In November, after 14 days of climate talks at COP27 in Egypt, world leaders packed up and flew home. Hopes for a more productive outcome failed to materialize, but it was always going to be a long shot, anyway, and UN secretary general António Guterres certainly knew this. Standing before some 110 world leaders at the start of the Summit, he admonished them all that “humanity is on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator." And as talks got underway, just for good measure, the UN published the Global Carbon Budget, showing that global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are set to rise around 1% this year.
The big goal – to demonstrate that countries were still in accord with the 2015 Paris Agreement, to keep global warming well below 2C from pre-industrial times, and ideally 1.5C – now looks doomed. Certainly, accounts of the Summit wrap offered little to celebrate, apart from news that wealthy nations have finally agreed to provide a loss and damage fund for developing nations that so desperately need for physical and social infrastructure. This was a hard-won concession, but like other financial funding commitments that have come from COP nations, it's unclear who will step up to the funding plate and how these funds will be administered, if at all.
More immediately, Russia’s war in Ukraine has thrown a long shadow over plans to accelerate a shift away from oil toward renewable energy. Anxious to seize their moment, more than 600 lobbyists from the oil & gas industry were granted access to the event – a record number for this industry, according to Global Witness. This is also the first COP summit were oil & gas executives were invited to participate in official events.
So, there’s a lot to be disappointed about. But there was also at least one significant bright spot that stood out in this climate extravaganza – the appearance of Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – popularly known as Lula. In October, he defeated Jair Bolsonaro who, for the past four years, has presided over a disastrous destruction of the Amazon rainforest. He has defended this destruction in the name of economic progress. The problem is that the Amazon is one of the planet’s key climate regulators – a vast track of rainforest that the indigenous of the land call
“the lungs of the Earth.” And for good reason – it produces some 6% to 9% of the world’s oxygen and has been one of the planet’s key carbon sinks. Lula – who as a former leftist president of Brazil garnered strong credentials as a rainforest and Indigenous rights champion – was greeted as a celebrity at COP27, an event that otherwise lacked much to celebrate. Overlapping COP27, some welcome good news also came out the G20 in Bali, where the US, EU, and Japan said they would provide $20 billion to subsidize Indonesia’s shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy. Indonesia also joined with Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a commitment to halt deforestation in return for promises for financial compensation from the international community. Collectively, these three countries are home to more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests.
Stepping back, a few things are clear. First, COP summits are lurching ever more toward political grandstanding and much worse. With the advent of Egypt hosting the latest summit and the United Arab Emirate (UAE) hosting the next, this annual high-level global climate summit is fast becoming a platform for legitimizing the oil agenda of countries that derive a big chunk of income from that industry. In fiscal year 2019-20, for instance, Egypt generated 24% of its GDP from oil and gas production.
With the billions of tons of carbon still hanging in the atmosphere from all those planes zooming in and out of Egypt, it’s time for COP leaders to think about cleaning up the climate crisis for real. Maybe COP leadership’s biggest contribution should be calling the whole thing off next year and planning a new venue that makes way for the messy presence of youth activists, who were effectively shut out this year. Leaders should be required to show up with actionable plans that tangibly demonstrate they’re living up to their carbon cut promises.
Much more is needed, of course. Lula’s win in Brazil was fragile at best. There are a growing number of displaced people on the move because of climate change. Many more are scrambling to make livings and don’t want to hear about saving pristine forests for a future that they don’t believe in. Real solutions are going to have to be more locally sourced, solutions that include viable livings for people across the demographic strata. Global leaders have proved again that they are too distracted with their political agendas back home to sacrifice for the common global good. Maybe policy makers find climate change too much of an existential problem in the face of more immediate concerns in their backyards. But as the droughts and floods intensify and climate migration burgeons, these problems will land in everyone's backyard, without exception.
Maybe leaders can learn something from innovators such as Nobel Laureate Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s top climate scientists who is pushing for a practical on-the ground solution - a national center of research similar to the idea of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This institute would develop a new industrial base supported by high value-added products sourced from the Amazon rainforest, one of earth’s most biodiverse regions. For example, Brazil is the largest exporter of açaí in the world, with revenue from this fruit exceeding the value of soy and beef. In August, speaking at the 2022 PCAB Meeting (Partnership for the Conservation of Amazon Biodiversity) Nobre said, “It is extremely important to consider Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, since their actions play a central role in our global carbon cycle, hydrology, biodiversity conservation, climate stability, and maintenance of cultural and ethnic diversity.” Who knows, with Lula headed back to office in Brazil, it might just be possible.
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