The Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) sentenced 43 individuals to life in prison in a mass trial on Wednesday 3 July 2024, according to the UAE’s state-run news agency, WAM. The trial, which has been criticized by human rights organizations for allegedly targeting dissidents, involved charges linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the UAE government. WAM reported the verdicts shortly after human rights advocates released statements announcing the sentences. Alongside the life sentences, five defendants received 15-year prison terms and another five were sentenced to 10 years. The court dismissed the cases of 24 defendants.
According to WAM, the court ruled that those convicted “have worked to create and replicate violent events in the country, similar to what has occurred in other Arab states—including protests and clashes between the security forces and protesting crowds—that led to deaths and injuries and to the destruction of facilities, as well as the consequent spread of panic and terror among people.”
While WAM did not identify those sentenced by name, and specific details regarding the trial are not clear, Joey Shea, a researcher focusing on the UAE for Human Rights Watch, noted a few prominent figures involved in the case to the Associated Press (AP).
On 10 July 2024, Human Rights First condemned the secret trial and sentencing of dozens of activists in the United Arab Emirates:
“Washington’s ally has again today demonstrated its violent repression,” said Senior Advisor Brian Dooley. “The Biden administration has struck millions of dollars of arms deals with the UAE dictatorship, and failed to sanction its officials responsible for cracking down on peaceful dissent. The message from Washington to the UAE has been clear for many years: Do what you want, there will be no consequences.”
Among those reportedly sentenced to life in prison after a mass trial is prominent legal scholar Nasser bin Ghaith. He graduated with honors from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Ohio with an LLM in U.S. and Global Legal Studies in 2001. Another of those in the mass sham trial — which included 84 defendants — was Ahmed Mansoor, who received his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical, Computer, & Energy Engineering and his Master’s in Telecommunications for the University of Colorado, Boulder. Human Rights First is still waiting for confirmation on the outcome of his case in the trial. [see https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/074ACCD4-A327-4A21-B056-440C4C378A1A]
Bin Ghaith, Mansoor, and other prominent activists in the trial were already in prison serving long sentences for their peaceful activism.
Those discussions, which concluded Saturday, came right on the heels of the annual Bonn Climate Change Conference, which sets the foundation for the United Nations’ yearly climate gathering. In Bonn, Germany, an enduring dispute over who should provide trillions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations once again ended with little progress toward a solution, dominating the agenda so much so that dialogues on other issues often reverted back to financial debates.
Government heads at both conferences barely addressed what may be one of the most pressing questions the world faces: how to respond to the immense role animal agriculture plays in driving climate change. This continues a pattern of evasion around this issue on the international stage, which advocates and scientists find increasingly frustrating, given that shrinking the emissions footprint of global livestock production and consumption is a needed step toward mitigating climate change.
“We’re seeing, essentially, the cow in the room being ignored,” said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re seeing these kinds of vague references to needing to shift diets, but still a refusal to call out animal agriculture as the leading cause, by far, of agricultural emissions, as well as other forms of environmental destruction in food and agriculture systems.”
Despite the mountain of evidence establishing a connection between the food we eat and climate change, the subject has only recently begun to pop up at international conferences. The big breakthrough came at last December’s U.N. climate conference, COP28, where more than two-thirds of countries in attendance, including the U.S. and the European Union, pledged to take steps to reduce the colossal climate footprint of food systems. Around the same time, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, unveiled its first-ever installment of a roadmap for transforming the global food system to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The failure of delegates at COP28 to directly address the causal relationship between meat consumption and climate change was just repeated by G7 nations and the Bonn climate conference attendees. These failures show how “incredibly politically charged” this issue is in multinational gatherings dominated by countries with very high rates of meat and dairy consumption, said Martin Frick, who heads up the World Food Programme’s Berlin office.
“We are moving in the right direction, but we are not moving fast enough,” said Frick. “Unless we are really serious about food, and look at it from a systems approach, ask ourselves the hard questions and give ourselves the hard answers, I don’t see how we can fix climate change.”
Still, some do see progress.
“Only six months ago, 159 governments at world-leader level made a commitment to incorporate food into their climate plans,” said Edward Davey, senior advisor of the Food and Land Use Coalition based at the World Resources Institute. The COP28 pledge includes incorporating the climate footprint of food into each country’s “nationally determined contribution,” or NDC — a specific emissions target required by the Paris Agreement.
Countries are expected to submit new NDCs by next February, and Davey said those updates will indicate whether those countries are taking the pledge seriously.
Until then, how the topic surfaces in international gatherings is the next best benchmark. “I wanted to see that food was genuinely getting its moment in the sun in the climate talks,” said Davey. “And I think what we saw was that the Bonn talks were largely focused on finance, and less on particular sectors.”
Food was not entirely absent from the G7 summit agenda. At the gathering in southern Italy, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni announced the launch of the Apulia Food Systems Initiative, a climate and food policy aimed at investing in resilient food systems for poorer countries. It commits an undisclosed amount of funding to strengthen agricultural climate adaptation, with most aid allocated across the African continent, where climate change is intensifying food insecurity. The initiative will back a U.S. State Department-led crop research effort, a project to create more resilient coffee supply chains, and technical support for implementing the COP28 food and agriculture pledge into countries’ NDCs.
Unsurprisingly, it does not include any projects to decarbonize animal agriculture. “Livestock is clearly a very good example of what wasn’t tackled directly, in the sense that there is no mention of livestock, per se,” said Francesco Rampa, head of the think tank European Centre for Development Policy Management’s sustainable food systems team, who assisted the Italian G7 presidency in developing the initiative. Rampa is quick to add that this is because the Apulia plan is structured to help poor nations that have negligible emissions from animal agriculture, and not higher-income countries with sizable contributions — like the G7 countries themselves.
Past G7 food initiatives have faced criticism for limited clarity and accountability around finance pledges, for not reaching small farmers, and for failing to facilitate a transition to more sustainable and equitable food systems in the places they aim to aid. Multiple experts told Grist they don’t expect the new Apulia pledge to buck that trend.
“I’m skeptical of the ability of the international community to act in a way, with the urgency, that this whole issue requires,” said William Dietz, director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. “We’ve got a generation of leaders like Nero who are fiddling while the world is burning.”
A new analysis released by human rights and anti-corruption group Global Witness on Wednesday left no room for doubt, said one campaigner, that the host country of last year’s United Nations climate summit, the United Arab Emirates, prioritized fossil fuel interests over the planet. “Make no mistake, COP28 was hijacked by the interests of the fossil fuel industry,” said Patrick Galey…
As meat and dairy representatives turned out to COP28 in record numbers, the climate summit’s promised food systems transformation policies fell short – and the livestock lobby is delighted.
COP28 began with a lot of promises, but as is typical with most of these conferences, it didn’t really go full-tilt on any of them. Take the food system, for example. Last year’s summit was dubbed the food COP for its overdue prioritisation of the agricultural sector, with two-thirds of the food served being vegetarian or vegan, in a nod to the climate footprint of the livestock industry.
There was talk about a food systems transformation, rich people eating less meat, and mitigation measures – but the resulting text was lacking and vague, with not much real progress and no bounding targets. The UN FAO didn’t say that meat and dairy consumption needs to be reduced, even though they account for the majority of the food system’s emissions. This is despite the UNEP producing a report endorsing alternative proteins as a viable and sustainable solution to animal agriculture during the conference itself.
But this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. The FAO has been in cahoots with the livestock sector for years – the latter has successfully lobbied over the years to water down the true impact of animal agriculture in the FAO’s reporting. And COP28 itself saw the number of meat and dairy lobbyists triple, just as smallholders and family farmers felt left out.
Now, the livestock industry is celebrating what it reckons is a positive outcome from the UN climate summit, with representatives sharing their enthusiasm and delight on a virtual panel just a week after the COP28 ended, as reported by DeSmog.
What meat and dairy lobbyists said about COP28
Hosted by trade publication Feedstuffs, the online discussion saw livestock lobby groups hail COP28 as a win, noting that there had been widespread recognition at the conference that agriculture was a “solution” to climate change. This is in spite of the sector being responsible for a third of global emissions, and livestock itself contributing to 11-19.6% of the total.
Constance Cullmann, president of US lobby group Animal Feed Industry Association, said the summit resulted in “a far more positive outcome than we had anticipated”, noting that it was the first time she’d “felt that optimistic” after a “large international gathering like this one”.
She was also pleased with the “strong recognition” at COP28 that meat and dairy “had a real role in meeting the nutritional needs of folks around the globe”. Cullmann labelled the FAO’s roadmap as “music to our ears”, welcoming its emphasis on “production and efficiency” over “looking at reduced consumption of animal protein”.
Representing the US Pork Board, Jamie Burr said he was “excited to see” that the recognised efficiency as the best pathway to reduce emissions, describing US agriculture as the “most efficient in the world”. Eric Mittenthal, who was at the panel on behalf of the Meat Institute, talked about the importance of sharing the message that livestock farming is necessary for nutrition and sustainability. He added that the lobby group – which represents the likes of JBS, Cargill and Tyson, among others – has demonstrated how agriculture can be a “solution” for “healthy people and a healthy planet”.
