan or those affected by heat waves in Russia, but all of those whose destroyed lives and livelihoods never make it into the statistics or the media. It is the flooding affecting people in places like Zumalai in Timor Leste or the low-lying coasts of Bangladesh. It is those suffering from cyclones, king tides and sea swells in small islands across the Pacific. It is people struggling to cope with droughts across the arid zones of sub-Saharan Africa, and even in unexpected places like the Papua New Guinea Highlands. These are the people who did little to cause climate change. But they are the ones suffering most. This is a good reminder of why we are in Cancun.

When I arrived here, I was roped into Oxfam’s campaign launch, featuring a great image on the beach. This giant message in a bottle says “Urgent: Save lives in Cancun” and has featured in newspapers and websites around the world. I also joined in an opening event for the Global Campaign for Climate Action (the TckTckTck campaign). Yesterday, TckTckTck and partners built a ‘Mayan Pyramid of Hope’. Pyramids were built through collective will, and the ‘Pyramid of Hope’ serves as an affirmation of this collective will, showing what can be achieved if we work together. It is a message from tens of thousands of people around the world representing their aspirations for concrete action and real progress in Cancun. The pyramid is covered with photographs of people taking action in their communities to tackle climate change. UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres wrote her hopes on one of the pyramid’s building blocks: “Commitment and compromise”.

The negotiations started today. Not much to report, except for the usual highs and lows of political game-playing. The bad news was that Japan said that they would not, under any conditions, agree to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (which would mean that they would agree to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions after the end of 2012, when the first commitment period runs out). It is a bit ironic that it is Japan, the home of the Kyoto Protocol that is joining the US in not agreeing to these reduction commitments. The danger is that other countries, notably Canada and Russia, but also Australia and (shamefully) New Zealand, are likely to use this announcement to hide behind Japan and “kill” the Kyoto Protocol. This is a serious setback. The “like-minded countries” already went ahead in 1997 and signed the Kyoto Protocol without the US. But the like-minded group looks a lot smaller without those other countries as well. The EU is unlikely to agree to go it alone. This is a blow to many developing countries that have signalled their willingness to reduce emissions themselves. Even tough negotiators like China are making long-term commitments to reduce their emissions through renewable energy, clean technologies and shutting down polluting factories.

The good news from Day One is that a number of countries have made statements saying how important it is to make progress – to pick up the pieces after Copenhagen and move on. There are real gains that can be made on issues such as establishing a new climate fund that would channel money to the countries bearing the brunt of climate change, particularly the small and vulnerable nations (such as the Pacific islands), and to support emissions reductions in the developing world. And progress is possible on getting an agreement on adaptation and technology transfer. Other agreements that may come from Cancun are potentially more problematic – I will report out on the discussions around forests later this week. So the good news today is ‘mood music’ but a refreshing change after the trauma of Copenhagen.

But now it is late and I’m still in recovery mode, trying to figure out what time zone I’m in. I may miss a day or two of blogging this week while things are a bit slow, but I’ll write daily posts when Environment Ministers and some heads of state roll into Cancun next week.

I’ll leave you with the words of the negotiator from Tuvalu, again toughly defending their right to survive as communities, as a culture and as a nation: “Give life to KP (the Kyoto Protocol) or take the lives of people in vulnerable island countries”. The stakes are high in Cancun.

Can Cancún’s COP deliver?

Another year, another Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, number 16 in a series that looks set to run and run. Mexico is the host, Cancún the seaside resort where thousands of diplomats, negotiators, activists and apparatchiks are gathering to have another go at sorting out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. High hopes for a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen last year were dashed on the rocks of US inaction, Chinese intransigence and a failure of political will. A weak but face-saving Accord was cobbled together at the last minute, but it satisfied very few — least of all those who’d like to do more than pay lip service to a 2ºC target.

By way of contrast, the build-up to Cancún has seen prospects of a final deal downplayed by just about everyone involved in the process. COP 16 will make progress on the building blocks of a Kyoto follow-up, we are told, but few expect anything substantial to happen before COP17 in Durban next year.

Nature News has a good overview of expectations:

“It’s a question of trying to get some incremental gains,” says Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London. “The approach of all-or-nothing that we took in Copenhagen blew up in our faces, and we can’t just sit back and do nothing at all.”

John Vidal in the Guardian reports on the impatience of Latin American and African nations:

“There is deep frustration among the least developed countries”, said Bruno Sikoli, the spokesman for the 54-strong group of mainly African countries. “We feel there has been far too much talking. If the rich countries put nothing new on the table, then it will be very serious. Climate change is affecting our countries hard now. It is most urgent.”

Johann Hari in The Independent takes the bleak view:

The collapse of Copenhagen has not shocked people into action; it has numbed them into passivity. Last year, we were talking – in theory, at least – about the legally binding cap on the world’s carbon emissions, because the world’s scientists say this is the only thing that can preserve the climate that has created and sustained human civilization. What are we talking about this year? What’s on the table at Cancun, other than sand?

Hari’s extended riff on the “great ecological crash” we’re staring in the face is well worth a read — he’s a compelling writer — and he articulates all too well the reality of the huge disconnect between the evidence piling up that we need to act fast and the complacency of the international realpolitik.

