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Nations share green transition plans in line with Paris pact

Nations share green transition plans in line with Paris pact

COP24By Vishal Gulati,

Katowice (Poland) : The political phase of the ongoing UN climate negotiations, amid the assembly of nearly 200 nations delegates, including India, was held on Tuesday with ministers and high-level country representatives together with non-party stakeholders shared plans for the transformation of economies in line with the 2015 Paris goals.

Climate experts told IANS the facilitative dialogue, also called Talanoa Dialogue, illustrated the huge progress already underway across all sectors and together with the landmark 1.5 degrees Celsius Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report with urgency and also scaled up ambition.

The high-level Talanoa roundtables, part of the UN Conference of the Parties (COP24), constitute the final part of a year-long global review that governments, business and civil society have fed into following the questions: “Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?” with the goal to increase countries climate ambition, a climate expert said.

Mahindra Group Chief Sustainable Officer Anirban Ghosh said: “The Talanoa Dialogue provides opportunities to have these bold discussions without any inhibitions, we are all in this together and we must all help each other to do more.”

“Climate champions like India and China realise that reducing emissions will help their countries, not only in reducing rising temperature but also in terms of air pollution,” he said.

Though the champions must also realise that they need to spearhead other countries in taking bold actions too. Processes like the Talanoa Dialogue infuse trust in the process, which is an essential element of any progress, and found wanting in the negotiations right now, Ghosh added.

Jennifer Morgan, Greenpeace International Executive Director said the leaders must now rise to the challenge and negotiate a decision on ambition here.

“Our world is on fire and the question that must be answered at this COP is: Will decision makers take responsibility and act? Youth and activists around the world are rising up, warning that they have had enough of inaction,” she said.

US-based World Resources Institute Senior Associate Eliza Northrop said: “The Talanoa Dialogue has been a breath of fresh air — creating an inclusive and participatory process to agree on a shared vision for a low carbon prosperous future and what we need to do to get there.”

“The many stories shared by countries, business, regions and cities emphasize the opportunities available for us to go further, faster and together. What countries need to do now is to send an unequivocal signal that they have listened to the 1.5 Celsius report and will enhance their Nationally Determined Contributions by 2020.”

So what is the Talanoa Dialogue?

In the Paris Agreement provisions foresee a “global stocktake” every five years, starting in 2023, to prepare a new round of ever-increasing national climate commitments called Nationally Determined Contributions.

The Talanoa Dialogue which was launched at the last COP in Bonn is meant to serve as an initial stocktaking exercise to inspire progress among countries and encourage them to increase their climate ambition.

By March 2020, the parties must update their national climate strategies, which currently are not sufficient to reach the two degrees Celsius let alone the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement.

Three crucial days are left starting Wednesday to ensure that the ongoing for COP-24 talks respond to the urgency highlighted by the IPCC report that says temperatures could rise 1.5 degrees as early as 2030 – with devastating impact.

To do that, in addition to delivering the Paris rulebook, the nations, both developed and developing, need to send a signal they are committed to collectively raise their ambition on climate change and united on a path forward to achieve that goal, say climate negotiators.

It means by December 14 there must be a clear and unambiguous outcome to that effect, a negotiator added.

(Vishal Gulati is in Katowice at the invitation of Climate Trends to cover the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP24. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)

—IANS

Despite the rhetoric, the US can’t pull out of Paris pact before Nov 4, 2020

Despite the rhetoric, the US can’t pull out of Paris pact before Nov 4, 2020

ParisBy Rajendra Shende,

The world today is “locked” in more ways than one. Brutal inequality, dreadful terrorism, unashamed threats on territorial claims and bullying on nuclear missile attacks have all locked our civilisation in a spiral trajectory of global hazards without any sign of slowing down.

Recent climate studies by Nature Climate Change, published on July 31, note that the world has also “locked” itself in a way that has never happened in human history of more than 800,000 years.