The panellists also discussed criticism of their industry and the need to keep up positive messaging. Mittenthal suggested that COP28 attendees “not representing the science or the reality on the ground”, which is why the industry’s presence at the conference was crucial. He added that collaboration is key as “groups opposed to animal agriculture will come back stronger”, and partnering with NGOs could help the sector “be taken seriously”.
Cullmann, meanwhile, said that the sector had got “breathing room” with the summit, but added that “this is a marathon for us”. “We need to jump into that and make sure that we don’t take the pressure off of communicating the incredible work that’s been done for decades and continues to be done,” she said about the year ahead. “The short answer is: not take the foot off the gas pedal – we’ve got to keep pushing.”
Addressing COP28’s failure to deliver its food promises
Despite hopes of faster action to transform the food system, climate experts said COP28’s declarations and reports were well short of what’s required. On the second day, 130 countries signed a declaration on sustainable food systems, but Lim Li Ching, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems, criticised the text for its “vague language” and pointed out the lack of any mention of “reducing overconsumption of industrially produced meat”.
The FAO’s roadmap, which was initially expected to advise rich countries to eat less meat, did not make any such explicit recommendations, only proposing a 25% reduction in livestock methane emissions by 2030. In fact, it actually promoted the increase of aquaculture by 75%, and said meat production needs to be increased in lower-income countries to address health challenges.
“The Global Roadmap has been developed with reference to and based on existing scientific and peer-reviewed publications. In no stage of the development of the Roadmap were livestock industries consulted, or any inputs were received from them,” the FAO told DeSmog.
Then there was the Global Stocktake, where agriculture was only mentioned in terms of adaptation to climate change, not mitigation. “Action on food systems transformation is still dangerously ignored,” Emile Frison, senior advisor to the Agroecology Coalition, told DeSmog.
Last month, experts and academics from five universities criticised the FAO’s failure to recommend a cut in meat consumption in a letter published in the Nature journal. “By failing to recognize the need to reduce the production and consumption of animal-sourced foods, the FAO misses a central element of a climate-friendly food system,” said lead author Cleo Verkuijl, who is a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “It’s like publishing a 1.5°C roadmap for the energy sector that ignores the need to scale back fossil fuels.”
Around the same time, a survey of 210 climate and food scientists showed that they agreed meat and dairy production needs to be significantly reduced, and quickly. The experts said livestock emissions must peak by next year, and be slashed by 60% by the end of the century. And 92% of experts said reducing livestock emissions is key to limiting temperature rises to 2°C, while 85% stated that it’s important for human diets to shift from “livestock-derived foods to livestock replacement foods”.
In response, the FAO told DeSmog: “We believe that some comments on the change in diets and the role of animal products in them are either misinformed because people have not properly read the roadmap report, or deliberately disingenuous for the sake of feeding vested interests narratives.”
But it’s hard to shake that narrative off when you consider the FAO’s relationship with the livestock lobby, and the latter’s effects on the former’s policy recommendations and emissions reporting. No wonder the meat and dairy executives are delighted, though. Meanwhile, we continue to head towards a world where the food system takes up half of our carbon budget by 2050.
Climate agreements suck. There are no real enforcement provisions. Many signatories cheat. Some don’t rep0rt at all. Moreover, reported data is highly suspect. It’s a worldwide scandal recently exposed by YaleEnvironment360.
Evidence of cheating is found in the atmosphere: Global CO2 is on a rampage, skyrocketing upwards like never before, double-to-triple rates of only one year ago, see: “CO2 Bursting into the Atmosphere”, March 22nd. This is not supposed to be happening. It is twisting the planet’s climate system into a pretzel that doesn’t know which way to turn next. There are plenty of reasons to believe it is going to get much, much worse. The planet’s climate system is already so far whacked-out that it’s breathing fire.
For example, the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite registered a 705% increase in fire activity in Canada in 2023 versus the prior six-years.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing in the aftermath of the much-touted climate agreement Paris ‘15 when 196 countries agreed to cut to net zero. Oops, wrong, many signatories are “net nothing.”
There is compelling evidence that signatory nations to Paris ’15 don’t give a damn about the agreement or care about Hot House Earth as they cavalierly undercount, when they do report, or they simply refuse to report. As a result, UN climate goals go straight into the trash, worthless.
In March 1994 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) organized an objective to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. That’s when “humans” were “officially recognized” as an active participant in climate change. It’s been downhill ever since. In fact, it’s been an ongoing disaster. The evidence is found in greenhouse gas emissions increasing every year since UNFCCC formalized. And now, as of 2024, emissions are bordering on torrential increases.
Worse yet, UNFCCC and Paris ’15 lures the world community into a false sense of hope, false pretense that everything is under control, we’ve got the nations of the world agreeing to combat global warming, not to worry. The illusion works because very little outrage about the illusion has been touted in public. In the real world, UNFCCC and the Paris climate agreement of 2015 are phony symbols of success. Get over it.
YaleEnvironment360 recently, March 21, 2024, published an exposé about the scandalous behavior of signatories to climate agreements: “Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk”, researched and written by Fred Pearce, one of the best most respected environmental journalists.
The article opens by stating the heart of the problem as “lax rules” allow for national inventories reporting to the UN “grossly underestimating many countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.”
In fact, according to the article “most countries published data to UNFCCC’s website is typically out of date, inconsistent, and inc0mplete.” According to Glen Peters, Centre for International Climate Research (Norway): “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions.”
For example, China’s coal reporting is likely so seriously underreported that its underreporting equals total emissions of many major industrial countries. And in the US, a recent article in Nature, US Oil and Gas System Emissions from Nearly One Million Aerial Site Measurements d/d March 13, 2024, exposed methane emissions three times more than the government reported.
One of the world’s major oil & gas producers, Qatar, stopped reporting emissions in 2007. No surprise there as it’s the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions abuser. Meanwhile, they revel in billions of dollars the world pays to dishevel the planet’s climate system. Even worse yet, it’s believed their undeclared emissions have doubled since 2007. Is something radically amiss here?
The Philippines last sent its inventory in 2013. Guyana in 2012.
According to Pearce’s article: “The world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric ‘room’ countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds.”
The standards for reporting are replete with uncertainties. Even with activity data that’s filed there’s no way to know how much fossil fuel is burned in most countries or how much methane leaks. And uncertainties are prevalent in how activities are converted into emissions estimates. Off the shelf formulae often fails to reflect real conditions. In short, it’s almost as if a gigantic Ponzi scheme oversees UN reporting standards.
The deception is found everywhere, e.g., in Canada, aircraft measurements of CO2 over the enormous tar sands project revealed emissions 64% higher than reported. Moreover, satellite data analyzed by the International Energy Agency on a global basis discovered methane emissions 70% higher worldwide over oil and gas fields than officially reported.
The overall scandal even extends to what should be “positive reports.” According to Clemens Schwingshackl of Ludwig-Maximilian’s University/Munich: “Governments collectively claim their forests are soaking up 6 billion tons more Co2 each year than scientists can account for.”
Everybody everywhere is fudging, cheating, obscuring, pretending, and/or avoiding reality. Yet over 100 heads of state, presidents, prime ministers, environmental ministers, secretaries of state, etc. show up for the annual COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) for photo-ops. And that’s pretty much the extent of the substance.
North Atlantic Ocean temperature is on a red-hot streak.
New research finds ocean temperatures… “have now smashed previous heat records for at least seven years in a row.” (Lijing Cheng, et al, “New Record Ocean Temperatures and Related Climate Indicators in 2023”, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, January 2024.)
Certainly, it’s nothing to mess around with as oceans absorb 90% of planetary heat. Maybe that’s too much too quickly to withstand. Or is it a big burp or could it be something much worse?
Ocean heat represented on a chart displays a nearly vertical solid move up for over the past year. This is Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” applied to ocean temperature! Climate science does not have a record of such a powerful jolt upwards for ocean warming. Maybe something big or even bigger than big is underway.
A recent NYT headline tells the story: “Scientists Are Freaking Out About Ocean Temperatures”, New York Times, February 27, 2023, by suggesting it could be indicative of developments beyond all expectations by mainstream science. January 2024 was the 8th year in a row when global temperatures “blew past previous records.” The North Atlantic has hit record-breaking temperatures and holding them there for a solid year now. According to scientists: “It’s just astonishing. Like, it doesn’t seem real.” (NYT)
But it is real!
And it should shake up and rattle the cage of every person on the planet because their leaders, who are supposed to address problems like this, are asleep at the switch, sound asleep!
It’s not only the North Atlantic that is acting up in a mean-spirited manner. Down south, according to Matthew England, professor at University of New South Wales: “The sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing… The temperature’s just going off the charts. It’s like an omen of the future.” (Ibid.)
Global warming appears to be infectiously indiscriminate north/south throughout the globe. These are strange times that demand a lot of attention by nation/states of the world that are sitting ducks for surprisingly rapid sea water rise and a host of other troubling ecosystem crash landings.