The Economist joins the chorus with perhaps the ultimate in negative perspectives. In an editorial the magazine declares:

In the wake of the Copenhagen summit, there is a growing acceptance that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam. Perhaps, after a period of respite and a few climatic disasters, it will get going again. It certainly should. But even if it does, the world is going to go on getting warmer for some time.

The chance of hitting a 2ºC target has passed. It’s now time to focus on adapting to the inevitable:

Though they are unwilling to say it in public, the sheer improbability of such success has led many climate scientists, campaigners and policymakers to conclude that, in the words of Bob Watson, once the head of the IPCC and now the chief scientist at Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Two degrees is a wishful dream.”

The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over. Analysts who have long worked on adaptation to climate change—finding ways to live with scarcer water, higher peak temperatures, higher sea levels and weather patterns at odds with those under which today’s settled patterns of farming developed—are starting to see their day in the uncomfortably hot sun.

What’s left is planning to adapt, and The Economist does a characteristically through job of providing an overview. I’d say it was notably optimistic in the face of the climate numbers — particularly those presented in a “theme issue” of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A — Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications. [All the papers in the special issue are available free until Nov 30, and many beyond that date.] The Guardian does a good job of summarising the bad news:

Rachel Warren, at the University of East Anglia, described a 4C world in her research paper: “Drought and desertification would be widespread … There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on [wild] ecosystems. Large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.”

Warren added: “This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes [and] an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. In such a 4C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world.”

Another Met Office study analyses how a 4C rise would differ from a 2C rise, concluding that threats to water supplies are far worse, in particular in southern Europe and north Africa, where regional temperatures would rise 6-8C. The 4C world would also see enhanced warming over most of the US, Canada and northern Asia.

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), “the prognosis for agriculture and food security in a 4C world is bleak”, according Philip Thornton, of Kenya’s International Livestock Research Institute, who led another research team. He notes there will be an extra billion people populating Africa by 2050.

Expectations for Cancún are low, but the stakes just keep on getting bigger. The next two weeks will give us an idea which way the chips are falling. Hot Topic will once again be featuring guest posts by Oxfam NZ’s Barry Coates, who is already in Cancún, plus I’ll add comment as news catches my attention. You can also follow the NZ Youth Delegation at their blog.

For more detailed news, there’s the International Institute for Sustainable Development‘s Reporting Services’ coverage, including their Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a daily update of events. iPhone owners can even download a UNFCCC app, Negotiator, designed to keep you up to date with COP 16 news — even read conference papers. Slightly more quixotic is the Twitter newspaper The unfccc-ipcc-cop Daily at paper.li. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes…

And finally: we can expect more comedy gold as the Scaife-funded Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow is flying Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley into Mexico to bring his unique brand of, er, something or other to proceedings. He’ll even have Roy Spencer to act as his bag man… I confidently expect high jinks.

(2) Degrees of existence

According to a UN Environment Programme report released yesterday, The Emissions Gap Report – Are the Copenhagen Accord Pledges Sufficient to Limit Global Warming to 2° C or 1.5° C? (summary PDF), if the planet is to have a reasonable (defined as 66%) chance of limiting warming to 2ºC, global emissions will have to peak before 2020, with emissions in 2020 of around 44 GtCO2e and reducing sharply thereafter. The report assesses the Copenhagen Accord pledges as likely to deliver best case 2020 emissions of about 49 GtCO2e. — leaving a “gap” of at least 5 GtCO2e between commitments and ambition. A “lenient” interpretation of the Accord could result in emissions little different to business as usual.

In order to close that gap, the report suggests that countries could adopt higher conditional targets, avoid the use of surplus emissions units (so-called “hot air”), and ensure strict rules for land use change and forestry carbon accounting. The good news is that the report suggests this might be possible. The bad news is that to have a reasonable chance of hitting a 1.5ºC target emissions will have to reduce by 4 – 5% per year after 2020, and move into negative (removing carbon from the atmosphere) territory after 2050. The report suggests this could be done by huge afforestation projects and using biomass energy generation with carbon capture and storage.

The UNEP report is part of the stage setting for the COP16 conference in Cancun beginning next week. More coverage at the BBC, Independent, and Guardian. Richard Black at the Beeb puts the worst case in the lead:

The promises countries have made to control carbon emissions will see temperatures rise by up to 4ºC during this century, a UN report concludes.

Ban Ki-moon was a bit more up-beat (that’s his job):

“I encourage all Parties to make good on their national mitigation pledges, and to further progress within the negotiations as well as through strengthened efforts on the ground to curb emissions. There is no time to waste. By closing the gap between the science and current ambition levels, we can seize the opportunity to usher in a new era of low-carbon prosperity and sustainable development for all.”

Sounds good. Sounds implausible. The gap between commitment and ambition is big and getting bigger by the day. Even a global recession could only trim last year’s emissions by 1.3% compared with the year before, as emissions growth in China and India more than made up for falls in the US, EU and Japan. The UNEP report suggests that there’s still a way to avoid the most damaging warming, but a look at ambitions for Cancun indicates the political will is lacking.

[Update: Barry Brook has a guest post from Tom Wigley looking at the likely climate system response to achieving zero emissions by 2050.]

[Dimmer]