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“I am disappointed with the result of COP 25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis”
– Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
With the kind of noise made around climate change this year, especially as the weather became more aggressive and extreme, many would have thought that the 2019 annual climate change conference would naturally become an ambitious one – an opportunity for world leaders to show resolve in halting climate change before it gets out of hand. Alas, that did not happen. The only difference between this year’s Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the previous twenty-four editions is that COP 25 lasted longer than the others.
Scheduled to close on Friday, 13th December, the gavel was finally raised after lunch on Sunday, the 15th. Instructively, the protracted timeline was as a result of frantic efforts to close deals on key decisions; the need for the more than 27,000 delegates that journeyed to Madrid, Spain, not to go home without a clear message to their countries that the UN climate process remained relevant, and that it still had the muscle to carry everybody up to face climate change.
But, at the end of the day, the talks were unable to reach consensus in many areas, pushing decisions into next year under “Rule 16” of the UN climate process. Actually, this is an unmitigated deflation of hope for those of us with high expectations for this year. Next year’s COP 26 is scheduled for Glasgow, United Kingdom, and it seems what the nations did in Madrid was prepare a brief for UK; nothing of weight being added to the framework.
Matters including Article 6 (which would have taken care of cooperation among nations: market and non-market mechanisms in eradicating carbon emissions), reporting requirements for transparency, and “common timeframes” for climate pledges (which would have put definite timelines on when rich nations are to raise the funds needed for poor nations to fight climate change) were all shifted to 2020.
Considering that next year’s pivotal agenda is the submission of Nationally Determined Contributions from countries, with the expected scale up of ambitions; the COP 25-no-deal situation has put the world on a more precarious climate footing than it was before. At the start of the meeting, COP 25 President and Chilean environment secretary Carolina Schmidt had said the conference “must change the course of climate action and ambition”. Now, it has changed the course, to the wrong direction!
World leaders saw the handwriting on the wall, but looked the other way. The scientists came to hit the message home, yet it was all business as usual in the international decision-making scene. Just before COP 25 started, the United Nations Environment Programme released its Emissions Gap Report, which showed that the stretch 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement was “slipping out of reach” – meaning that the world is warming faster than previously forecast. The report said that even if existing climate pledges in the countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions are met, carbon emissions in 2030 will be 38% higher than required to meet that 1.5C target.
This point was corroborated by a new Global Carbon Project report a few days later, which showed that emissions from fossil fuels and industry are expected to continue rising in 2019 and 2020. Not only that, as the Madrid COP was underway, protesters were out in nearby streets marching and demanding for climate justice and increased ambition to make a difference. A common refrain from protesters and civil society observers was the discrepancy between the slow pace of the negotiations in the conference venue and the urgency suggested by the latest science.
One of the climate change activists on the streets of Europe whose voice reverberated around the world, was the Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg. For a girl who has taken a larger than life position in the climate activism arena, Thunberg was able to speak to power, and with her innocent and frail femininity, uncannily capture the spirit as well as cut the picture of a pained Mother (Earth) urgently making a last-ditch effort to guard the flickers of climate hope from being extinguished by her ignorant, yet endangered, children. While she was in Spain, Time magazine named her Person of the Year.
But the teenager was not able to change the course of the COP. Even from the United States of America, President Donald Trump taunted Thunberg in his infamous tweets, telling the 16-year old to “chill, go see a movie”! This is not entirely surprising though: it was Trump who pulled America out of the Paris Agreement. The only thing unanticipated is the lack of ambition on the part of the nations that are still on the ticket. Instead of ratcheting up contributions towards next year’s reporting, there was a general atmosphere of inertia at the just ended COP.
From the outset, the Chile/Madrid COP made it clear it was to be an “ambition COP”, reason why it came with hashtag #TimeForAction, reflecting gap between current pledges and what would be needed to meet global temperature goals. Under the Paris Agreement, all parties committed to not only submitting NDCs for cutting emissions, but also to “recommunicate” or “update” their pledges by the end of 2020. So, successive NDCs must represent a progression and reflect highest possible ambition. Along with five-yearly stocktakes of progress, these regular rounds of NDCs are at the heart of the Paris “ratchet mechanism” designed to raise ambition over time.
Given that current NDCs are nowhere near enough to limit global warming to 1.5C, there have been efforts at successive COPs to agree texts calling for greater ambition from all parties. So, with COP 25 being the final summit before the deadline year of 2020, Madrid was seen by many as a last chance to secure increased ambition. But, that did not happen.
As it stands, according to the World Resources Institute NDC tracker, just 80 countries – primarily, small and developing nations – have stated their intention to increase their NDCs by 2020. Sadly, this represents just 10.5% of world emissions. All the biggest emitters, like China and India are absent from this list. Meanwhile, just before the end of the COP, EU heads of state met in Brussels and agreed to make the bloc “climate neutral” by 2050.
Nevertheless, it is germane to itemize the procedural gains and minor values added at COP 25. When the time for the stocktake arrived, the UNFCCC parties managed to reach agreement on some topics, as follows: Including ocean and land ecosystems in the COP 25 decision; Confirming the importance of science for decision making; Establishing an implementation plan for the theme of gender and climate change; Renewing the international mechanism protecting against the impacts of climate change (known as “loss and damage”); Calling for greater ambition through the submission of updated NDCs in 2020; and Extending the Global Climate Action programme – focused on promoting and implementing climate action by non-state actors including local governments and business – by five years.
From a practical point of view, I think the agreement reached on gender issues is strategic. The Gender Action Plan (Annex 1) will strengthen the role and the empowerment of women in their respective local communities, providing them with tools to face climate change more effectively. If efficiently mobilized, this paradigm holds the promise of becoming one of the most vital tools to mainstream climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, especially in the developing world.
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