Impact of Ocean Heat Acceleration
According to NASA, Global Climate Change – Vital Signs of the Planet: Accelerating ocean warming: (1) increases sea level rise due to thermal expansion (2) accelerates melting of major ice sheets, already starting to cascade everywhere on the planet, directly increases sea levels (3) intensifies hurricanes (4) degrades overall ocean health with loss of biodiversity.
For example, the Blob event in the Pacific Ocean laid the foundation for what to expect from ocean heat. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
An unprecedented marine heat wave known as ‘the Blob’ dominated the northeastern Pacific from 2013 to 2016, and upended ecosystems across a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean. This led to an ecological cascade, causing fishery collapses and fishery disaster determinations.
— “The Ongoing Marine Heat Waves in U.S. Waters, Explained”, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 24, 2023.
If fishery collapses occurred way back in 2013-16, then what of today’s more overheated ocean? The Blob was unlike anything the West Coast had experienced: From the Gulf of Alaska-to-Baja, California (Mexico) sea surface temperature hit levels 7°F above average.
“Fishery collapses” as experienced a decade ago, on top of depleted fish stocks, like we have now, is a formula for disaster for marine life and human life. Globally, overexploited fish stocks; i.e., catching fish faster than they reproduce, has “more than doubled since 1980.” Ergo, most current levels of wild fish catch are unsustainable. (“Fish and Overfishing”, Our World in Data)
“In 2015 a record outbreak of toxic algae shut down West Coast Dungeness crab fisheries worth millions of dollars. Then came seabird die-offs, record numbers of whales entangled in fishing lines, crashing salmon returns, and starving California sea lion pups washing up on beaches, just for starters. “You had a number of things occurring that by themselves were just astounding,” according to Nate Mantua, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “When you put it all together you could hardly believe it.” (“Looking Back at The Blob: Record Warming Drives Unprecedented Ocean Change”, NOAA Fisheries, September 26, 2019.)
According to Arctic News: The year 2024 looks to be worse than the year 2023… sea surface temperatures that were extremely high in 2023 will be followed by a steep rise in 2024, in fact, crossing 21°C (70°F) as early as January 2024. Toxic algae welcomes the heat; it is sustained and enhanced by warmer waters.
According to Copernicus, which is the Earth Observation Programme of the European Union:
• The average global sea surface temperature (SST) for January over 60°S–60°N reached 20.97°C, a record for January, 0.26°C warmer than the previous warmest January, in 2016, and second highest value for any month in the ERA5 dataset, within 0.01°C of the record from August 2023 (20.98°C).
• Since 31 January, the daily SST for 60°S–60°N has reached new absolute records, surpassing the previous highest values from 23rd and 24th of August 2023.
The planet is turning hotter prior to, during, and in the aftermath of COP28 (UN Climate Conference of the Parties) held in oil-rich Dubai, November/December 2023 and hosted by Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber as COP28 President as well as serving as Group CEO of ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) since 2016.
COPs have been held for nearly 30 consecutive years to address the issue of climate change and global warming and what to do about it. Yet they have miserably failed to impact fossil fuel emissions (up every year and accelerating). COP28 was a ‘tilted game’ in favor of continuation of fossil fuel emissions and according to Martin Siegert, polar scientist and deputy vice-chancellor at University of Exeter:
The science is perfectly clear. COP28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the COP response to deal with it.
— “A Tragedy for the Planet’: Scientists Decry COP28 Outcome”, Common Dreams, December 14, 2023.
“A tragedy for the planet and our future” as emphasized by Dr. Siegert, is a travesty that should not be allowed to stand. Throughout the history of COP meetings, never has the oil and gas industry taken the lead position in meetings of 60-80,000 attendees supposedly devoted to fixing global warming. Nothing more needs to be said about the charade known as COP28. It’s only too obvious. Well, maybe more needs to be said: The people of the world have never been so easily bamboozled, hoodwinked by an international body that’s supposed to protect the sanctity of the planet. COP28 didn’t.
Where’s the pushback?
Regardless, the oceans are in a state of rebellion, which could flood the oil and gas business out of business, as an act of nature protecting herself. Worldwide petroleum refineries are constructed along coastal areas and rivers to take advantage of water resources and easy transportation. As the spigots of fossil fuel CO2 emissions remain wide-open, assuredly, enhanced global warming will flood them out of business.
The hosting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) by the United Arab Emirates for two weeks in late 2023 failed to reach strong and binding agreements, coupled with continued support for the expansion of the fossil fuel sector. This highlights the mistake committed by the UN in granting countries with poor human rights record the opportunity to exploit international events to whitewash their image. The COP28 conference is the latest evidence of how an environmental global event has been turned into a means of exploitation by a state that tops the list of human rights violators in suppressing freedoms and criminalizing civil society and political opposition.
Below Expectations Outcomes
On 13 December 2023, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) concluded its proceedings in Dubai amid significant disagreements and criticisms from several participating countries over the described “weak” draft agreement. Additionally, the conference was on the brink of potential failure to reach an agreement among the 198 countries involved, especially after the removal of words from a previous draft indicating that fossil fuels ‘can be gradually phased out’.
The agreement came after disputes that led to the extension of the conference for an additional day. The objections were about whether the final outcome would include a call for ‘gradual reduction’ or ‘gradual elimination’ of fossil fuels, responsible for three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. The representative of the European Union, Emun Ryan, initially described the draft agreement as ‘unacceptable,’ even threatening to leave the conference. However, he later clarified that the collapse of the talks is ‘not the outcome the world is looking for’.
This contentious point remained a subject of dispute for two weeks between activists and countries threatened by global warming on one hand and major powers on the other. It served as one of the reasons for objections from civil society and environmental protection organizations. In addition to this, they condemned the final statement’s failure to address the phasing out of oil, gas, and coal, a demand made by more than a hundred countries. Notably, this demand faced rejection from Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia – the largest oil-producing country in the world.
While participants in the general session applauded inside the hall, representatives of civil society and climate activists expressed their dissatisfaction with the outcomes of the climate talks. The final results were deemed disappointing, as they failed to compel wealthy nations to fulfill their financial responsibilities, leaving developing countries without sufficient guarantees to assist them in transitioning to renewable energy.
Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, told UN News that “the outcome was marred with loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes relying on unproven, unsafe technologies”. Singh pointed to what he saw as “the hypocrisy of wealthy nations…that continue to expand fossil fuel operations massively while paying mere lip service to the green transition”.
Regarding the activation of the “Loss and Damage Fund,” Mahmoud Mohieldin, the UN Special Envoy for the United Nations on Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, described climate financing as insufficient and time-consuming. He stated that “it is unjust because the most vulnerable countries are asked to pay for a crisis that they don’t contribute to, and they get the smallest share of finance to achieve their climate goals”. Considering the estimated annual economic cost of losses and damages in developing countries, which was around $400 billion by 2023 and projected to be approximately $1.8 trillion by 2050, several countries, including the UAE, pledged to provide a total of only around $700 million. Greenpeace, the global environmental organization, also argued that this funding should not be exclusively allocated for loss and damage but should be expanded to include support for adaptation and mitigation measures.
Criticism of the Host Country and Conference President
The hosting of the UN Climate Conference by the UAE, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the third-largest oil-producing country in the Arab world has been seen as a glaring example of the Gulf States exploiting international conferences for “greenwashing.” This is a common tactic among companies to exploit concerns about climate change. Some entities and companies claim to take responsibility for the environment to attract more business or comply with lower levels of scrutiny.
The UAE has had a long-standing involvement in activating pressure groups in the fossil fuel sector since the 1990s. This involvement has steadily increased, with the number of participants from lobbying groups reaching 500 at COP26 and rising to 630 at COP27, including 70 pressure groups associated with Emirati oil and gas companies. Consequently, the UAE’s hosting of COP28 provided a platform for the activities of these groups, which attempted to steer the discussions towards undermining any progress in climate action.
While the UAE has invested in renewable energy sectors, its economy and budget still heavily rely on the continued production of fossil fuels. In this context, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme revealed that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait, among around 20 major fossil fuel-producing countries, continue to provide significant political and financial support for fossil fuel production. Based on a review and analysis of government air pollution data and satellite imagery from 2018 to 2023, a report by Human Rights Watch stated that “the UAE’s fossil fuel industry contributes to toxic air pollution while the government works to position itself as a global leader on climate and health issues at the United Nations Climate Conference COP28”.
There is a clear contradiction between the image that the UAE is trying to portray about itself to secure a seat on the global stage and the Conference President, Sultan AlJaber, who has faced months of criticism from some environmental advocates for also serving as the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, “ADNOC,” one of the world’s largest oil companies. BBC revealed a network of coordinated accounts promoting the climate summit and its president. These practices led over a hundred members of the European Parliament and the US Congress to sign a letter demanding his removal from his position as president of the summit, as they believed he “posed a serious risk to the Conference of Parties process.” One of the most concerning leaks from secret documents was about the UAE’s plans to use its role as host of the UN climate talks as an opportunity to strike oil and gas deals.
