Glasgow Disappointed, But It Inched the World Forward on Climate – Yale E360

Fade back to Yadav in a conference-hall huddle with China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua, whose influence over other delegations allowed the Indians to engineer their coup.

Almost unnoticed, the conference moved the goalposts for climate action, says Piers Forster, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds and long-time author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They agreed by then to “revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their nationally determined contributions ” and to make sure those targets are consistent with the pledges made by many of them to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century.

By the time they meet in Egypt, governments should also have met their decade-old target for providing $100 billion annually in climate finance for developing nations and begun a “dialogue” to create a UN facility to manage a separate fund making payments of recompense for loss and damage caused by climate change.

The result was “a failure of leadership and a failure of diplomacy,” said The Elders, a grouping chaired by former Irish President Mary Robinson that also includes former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

The outcome was “a big step forward,” said Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, co-author of the authoritative Global Carbon Budget published in the first week.

Jeffrey Kargel, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, cautioned that, with or without an end to coal burning, we are likely to be victims of time lags in the world’s climate system.

Many question the value of these great annual events, with their huge carbon footprints as thousands of delegates descend on some apparently arbitrary city to deliver much less than they promised on the most pressing issue of our time.

Most of the two weeks, as we reported here, were dominated by public pledges made by ad hoc groups of nations that were not tied to the UN process.

These coalitions of the willing — ranging in size from a dozen or so to more than 100 — promised to cut methane emissions, end deforestation, banish coal, end exploration for new oil and gas, switch auto production to electric and other low-carbon vehicles, and develop new technologies for low-carbon steel and concrete to decarbonize construction.

commitment on methane, are already at least partly accounted for in existing nationally declared contributions , the formal declarations given to the UN by nations on their plans for cutting emissions.

They included Pacific Island states such as Fiji, and Caribbean nations such as Antigua and Barbuda, who thought the lifeline for coal might consign their nations to the history books.

“The last-minute watering down is unfortunate, but is unlikely to slow down a strong momentum past coal, a dirty fuel of an earlier era,” said environmental economist Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics.

Rules were agreed on transparency — the details of how countries report their NDC pledges — and on what became known as Article 6 — how countries can collaborate on meeting their targets, including through carbon trading.

The route to unlocking private cash lies in allowing the booming market in “voluntary” offsets set up by corporations seeking to “green” their businesses to also be used to help countries deliver on their national emissions pledges.

Some call this double-counting, if the companies also continue to claim those same offsets reduce their emissions.

Brazil wants to claim credits for restoring 12 million hectares of former forests by 2030 — an area almost the size of England — even as deforestation continues elsewhere in the country.

Forest and other projects that generate carbon credits should be able to show that, without the intervention, there would be more carbon dioxide in the air.

There is hope among some carbon-credit practitioners that the agreement in Glasgow will achieve that.

“The worst and biggest loopholes were closed, but there is still scope for countries and companies to game the system,” according to Mark Maslin of University College London.

Controversially, the Glasgow deal allows carbon credits created under a largely discredited carbon-trading system developed under the Kyoto Protocol to continue being traded under the new regime, provided they are no more than eight years old.

But she was upset that Indigenous peoples’ rights to free, prior, and informed consent to allowing others to use natural resources on their land, which is enshrined in other UN law, had not been extended in the Glasgow deal to cover the value of their carbon.

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the U.K.

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