It reveals the steady and steep rise of warming of the Earth’s temperature due to human induced green house gases (GHGs) that have already been emitted in the past, thereby locking the fate of the Earth due to climate change. As per the study, there is only one per cent chance, irrespective of the global action, to limit the temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius — the lower limit of the range of warming agreed to in the 2015 Paris accord.

Research published in May 2017 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters also stated that the Earth’s warming now is already on the way to touch 1.5 deg C and it will, in all certainty, cross that figure in nine years from now, whatever kind of efforts we make.

As for the upper warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius pledged in the Paris agreement, many scientists, including those who wrote the fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warn that crossing of 2 degrees Celsius warming would be catastrophic to humanity. In reality, this upper limit is called the death zone and may trigger “runaway” climate change, leading to globally disastrous and uncontrolled chain of extreme events that would signal the beginning of extinction of life on Earth.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre this month published a study, based on one by Lancet Planetary Health, that hinted at the beginning of the global catastrophe. It said that the deaths caused by extreme weather in Europe could rise from 3,000 a year between 1981 and 2010 to 50 times that figure — 152,000 a year — between 2071 and 2100. Europeans have the best social health system in the world to protect themselves and those numbers would look minuscule if we think of what would happen in poor developing countries.

With the rise in temperature, one of the scenarios is related to melting of glaciers, permafrost — Arctic and the Antarctic. The ice-melt would result in releasing massive emissions of GHGs like CO2 and methane trapped for centuries under the ice which would warm the planet more and cause more melt, thus “locking” the Earth in a vicious cycle. Last week a study published by the Geological Society of London revealed that there are 91 volcanoes, not known before, buried under the ice in Antarctica which, if exposed due to ice melt, can become live and belch out massive amounts of GHGs and warm the planet at unprecedented speed — thawing more ice. Less ice also means less white surface to reflect the sunlight and heat back into space, thereby causing more warming.

As the world’s oceans warm, not only is marine life at risk of extinction, but the massive stores of dissolved carbon dioxide may be quick to bubble out into the atmosphere and further amplify temperature rise, thus continuing the cycle towards runaway climate change.

This month’s real “breaking news” was of the breaking away of large icebergs — three times the size of Mauritius — from Antarctica’s fourth-largest ice shelf. The icebergs, being a floating mass, do not raise the sea level. However, Antarctica’s glaciers, which are held in place by the walls of the icebergs would now start emptying into the sea, which would start raising the sea-level.

The more stunning possibility that has become a subject of hot debate in the realms of the science of oceanography is the disruption in oceanic currents. The debate revolves around the scenario that the melting ice from the poles may cause the huge ocean currents — called heat conveyor belts, keeping the northern countries warm and causing healthy rain patterns, including monsoon rains — to either slow down or stop or reverse. The consequences are not well established but this could well be the “black hole” of uncertainties. Some scientists have already observed the slowing down of the ocean currents.

To top it all, on August 4, the US served notice on the United Nations that it “intends to exercise its right to withdraw from the (Paris Climate) Agreement”. This has created a situation that would “slow down the conveyor belts of diplomacy”, according to a climate negotiator from a small island country.

The Paris Climate Agreement, interestingly, entered into force on November 4, 2016. Under Article 28 of that agreement, withdrawal by a country that has ratified the pact — which the US did when Barack Obama was the President — is possible only after three years from the date of entry into force. Further, such withdrawal would be effective “upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt of the notification of the withdrawal”. Thus, the earliest US withdrawal can take place only on November 4, 2020, around the time when its next President would be declared.

Is President Donald Trump himself “locked” in Article 28 or is the world “locked” in Trumpian ambiguity? Whatever the case, the key to unlock the climate puzzle may need a flood of positive runaway efforts on a planetary scale.

(Rajendra Shende is Chairman, TERRE Policy Centre, an IIT alumnus and former director of the UNEP. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)

—IANS