Black Human Rights Record
Since the moment the UAE was chosen as the host country for the global event, several criticisms have arisen regarding the Gulf state’s human rights record. Questions have been raised about the extent of freedoms available to citizens to express their opinions and aspirations for this international event hosted by their country, amidst the tight grip on freedom of expression in the country.
For months, various human rights organizations have been sounding early alarms to warn the UN of the danger of granting hosting rights to a country ranked among the lowest in the world on the Human Freedom Index for 2023, placing 127 out of 165 countries worldwide.
The UAE has resorted to global spyware programs, including tracking software from an Israeli intelligence company, to spy on activists and opponents, monitor online content, and impose excessive control over social media platforms. Investigations have revealed that the UAE has adopted digital surveillance as a means to crush dissent and stifle freedom of expression. This practice was warned against by Amnesty International, which cautioned against the use of spyware to target human rights defenders and members of civil society, including those attending the COP28 conference.
Indeed, these concerns were justified, as several human rights violations were recorded during the conference:
– The start of mass trials involving more than 80 Emirati citizens, including prominent human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience.
– Restrictions on online content and deletion of numerous posts.
– Prevention of the right to peaceful protest and restriction of this right to specific areas.
– Prohibition of civil society organizations from participating in the conference, limiting participation to governmental organizations.
– Creation of an atmosphere of intimidation through extensive surveillance using video cameras and filming participants in activities and events.
Political Purposes Justifies the Means
Not far from these criticisms, the UAE exploited the international conference for political purposes, including the recent normalization between the country and Israel. The UAE sent an official invitation to the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to participate in the conference. Herzog’s participation sparked objections from participating countries due to Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip and its committing of genocide against civilians, in clear violations of international law.
The practices of the UAE during the 2023 Climate Conference raise serious questions about the UN’s readiness to grant countries with a black record in human rights the opportunity to exploit international platforms to market their image. It also raises concerns about the seriousness of their commitments to implement the conference’s recommendations. A joint statement by forty-two human rights organizations stated that since 2013, the UAE has been mentioned in every annual report by the UN Secretary-General on intimidation and reprisal against individuals seeking to cooperate with or have cooperated with the UN, indicating the ongoing harassment faced by human rights defenders in the UAE.
The UAE’s hosting of the conference sheds light on Western support for these countries and the cover granted to them for their human rights violations, as well as the neglect of calls to urge the UAE to cease its violations. More than 19 human rights groups sent a letter to the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging the US to pressure the UAE to immediately release human rights defenders. Additionally, Human Rights Watch urged EU foreign ministers in a letter to call on the UAE to end its suppression of independent civil society and release the imprisoned human rights defenders.
Therefore, giving the UAE the opportunity to host the conference allowed it to tarnish the reputation of a global event with blatant human rights violations and control the conference’s outcomes through fossil fuel lobbying groups. Additionally, it cast doubts on scientific facts by appointing an individual not suited for the responsibility as the conference’s president. This president is using his position to market his oil company’s interests.
Based on the above, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights (ADHRB) calls on the United Nations to fulfill its role in limiting the actions of countries with a long record of human rights violations. These actions include criminalizing freedom of opinion and expression and using terrorism as a pretext to prosecute opposition and activists. ADHRB urges the UN to hold these countries accountable instead of promoting them. It also calls to stop these countries from using global events and exploiting international platforms to market their policies and whitewash their human rights violations.
Globally, the impact of climate-induced back draws and, ultimately, migrations can be witnessed extensively. This phenomenon is less prevalent in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). However, the recent statistics on climate change and the allocation of investments in natural resources in the Gulf can revert the trend. According to the Middle East Institute (MEI), the relationship between climate change and migration still needs to be studied extensively. Climate change in the Gulf is a topic that still needs to be tackled with an intersectional approach. GCC countries sponsor investment of billions of dollars in plans for developing renewable energy. However, reports show that these plans’ application, transparency, and effectiveness remain questionable. Consequently, concerns arise over a possible strategy of ‘’greenwashing’’ to appease the international community’s requests.
According to NASA, large parts of the Gulf region will become unavailable by 2050 due to the rising temperatures that may increase by 5 degrees by the end of this century. Climate change already has detrimental effects such as desertification, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and rising sea levels. Saudi Arabia has recently faced climate hazards, including floods caused by heavy rainfalls. In addition, according to the World Bank, by 2025, almost 100 million people in the MENA region will be exposed to high-level water stress. In this prospect, the absence of a regional cooperation mechanism will likely cause distress in the area.
Officially, all the Gulf countries have ratified the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Paris Climate Agreement and have made official promises to mitigate the effects of climate change. Notably, five Gulf countries have set a net-zero emission plan to achieve by this century’s end. To tackle climate change, Gulf countries set up political institutions to draft policies on climate-related challenges.
On the other hand, concerns arise about the promises made by these countries. Firstly, they tackle climate change only with the Ministry of Environment. This approach fails to deal with the effect of climate change on cross-sectoral aspects of society, including human rights. Secondly, the policies proposed to tackle climate change are questionable. Often, they lack transparency, and when presented, they do not involve different sectors of society. Thirdly, the MEI Institute reports that even when regional plans are launched, they are often unsuccessful due to geopolitical tensions. Finally, it is legitimate to question the intentions of GCC countries regarding climate change. Notably, the former president of COP28, Sultan Al-Jaber, stated that no evidence exists between climate change and fossil fuels. This declaration collides with years of scientific research and probably underlines a willingness to maintain supremacy in the fossil fuel market.
From a human rights perspective, the situation in the Gulf is especially concerning for different reasons. Firstly, there is an incumbent issue with natural resources like water that will likely trigger displacement. Secondly, the Gulf is the destination of millions of migrants who each year suffer the burden of rising temperatures. From this overview, the Gulf will be subject to seasonal migrations of the wealthiest classes. On the other hand, the lowest classes and migrants will likely suffer from a lack of natural resources (including food) due to the rising temperatures. In this sense, regional courts have pointed out the interrelation between human rights and climate change and possible backdraws on the right to life. ADHRB is especially concerned about the evolution of this issue in the Gulf in the upcoming years. For this reason, we call on the international community, especially the UN, to monitor the future allocation of investments in natural resources and the issue of climate change in the Gulf.
John Podesta already has a lot on his plate. The veteran political strategist has been working for the past year as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden overseeing the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in United States history. Now, in the wake of another landmark climate agreement at COP28, he’s also going to take over the job of representing the U.S. on the world stage.
This week, following the news that special climate envoy John Kerry would depart the role this spring, President Joe Biden announced that Podesta would take over the position, putting the latter in charge of the administration’s climate policy abroad as well as at home.
Podesta arrives in this new role at a time when the United States is facing increasingly urgent calls to step up the amount of climate funding it sends to developing countries. As he represents the U.S. in international climate talks, he has a responsibility to follow up Biden’s domestic policy achievements with equal ambition on international issues, said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Despite important progress secured through the Inflation Reduction Act and other domestic policies, the country has repeatedly fallen short, especially on delivering climate finance for low- and middle-income countries to tackle climate change,” she said. She added that Podesta “will need to ensure international climate diplomacy is as much a priority as the domestic climate agenda.”
Podesta has decades of experience in Beltway politics and has influenced the shape of climate policy under three Democratic presidents. As White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton, he helped Clinton hone his messaging on climate and environmental issues, and he later served as a top adviser to Barack Obama, who tried and failed to sell Congress on a cap-and-trade climate bill. When that bill died in the Senate, Podesta pushed Obama’s focus toward the executive branch, crafting a key regulation of power emissions.
After Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Biden asked Podesta to return to the White House to help implement the landmark legislation. As Podesta told Grist last summer, this job entailed not only selling the law to companies and local governments but also getting in the weeds on complex policy questions relating to green hydrogen and carbon removal.
However, Podesta has less experience in foreign policy than his predecessor. The outgoing climate envoy served on the Senate foreign relations committee and as Obama’s secretary of state, and he has represented the United States at several United Nations climate conferences. Kerry was instrumental in negotiating the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015 and in hammering out last year’s so-called “UAE consensus” at COP28 in Dubai. The latter accord represented the first time that the world’s nations agreed to transition away from dirty fuels.
Kerry’s close relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, also allowed the United States and China to make progress on climate cooperation even amid a broader geopolitical chill. Last year, for instance, the two nations signed a joint agreement to accelerate renewable energy deployment. When Kerry gave his notice just months after Xie announced his retirement, The Guardianhailed the moment as the “end of an era in global climate politics.”
Podesta engaged at length with China and India on climate issues when he served in the Obama administration, and he too consulted on the Paris accord. Some observers said Podesta would likely continue on the path Kerry set in the climate envoy role.
“John Podesta is certainly a steady pair of hands,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate program at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank. “He has dealt with the China file very extensively together in the Obama administration with John Kerry, and I am expecting a continuation of where John Kerry left.”
But other climate advocates expressed concern about Podesta’s past focus on domestic affairs, and his plan to advise Biden on domestic and international matters simultaneously.
“This stance suggests that international negotiations will become a secondary priority, despite the urgent global necessity to drastically escalate climate action,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the environmental group Climate Action Network, in a statement. He said the appointment “casts a shadow of doubt over the United States’ commitment to global climate leadership.”
