Signs of weaker language on the phase-out of fossil fuels emerged yesterday as the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit delegates prepared for the final few days of talks.
To that end, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates’ chair of the negotiations, convened a majlis – a gathering of elders in Arabic custom – in an effort to build a greater consensus among nations on the fundamentally divisive subject of fossil fuels.
“The clock is ticking … and we all need to move much, much, much faster. But to do that I want to break the silence, I want to bring parties together under one roof … where we can talk openly, transparently.”
One representative of each country gathered soon after, sitting in a circle, while their negotiating teams and observers were in a room next door. Al Jaber said they all had “one simple objective: to come out with a clear understanding of the pressing issues that we need to get to the bottom of now.”
Traditional COP-style negotiations resumed later in the afternoon.
It was imperative that countries agree at COP28 to an “orderly and just decline in fossil fuels in line with our international climate goals,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the OECD’s International Energy Agency.
New pledges made here so far, mainly a new decarbonisation alliance of counties and companies, would only reduce by one-third the wide gap between countries climate commitments and what is needed to keep the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C, he said.
Whatever steps are finally agreed here to reduce fossil fuel emissions, “it is clear that least developed countries will not be able to go at the same speed as G20 economic powerhouses,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy.
“They have to meet development needs but also have the opportunity now to leapfrog unsustainable decisions. This is why we need a package that combines energy transition and energy access.”
There is a consensus, however, that this meeting has to build on prior COPs, particularly Paris in 2015 and Glasgow in 2021, said Simon Watts, New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister. “We need to make sure that we walk away from this COP with a step forward from those two prior meetings,” he said in an interview with Newsroom.
Food, agriculture and food were another key focus of COP28 yesterday. The highest profile initiative was the release by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation of its first road map by which farmers could achieve emissions reductions in line with the 1.5C by 2050. At the same times, they could increase production to feed a projected global population of 10 bn, a 25 percent increase from today’s.
Key targets include reducing methane emissions from livestock by 25 percent by 2030; ensuring all the world’s fisheries are sustainably managed by 2030; safe and affordable drinking water was available for all by 2030; halving food waste by 2030; and eliminating the use of traditional biomass for cooking by 2030.
The methane target is on an intensity basis, that is per unit of production, rather than an outright reduction. Thus, if meat and dairy production grew by more than 25 percent, emissions would rise not fall.
The roadmap was welcomed but also sharply criticised. “The Food and Agriculture Organization should be applauded for this first step in laying out a plan to eliminate extreme hunger and the third of greenhouse gases that come from food systems, and particularly for its emphasis on a just transition – it is not easy,” said Emile Frison, an expert at the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
“But this current draft puts a huge emphasis on incremental changes to the current industrial food system. But this is a flawed system that is wrecking nature, polluting the environment, and starving millions of people. These efficiency-first proposals are unlikely to be enough to get us off the high-pollution, high-fossil-fuel, high-hunger track we are on.”
This emphasis on improving the efficiency of farmers in developing countries was also the centrepiece of a COP session yesterday by Global Dairy Platform on its Pathways to Dairy Net Zero strategy.
That’s the right target because those farmers account for 80 percent of dairy’s global emissions, and those are growing faster that emissions from developed countries, said Jay Waldvogel, a senior executive of Dairy Farmers of America, the US’s largest dairy co-op.
The Global Dairy Platform, founded by Fonterra and other major international dairy companies in 2006, is currently chaired by Fonterra chief executive Miles Hurrell. In brief comments opening the session, he highlighted the nutrition and employment benefits of dairy farming in developing countries. Acknowledging the sector contributes some 2.5 percent to global greenhouse gases, he said dairy farmers were committed to reducing them.
Some US$3 billion in climate finance has been pledged for food and agriculture so far at COP28. In addition, governments, investors and philanthropists are increasing their funding for tackling methane in agriculture, ending deforestation and other goals for making farming and food more climate compatible.
But agriculture still attracts very little climate funding compared with other sectors, as this chart from the Climate Policy Initiative shows.
Global climate finance flows (2021-22)
By far the biggest New Zealand announcement at COP28 so far was the launch on Saturday of Recloaking Papatūānuku, a highly ambitious proposal to plant and enhance some 2.1 million hectares of native forests in Aotearoa over the next decade.
The proposal has been developed by Pure Advantage, an NZ climate strategy and advocacy grouped backed by business leaders such as Sir Stephen Tindall, Rob Morrison, Phillip Mills and Andrew Grant.
Such a scale of reforestation would “weave ecological and climate responses together with benefits for decades to come,” said Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, chief executive of WWF New Zealand, welcoming guests to the launch.
Simon Millar, Pure Advantage’s executive director, said the project would deliver multiple benefits such as building climate and ecological resilience, reducing the vulnerability of our communities and ecosystems to increasingly frequent and severe climate-related storms, sequester carbon, create employment, enhance biodiversity and protect tonga species.
Based on carbon sequestration alone, Recloaking Papatūānuku would help New Zealand meet its climate commitments – our Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement.
Lacking sufficient emission reductions at home based on current policies and projections modelled by the Climate Change Commission and Treasury, New Zealand will have to buy substantial offsets aboard.
But modelling of Recloaking Papatūānuku’s shows an average abatement cost of some $32 per tonne of CO2, compared to the average cost of international offsets, which are currently priced around $60 a tonne.
“This example of a large rewilding projected would be one of the first and biggest in the OECD,” said James Shaw, co-leader of the Green party and until the recent election Climate Minister, in the panel discussion at the launch. “It could make a colossal difference in our nationally-determined contributions.”
Simon Watts, Climate Minister in the new National-led government, speaking at the launch, welcomed the proposal.
Recloaking Papatūānuku is the most inspiring, uplifting and generally encouraging project to launch here in Aotearoa NZ for quite some time. It is one truly bright light on our horizon. It has the potential to slow and hopefully reverse the otherwise inexorable waves of threatened extinction for so many of our native species. https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/extinction-threat-to-indigenous-species/
This initiative which would ‘weave ecological and climate responses together’ is something we must all embrace. The acknowledgement that the two responses, ecological and climate, are intrinsically interlinked is not something we hear much about. Simon Watts ‘welcomed the proposal’. Let’s remember this and see if he still supports it after he’s run it by his colleagues in the new parliament.