The White House did not respond to Grist’s request for an interview with Podesta before publication.
Biden’s 2021 appointment of Kerry as the first ever “special envoy on climate change” drew the ire of many Senate Republicans, who accused Biden of bypassing the normal confirmation process for ambassadors and other senior diplomatic officials. Biden has appointed at least 40 special envoys, according to Ballotpedia, far more than any previous president. These diplomats handle issues from Yemen to the Arctic to Iran’s nuclear program.
Congress passed a funding bill in 2021 that closed the loophole allowing for special envoy positions, meaning that future climate diplomats will be subject to confirmation by the Senate, just like their ordinary ambassador counterparts. The very idea of a climate envoy is anathema to many Republicans in Congress, meaning any successor Biden appoints will face a tough road to confirmation. If Donald Trump wins another term in November, the position will almost certainly vanish altogether.
In an apparent attempt to avoid this new Senate confirmation requirement, Biden has announced that Podesta will serve as “senior adviser” for “international climate policy.” Shelly Moore Capito, a Republican senator who is influential on climate issues, said the move was an attempt to “circumvent Congress on environmental policy.”
The biggest item on Podesta’s agenda will be the “new collective quantified goal,” a fundraising target that the world’s countries are hoping to hammer out at COP29 in Azerbaijan in November. Rich countries set a goal in 2009 to send poor countries $100 billion per year for decarbonization and disaster response, but they have lagged far behind schedule on meeting it. As the next climate conference approaches, developing countries are demanding that the United States make much stronger financial commitments.
In addition to figuring out how the U.S. should engage with these demands, Podesta will also have to wrangle countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which weren’t obligated to donate to the funding pool established in the 2009 agreement. These countries are in a limbo zone between developed and developing, and much of the controversy around the “new collective quantified goal” has centered on how much they should be expected to contribute.
Some climate activists said the changing of the guard would give the Biden administration a chance to reposition itself in global climate talks. Many of these activists have criticized Kerry for rebuffing financial demands from developing countries — just last summer he told Congress that he would “under no circumstances” commit the United States to a policy of “climate reparations.” When rich countries launched a loss and damage fund at COP28 to help poor countries address the consequences of climate change, the United States volunteered to contribute just $17.5 million, a fraction of what smaller countries like Italy and Japan pledged.
Kerry and other U.S. diplomats have often focused on extracting commitments from other countries at climate talks rather than making commitments themselves, said Brandon Wu, policy director at ActionAid, an economic justice advocacy organization.
“Rather than engaging in the traditional U.S. negotiating tactics that Kerry favored — telling other countries what to do while pretending the U.S. is a leader despite its record of failure — he needs to shift the tone and substance of U.S. climate diplomacy altogether,” Wu said of Podesta. “It’s no easy job, but that’s the natural consequence of so many years of inaction from the world’s biggest historical climate polluter.”
The job is made even harder by the fact that the special climate envoy doesn’t control federal spending. Even if Podesta does pledge more international funding, it will be up to Congress to pass a law that makes that pledge a reality. With Congress split between Republicans and Democrats, and the outcome of the next presidential election still anyone’s guess, it will be hard for the diplomats opposite Podesta to take him at his word.
Zoya Teirstein contributed reporting to this story.
At the United Nations climate conference that concluded last month in Dubai, the world’s countries pledged to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030. The renewables target received less attention than other, more contentious goals pursued at the conference, such as scaling down fossil fuel production and funding reparations for the nations suffering the worst climate impacts. After all…
The Emirati authorities’ commencement of a mass trial involving over 80 Emiratis, including prominent human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience, has sent shockwaves globally. The trial coinciding with COP28, billed as the ‘most inclusive COP ever,’ reflects the UAE’s blatant disregard for human rights and its unwillingness to address the dire state of rights in the country.
The new mass trial, revealed by the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center (EDAC), includes renowned figures like Mohamed al-Siddiq, Khalid al-Nuaimi, Hadef al-Owais, Nasser bin Ghaith, Sultan al-Qasimi, Ahmed Mansoor, and Mohamed al-Roken. These individuals face trumped-up terrorism charges, adding to the UAE’s history of politically motivated prosecutions. Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, expressed astonishment at the Emirati authorities’ audacity to initiate a sham trial during an international event. The move aims to suppress peaceful dissent and signals the UAE’s reluctance to address its abysmal human rights record.
The Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center condemned the referral of 87 individuals to Abu Dhabi Federal Appeal Court, emphasizing their concerns about the UAE’s fabrication of charges to prolong sentences. Notable figures like Dr. Sultan Bin Kayed al-Qasimi, Khaled al-Shaiba Al-Nuaimi, Dr. Muhammad Al-Roken, Dr. Hadef Al-Owais, Ahmed Mansoor, and Dr. Nasser Bin Ghaith are among the accused.
The UAE’s acknowledgment of the trial, reported by ABC News, during COP28 raises questions about the timing and intentions behind this judicial move. The state-run WAM news agency quoted the UAE’s attorney general, Hamad al-Shamsi, stating that the accused faced charges related to terrorism.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been vocal in denouncing the UAE’s actions. Their demonstration during COP28 aimed to shed light on figures like Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights defender targeted for advocating press freedom and democratic rights.
The UAE’s continued suppression of dissent through mass trials, especially during international events like COP28, demands urgent attention. The international community, human rights organizations, and concerned individuals must closely monitor the situation, advocate for transparency, and push for the immediate release of all arbitrarily detained prisoners. The UAE’s exploitation of the criminal justice system to quash the human rights movement is an alarming trend that requires collective efforts to bring about meaningful change.
The 28th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties summit (COP28), recently met in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The president of the summit, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber — who also leads the UAE’s national oil company — drew criticism for rumors that he planned to use COP28 to make oil deals and for claiming there is “no science” behind urgent calls for a…
Three years ago, 15,000 scientists declared a climate emergency by signing onto a State of the Climate Report. That signing led to annual updates, for example, the most recent version: The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory, Bioscience, vol. 73, issue 12, December 2023, Oxford Academic (aka: “The Report”).
The initial paragraph of The Report suggests a planetary juggernaut of cascading ecosystems altering life systems: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in uncharted territory… a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.” Therefore, it’s fair to say nobody really knows how this uncharted territory will play out.
The Report is a compendium of all-time climate record events depicting big-time trouble, going in the wrong direction versus maintaining a healthy planet. In and of itself, the analysis in The Report, researched and authored by top notch scientists, should be enough for world policymakers to insist upon going back to COP28 in Dubai/2023, redoing the two-week UN climate conference and adopting effective solutions to replace the mealy-mouthed inadequate proposals adopted at COP28. The world deserves better.
Thirty years of UN climate conferences failing to move the needle to help Earth’s ecosystems thrive and survive, and not collapse, has unintentionally cast a dark shadow over scientists’ climate warnings within the context of a commanding capitalistic socio-economic system based upon infinite growth at center stage, humming along like “no worries” economic growth always bails us out, but what’s left behind?
The Report makes the case that under the surface, and not clearly visible to society, a monstrosity of ecosystem turmoil threatens the entire foundation of capitalistic growth. The Report’s warnings are real, not fictional, not misleading but real warnings of a premature collapsing Earth system that’s the foundation for everything. This challenging situation has progressively gotten worse by the year, but it’s now starting to burst at the seams. The year 2023 exposed an off the charts dangerous climate system broadcasts on nightly news programs reporting massive wildfires, massive flooding, massive droughts, massive atmospheric rivers, massive everything, never witnessed previously. Scientists believe it’ll get worse.
According to the scientists: “We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered. Conditions are going to get very distressing and potentially unmanageable for large regions of the world… We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems… Massive suffering due to climate change is already here, and we have now exceeded many safe and just Earth system boundaries, imperiling stability and life-support systems.”
The Report states that 20 of 35 vital planetary signs are now at record extremes. This means that nearly 60% of the planet is huffing and puffing to stay on track of life-sourcing support. For example, the chart of Ocean Heat Content shows a nearly vertical upward thrust. This is viewed by scientists as especially troubling because of the knockoff impacts, including loss of sea life, coral reef bleaching, and intensified tropical storms. Hidden from view, the world’s oceans are under severe stress, not to mention extremely abusive overfishing, especially China’s inordinately large distant water fishing fleet of thousands of trawlers (“world’s worst abuser of sea laws” – IUU Fishing Index, US Coast Guard).
With 60% of the planet limping and few, if any, serious signs of governmental policy helping the 20 vital signs in various stages of deterioration, The Report addresses the root cause of trouble by identifying cause and effect; i.e., the ecological footprint of economic activity overwhelms any chances to heal the planet. In short, infinite economic growth and a steady state planet are like oil and water that do not mix.
According to the scientists, “economic growth, as it is conventionally pursued, is unlikely to allow us to achieve our social, climate, and biodiversity goals. The fundamental challenge lies in the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from harmful environmental impacts.”
More to the point, egregious, superfluous, redundant, unneeded wealth creation is at the heart of the problem. As it happens, sixty percent (60%) of planetary ecosystems hobbling along on crutches is the result of 10% of the world population enjoying a great ride at the top of a great economic bubble expanding year by year, as this minority of people lead the best possible lifestyle in classic double or triple or quadruple, or maybe even as much as 100 to 1,000 times overshoot. The 10% global footprint tramples the lowly 90%.
In a faux complexity of hopefulness, many GDP models assume that growth can be decoupled from emissions and from consumption-oriented environmental impacts and all will be hunky-dory, e.g., carbon capture will bail us out of the global warming imbroglio. However, The Report makes special mention of such assumptions as not realistic: “Negative emissions technologies are in an early stage of development, posing uncertainties regarding their effectiveness, scalability, and environmental and societal impacts. As such, we should not rely on unproven carbon removal techniques.”
In the final analysis, the hard truth is fossil fuel emissions must be halted at the source as soon as possible or future state of the planet reports will show surrealistic evidence of a sickly planet. At some point in time this image of a sickly planet will become unbearable, and the masses will turn extremely restless, similar to unwelcomed disruptions, as well as threats of disruptions, already becoming evident throughout the globe. Under the circumstances, this type of behavior is not at all surprising. After all, it’s only too obvious that nearly two-thirds of the planet’s vital signs are flashing code red, not code yellow. It’s too late for caution when immediate action is required.
According to the scientific evidence, the underlying message is clear: Do something different. The current trajectory is not working. What could policymakers of the world do differently to put the planet back to a steady state so that it doesn’t flame out near term? Climate change, like a wild roller coaster ride, is full of surprising turns and sudden rapid descent.
The Report contains ideas to hopefully shake off what looks like an inevitability of more and more failing ecosystems: “The fundamental challenge lies in the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from harmful environmental impacts. Although technological advancements and efficiency improvements can contribute to some degree of decoupling, they often fall short in mitigating the overall ecological footprint of economic activities. The impacts vary greatly by wealth; in 2019, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for 48% of global emissions, whereas the bottom 50% were responsible for just 12%. We therefore need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy.”
Frankly, that sounds like some version of socialism, but in America socialism is equated to Mephistopheles. But what if that’s not really true? What if socialism benefits everybody, except for the one percent?
Broadly speaking, The Report recommends: “Efforts must be directed toward eliminating emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change and increasing carbon sequestration with nature-based climate solutions.” All of which is doable., but honestly, that’s an often-repeated prescription that never seems to stick, never gains traction. If otherwise, if it gained traction, over time The State of the Climate Reports would fade into the sunset without anything to write about.
Nevertheless, the ecological overshoot of human demands on natural resources, or overexploitation, is seemingly an insurmountable issue that points a finger at endless growth and its sidekick overconsumption by rich countries and wealthy individuals. And since socialism is out of the running to fix ecological overshoot, one way forward is a circular economy. Instead of a throw-away economic system, learn to recirculate across the board, like British economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics designed to avoid ecological overshoot.
In the final analysis, The Report is more relevant now than ever before simply because nearly 2/3rds of the planet’s vital signs are screaming for help, but none is forthcoming. Therefore, and unfortunately, The Report is destined to grow and grow as ecosystems fail one by one, until one day Eureka! The State of the Climate Report will become sought after and studied and discussed by policymakers standing knee-deep in water.
Realistically, the issues described within this article about the state of the climate system do not get as much attention as warranted by policymakers or by the public. Assuming this article is read, the gist 0f it, alas, may be tossed aside as easily and quickly as our disposable-oriented society tosses aside paper wrappers, plastic containers, and pretty much everything, including nuclear waste, but where to?
Meanwhile, of special interest, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR) Roger Hallam has decided to accept the inevitability of collapsing ecosystems. He is turning his focus away from climate demonstrations and disruptions of society, gluing people to buildings, roadways, and airplanes to the discovery of a new type of civilization. He’ll be conducting a worldwide zoom session January 14th at 8:00 AM Pacific Coast time. It’ll be a rare opportunity to learn about and/or join a new world order that’s not sinister. To register for the zoom meeting: Here’s the link.
At the United Nations climate conference that concluded last month in Dubai, the world’s countries pledged to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030. The renewables target received less attention than other, more contentious goals pursued at the conference, such as scaling down fossil fuel production and funding reparations for the nations suffering the worst climate impacts. After all, the costs of renewable technology like solar have plummeted in recent years, making it cheaper than coal and natural gas in the vast majority of cases.
But a new report from the International Energy Agency lays bare the challenges that lie ahead as the world tries to accelerate this trend. If countries implement current policies, the agency projects that global renewables capacity will increase by a factor of 2.5, falling short of the 11,000-gigawatt tripling target set at the so-called COP28 conference in Dubai. In part this is because high interest rates and supply chain disruptions in wealthy countries like the U.S. are stifling the growth of renewables — particularly offshore wind.
“The tripling renewables target will not be easy by any means,” said Maria Pastukhova, a senior policy advisor at the climate think tank E3G’s office in Berlin, Germany. “It’s not simple, but it’s been seen as absolutely urgent and economically beneficial to most countries. It’s a race against time that we know we have to win.”
The report is the first to conduct a country-by-country analysis of renewables expansion since COP28. Overall, it found countries have installed more than 3,600 gigawatts in renewable energy capacity so far. Under current policies, that number is expected to reach a bit more than 9,000 gigawatts by 2030, leaving a roughly 2,000 gigawatt gap to reach the 11,000 gigawatt target.
China is expected to be responsible for about half of the growth in the coming years. The country, which has long been a leader in solar installations, commissioned as much solar last year as the whole world did in 2022. The United States, the European Union, Brazil, and India are also expected to double their renewables portfolios by 2028.
Still, despite these bright spots, meeting the COP28 target requires significant additional policy interventions, according to the energy agency. The challenges are particularly acute in the wind industry, which has been hit hard by inflation, high interest rates, and supply chain disruptions. Over the last two years, central bank interest rates have risen from less than 1 percent to more than 5 percent, making it harder for renewables developers to finance projects. Inflation has pushed the cost of wind turbines and other components higher, adding to the crunch facing developers. On top of this, many wind developers signed contracts to install wind turbines before the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when interest rates were stable and equipment was easy to procure. The past few years have upended expectations that those economic tailwinds would continue.
As a result, wind turbine manufacturers in North America and Europe have suffered financial losses for nearly the last two years. In 2023, wind developers postponed or canceled about 15 gigawatts of installations in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Auctions for wind projects are receiving few or no bids in Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico. In New York, state regulators are planning to accept new bids for canceled projects and are now attempting to tie prices to inflation.
Even if more favorable economic conditions emerge for renewables in the coming years, developers face another major challenge, particularly in the U.S. and Europe: long permitting timelines. In order to build solar and wind projects and the enabling infrastructure needed to connect their power to the grid, developers have to work with regulators to receive a variety of operating and environmental permits. In Europe, these permits can take anywhere from 5 to 15 years, Pastukhova said.
“The bureaucratic procedures hamper development,” she said. “That does not help the business.”
Pastukhova said that even as wealthy countries solve domestic challenges to accelerate renewables deployment, they must also finance projects in developing countries. Parts of Africa and South Asia have tremendous potential for solar, but without funding to invest in the infrastructure needed to support renewables and access to technology, some countries may be left behind in the energy transition.
“The most important challenge for the international community is rapidly scaling up financing and deployment of renewables in most emerging and developing economies,” said Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency’s executive director, in a press release. “Success in meeting the tripling goal will hinge on this.”
Top scientists and many global leaders have agreed: to address the intensifying climate catastrophe, we must immediately address the supplyside of fossil fuels by retiring oil and gas production, quickly and drastically. It’s alarming, then, that current trends are continuing in the other direction. The recent COP28 climate summit dashed immediate hopes of agreeing on a phaseout of fossil fuel…
UN climate conferences since 1992 have failed to follow thru with results, as CO2 emissions continue higher and higher with every passing year. In fact, post climate conference impact of adopted proposals has become something 0f an inside joke. The most recent conference, COP28, embraced nuclear power as a godsend challenging climate change.
“Triple Nuclear Power” still echoes throughout the halls of COP28. If one stands at the podium in the convention center now empty and listens intently, echoes reverberate “triple nuclear power” spewing out of red-faced maniacs from over 20 countries that committed to tripling nuclear power to bail our global asses out of a crazed climate system of epic proportions.
The US, UK, UAE, and others signed a declaration. Since they couldn’t budge oil and gas, it was decided to favor nuclear power as a surrogate for fixing the rip snorting global heating imbroglio found from pole to pole, from ocean to ocean. It’s real, it’s palpable; it’s now, much earlier than forecasts, as 1.5C prematurely comes to surface during irregular episodes.
Yet, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the declaration by 22 countries calling for a tripling of nuclear energy by 2050 is more fantasy than reality:
Even at best, a shift to invest more heavily in nuclear energy over the next two decades could actually worsen the climate crisis, as cheaper, quicker alternatives are ignored for more expensive, slow-to-deploy nuclear reactors.
— Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 13th, 2023,
Building nuclear power facilities has a long history that unfortunately casts a doubtful shadow over the idea of tripling by 2050. A now-famous plan by Princeton University in 2004 called for a “stabilization wedge” to avoid one billion tons of carbon emissions per year by 2055 by building 700 large nuclear reactors over 50 years.
In 2022, there were 416 operating reactors in the world. Starting in 2005 when the Princeton plan was announced, it would have meant building 14 reactors per year, assuming all existing reactors continued to function. However, over the 50-year cycle aging reactors and those going into retirement would ultimately require 40 new reactors per year. But throughout the entire history of nuclear power, on average 10 nuclear power plants connected to the electricity grid per year, and the number of new units was only 5 per year from 2011-2021.
Once again, like the sticky issue of direct carbon capture, achieving the scale of proposed solutions to climate change’s biggest weapon, or global warming, is beyond reality. Talk is cheap.
Meanwhile less expensive safer wind and solar easily trounce nuclear power’s newly installed output, by a country mile, to wit:
New nuclear energy capacity 2000-2020 42 GWe
New wind capacity from 2000-2020 605 GWe
New solar capacity from 2000-2020 578 GWe
Nuclear costs are prohibitively high: It’ll cost $15 trillion to triple nuclear capacity, assuming existing reactors continue to function, which will not be the case, raising this big bet well over $15T. Who’s putting up $15T?
And is there enough time to triple by 2050? From design to projected operation of the NuScale VOYGR plant takes 13 years. According to the International Energy Agency, the design and build phase for a country’s first nuclear reactor is 15 years. Several countries that signed on to the declaration to triple nuclear power are newbies.
According to a Foreign Policy article, December 13th, 2023 entitled: COP28’s Dramatic But Empty Nuclear Pledge: several reasons for skepticism about the nuclear energy triple buildout were enumerated, concluding:
The combination of macroeconomic pressures and regulatory restrictions means that neither pledges such as those made at COP28 nor memorandums of understanding with various industries, utilities, and governments should give anyone much confidence that a major expansion of nuclear energy is forthcoming.
Nuclear expert Mycle Schneider, the lead author of the prestigious World Nuclear Industry Status Report (500 pgs.) now in in its 18th edition known for its fact-based approach on details of operation, construction, and decommissioning of the world’s reactors was recently interviewed by the Bulletin: Schneider’s publication is considered the landmark study of the industry.
Regarding NuScale, the US-based company that develops America’s flagship SMR (Small Nuclear Reactors), the company initially promised in 2008 to start generating power by 2015. As of 2023, they haven’t started construction of a single reactor. They do not have a certification license for the model they promoted for a Utah municipality. NuScale’s six module facility would cost $20,000 per kilowatt installed, twice as expensive as the most expensive large-scale reactors in Europe. And SMRs will generate disproportionate amounts of nuclear waste. No bargain here, assuming it even works efficiently enough, which is doubtful.
Schneider:
The entire logic that has been built up for small modular reactors is with the background of climate change emergency. That’s the big problem we have.
A sense of urgency cannot be met:
Considering the status of development, we’re not going to see any SMR generating power before the 2030s. It’s very clear: none. And if we are talking about SMRs picking up any kind of substantial amounts of generating capacity in the current market, if ever, we’re talking about the 2040s at the very earliest.
Schneider on COP’s pledge to triple nuclear power:
From an industrial point of view, to put this pledge into reality. To me, this pledge is very close to absurd, compared to what the industry has shown.
Looked at another way:
It took 70 years to bring global nuclear capacity to the current level of 370 gigawatts (GW), and the industry must now select technologies, raise finance and develop the rules to build another 740 GW in half that time… Why would anyone spend a single dollar on a technology that, if planned today, won’t even be available to help until 2035-2045?
— Mark Jacobson, an energy specialist at Stanford University, “Nuclear Sector Must Overcome Decades of Stagnation to Meet COP28 Tripling“,Reuters, December. 7, 2023.
How about $15 trillion?
COP28 did not deliver on phase down of fossil fuels, and it’ll likely miss on tripling nuclear power. But once the results are finally known, it’s too late. The heat’s already on.
The UAE, host to the latest UN climate conference, showcases the vices that need to be vanquished if we’re going to have anything approaching a green society.
International climate negotiators explicitly mentioned the technology as a route to decarbonization in their first-ever “stocktake” of global emissions. Looking back across the final texts agreed on at the annual U.N. climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement, this is the first time the word “nuclear” has ever been used.
Twenty-five countries made the point even more emphatically at the start of the conference in Dubai, where — led by the U.S. — they pledged to triple nuclear electricity capacity by 2050.
“We’ve never had anything like this on nuclear at a COP before,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes technological solutions to environmental challenges. “It reflects how much attitudes have changed over the last decade.”
Whatever the reasons, nuclear has been on a downward trajectory of late. The share of global electricity derived from it has slumped to 9.2 percent, its lowest level since the 1980s. By the 2040s, more nuclear facilities are expected to be decommissioned than come online. The latest commitments at COP28 are an attempt to not only reverse that trend but dramatically expand the world’s nuclear footprint. But multiple nuclear experts say that the tripling target is almost certainly unattainable, if not irresponsible.
“It’s an essentially meaningless commitment,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He noted that some of the countries who signed the pledge don’t even generate nuclear power right now, so a tripling would still technically be zero. And it doesn’t include China or Russia, which are global leaders in regard to nuclear ambition. Even Nordhaus admits that “it’s not really clear that anybody has a particularly credible plan.”
Attempts to both maintain and expand nuclear have stumbled recently. The Biden administration recently had to provide a $1.1 billion lifeline to keep a legacy nuclear plant in California running, and a highly anticipated foray into smaller-scale reactors fell apart. This points to perhaps the most significant impediment to a more nuclear future: cost.
“Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar,” said Allison Macfarlane, the former chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, estimating that it would take tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars to bring some of the proposed technology to market. “The only people that have that kind of money is governments”
Even if the financials make sense, she said, time is not on nuclear’s side. It can take a decade or two for a facility to come online, which makes it difficult to scale quickly enough to meet climate goals and make a dent in the climate crisis. While that might have been possible if the nuclear revival had begun a decade or two ago, she said it’s now too late.
“Nuclear is not a short-term solution to climate change. We need a solution yesterday,” said Macfarlane, who is currently the director of the school of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia. Instead she argues for putting money toward technologies that can be deployed today, such as solar and wind. “We need to direct our energies toward whatever we can build immediately.”
To Lyman, the nuclear pledges at COP28 are worse than empty — they could be detrimental or even dangerous. “It damages the credibility of the U.S. and any other countries that signed on,” he said. That includes Japan, which was home to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Broken promises could mean that future declarations are taken less seriously.
Beyond politics, Lyman worries that a renewed push on nuclear could lead companies, governments, or both to cut corners or curb regulations in the name of financial gain or expediency. That, he said, “is a recipe for disaster.”
Indigenous campaigners, human rights defenders and climate activists say they are being silenced by fear of reprisals
Incidents of harassment, surveillance, threats and intimidation are creating a climate of fear at UN events including the recent Cop28 climate conference in Dubai, experts have said.
Indigenous campaigners, human rights defenders and environmental activists say they are increasingly afraid to speak out on urgent issues because of concerns about reprisals from governments or fossil fuel industries.
The outcome of global climate summits has barely changed since the United Nations held the first Conference of the Parties (COP) in Berlin in 1995. Reaching an international consensus on climate action that might avert the worst effects of global warming and put the planet on a sustainable track has always been an elusive goal due to the power of the fossil fuel industry and political short…
Over the course of its 75-year history, the World Bank has been the go-to organization for solving global crises: It was charged with rebuilding Europe after the Second World War, and then again with reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan after they were invaded by the U.S. During the global economic downturn of the 1970s, it loaned poor countries millions of dollars with the stated purpose of ending third world poverty. And earlier this month, the institution was picked to manage one of the most monumental tasks of the century: dispensing climate reparations to the developing world.
The World Bank’s role managing this so-called loss and damage fund was formalized on the very first day of COP28, this year’s United Nations climate conference, which just concluded in the United Arab Emirates. The fund, which provides a trove of money for relatively poor countries that have emitted little carbon yet disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, was capitalized with more than $650 million in just a few days after the start of the conference.
But this success came after a string of furious debates, in which representatives from several coastal and low-income nations expressed vehement opposition to the World Bank’s management of the fund. When developing countries finally agreed that the Bank could host the fund on an interim basis for the next four years, they included a long list of conditions that the institution must meet. The deal was struck largely due to attrition, after weeks of negotiations in which wealthy nations, largely led by the U.S., rejected an alternative to set up a standalone fund.
Grist spoke with former World Bank employees, COP28 negotiators, and watchdog groups to understand the opposition to the World Bank’s role in the unprecedented effort to pay out climate reparations from the new loss and damage fund. Experts unanimously agreed that developing countries have little trust in the World Bank as a result of its governing structure, which gives the U.S. outsized influence, as well as the failures of its past programs, which led to debt crises that compounded poverty in many developing nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the Bank’s track record as a major investor in fossil fuel projects around the world has led some critics to question its fitness for a position meant to battle climate change.
“The structure of the international organizations [like the World Bank] reflects a global power structure that is no longer the case, no longer true,” said Paul Cadario, a 37-year veteran of the World Bank who is now a distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto. “It doesn’t give sufficient weight to the concerns of the Global South. Those concerns are inevitably going to wash over something as specific as the loss and damage fund.”
The World Bank’s primary function is that of a credit institution — a bank like any other. Given its creditworthiness, the bank borrows money at low interest rates, which it then loans to developing nations. It is in part this setup that has sounded alarms among potential loss and damage fund recipients: Grantmaking and fund management, two integral components of the loss and damage effort, are not core functions of the bank. While the exact extent to which the loss and damage funding will take the form of no-strings-attached grants versus interest-bearing loans is unclear, developing nations have argued vehemently against loans that would further trap heavily indebted nations.
The World Bank has gained some relevant experience over the last few decades, as it’s taken responsibility for the management of a handful of funds designed to provide capital to developing countries trying to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to a warming world. As the trustee of these funds, the bank is responsible for fundraising and allocating the money raised. A loss and damage fund would likely work the same way: The bank would appeal to various donor countries for funds, which it would then pass on to developing nations for specific projects.
But the bank has historically been slow to deploy these funds. The Green Climate Fund was established by climate negotiators at COP16 in 2010 to help developing countries tackle the climate crisis. It’s the largest multilateral fund of its kind and has received about $33 billion in pledges so far. But countries in need have had difficulty accessing the money, because project approvals take several years. The Philippines, a low-lying archipelago threatened by sea-level rise and typhoons, had just one of seven projects it proposed over seven years approved in 2021.
“The process is extremely slow and very bureaucratic,” said Rohit Khanna, a former manager of global energy programs at the World Bank who also helped set up one of the bank’s climate funds. “The Green Climate Fund Secretariat is quite risk averse. The Secretariat is just anxious that if something goes wrong, the fund will die in its infancy.” (The Secretariat is a World Bank employee who manages the day-to-day operations of the fund.)
The highly bureaucratic process is a burden for developing countries, said Michai Robertson, a negotiator for small island states like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Barbados. The bank often had lengthy reporting requirements to guard against fraud and corruption, and at times it made well-meaning but impractical information requests, he added. In one case, the bank asked for 30 years of weather data in conflict zones where such data did not exist. Robertson attributed the logjams to “a lack of trust in developing countries and their systems.”
“It’s very colonial in its mindset,” he added.
In exchange for running the funds, the bank charges fees that are primarily used to pay its staff, many of whom live in expensive cities like Washington, D.C., and New York. In recent years, those costs have been increasing. The bank increased its fees from 12 percent to 17 percent, calculated as a percentage of the Secretariat’s operational costs for running the Global Partnership for Education fund a few years ago. More recently, it tried to increase those costs to 24 percent before they were negotiated down to about 20 percent.
“I don’t think the bank is transparent” about its fee structure, said Rohit Khanna, a former manager of global energy programs at the World Bank who also helped set up one of the bank’s climate funds. “The bank is not cheap, that’s for sure. The fees are high, and part of it is just the fact that you’re paying for a lot of stuff in Washington, D.C.” Khanna said costs in the low teens for the loss and damage fund would be acceptable, but anything as high as 24 percent would be “outrageous.”
But the objection to the World Bank’s involvement in the loss and damage fund goes beyond its high fees and bureaucracy. Its critics charge more broadly that the institution has consistently pushed programs that have impoverished vast swaths of the developing world.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. At a two-week conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which was organized by the U.S. and British governments, leaders from 44 countries gathered to find ways to rebuild international currencies sunk by the war and “to promote worldwide reconstruction.” Initially, that meant promoting policies that favored substantial government intervention in the economy. In the decades after its founding, the World Bank encouraged countries in the Global South to take out millions of dollars in loans to dam rivers and erect power stations, assuring them that the new infrastructure would increase export revenue by enabling industrial production and pull their people out of poverty.
That plan did not pan out, according to University of Minnesota professor Michael Goldman, who has written one of the seminal books about the World Bank. While the bank pushed many developing countries to invest in industries that ultimately did not have longevity, rich nations’ hunger for many of the Global South’s key commodities began to dwindle. The commodities that had generated export revenue for developing countries were largely replaced by cheap synthetic alternatives: corn syrup instead of sugar, polyester instead of cotton, particle board instead of timber.As the market value of these commodities plummeted, poor nations’ foreign debt ballooned, reaching $1 trillion by 1986.
Rather than diminishing the World Bank’s stature, however, the global debt crisis placed the bank in the position of solving the colossal problem that it had a dominant hand in creating.
Governments in the developing world started borrowing large sums just to pay off the interest on their old loans. But these new loans came at a steep cost: The World Bank was stacked with people who believed that state-led development had failed and a free market approach would benefit indebted nations. As a result, the bank promised to bail out poor countries on the condition that they implement specific economic policies that, while on their face were intended to pull countries out of debt, ultimately served the interests of wealthy northern nations by allowing foreign companies to privatize public sectors.
These 1990s-era “structural adjustment programs,” as they were known, marked a radical departure from the World Bank’s founding ideology. Rather than push for government intervention in developing markets, the bank ordered borrowers to liberalize their economies by eliminating trade restrictions and allowing foreign companies to privatize previously public functions like electricity and mining. In the ensuing decade, people living in the borrowing countries struggled under policies that also saw the elimination of critical government subsidies and social welfare programs.
“It was considered ‘the lost decade’ because of the austerity programs the World Bank implemented to get back its money to repay its investors,” Goldman told Grist. In Mexico, for example, the government was forced to take out structural adjustment loans after racking up $80 billion in debt to U.S. banks by 1982. Provisions in the loans “completely revamped the Mexican state and economy, eliminating food subsidies, rural public agencies, national food security systems, and state-owned food monopolies,” Goldman wrote in his book, Imperial Nature.
The ideology behind structural adjustment — which promoted market liberalization, state austerity, and public sector privatization — permeated every arm of the World Bank during the 1980s, according to Robert Wade, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. When Wade started working at the institution in 1984, he had already lived in Taiwan and South Korea, where government intervention in the economy had improved the prospects of millions of people. At the bank, however, he found that no one was interested in these success stories. He departed four years later, “with the sense that the World Bank was ideologically driven in a direction that I thought was inappropriate for developing countries,” Wade told Grist.
Structural adjustment is now widely considered a resounding failure among economists and development analysts. Since the turn of the millennium, the World Bank has shifted in new directions, focusing more on promoting good governance and “sustainable development.” But Wade told Grist that, at its core, the institution is still dominated by the perspectives and interests of rich countries. He pointed to the World Bank’s power structure: It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., its president is typically an American citizen handpicked by the U.S. president, and the U.S. is the only country to have a de facto right of veto at the bank. To this day, the U.S. remains the bank’s largest shareholder, providing more capital to the bank than any other country.
According to Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, the average individual in the global South has one-eighth of the voting power in the World Bank as their counterpart in the global North. As a result, the bank’s hosting of the loss and damage fund would mean that the countries that have contributed the most to climate change would have the most power to administer the reparations for the harm they have caused.
“They’re playing a double game,” Wade said. “Western nations have a collective interest in pretending that they’re committed to giving money to this fund” while structuring it in a way that minimizes what they actually have to pay. That became clear at COP28 earlier this week, when delegates agreed to adopt a loss and damage fund that will start at $429 million — a small fraction of what developing countries say they will need to make up for the economic impacts of climate change. The U.S. in particular came under fire for offering up a paltry $17.5 million. (The United Arab Emirates and Germany, by comparison, each pledged $100 million). The cost of Pakistan’s devastating floods during the summer of 2022 were estimated to be around $40 billion alone.
To protect the loss and damage fund from the idiosyncrasies of the World Bank, developing nation negotiators set out some conditions that the bank has to meet. They include autonomy for the board that would oversee the fund, access to the fund for all developing countries, and fees that are “reasonable and appropriate.”
“What we agreed to was that rather than trying to shove ourselves into existing World Bank structures, we would establish a set of conditions that the World Bank must meet if it is to be the interim host,” said Avinash Persaud, special climate envoy and negotiator for Barbados. “If the World Bank doesn’t do a good job — and I’m not saying it won’t — then sacking the World Bank,” is a possibility, he added.
The time has come to treat the sequence of UN Climate Change Conferences, the latest concluding in Dubai, as a series of the failed and the abysmally rotten. It shows how a worthless activity, caked (oiled?) with appropriately chosen words, can actually provide assurance that something worthwhile was done. Along the way, there are always the same beneficiaries: fossil fuel magnates and satirists.
COP28, which featured 97,000 participants, including the weighty presence of 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, was even more of a shambles than its predecessor. Its location – in an oil rich state – was head scratching. Its chairman Sultan Al Jaber, taking advantage of the various parties who would attend, had sought to cultivate some side business for the United Arab Emirates, notably for the state oil company ADNOC.
This did not deter UN climate change bureaucrats and negotiators, who seemed to equate climate change policy with an account of goods held by a business. Consider the wording of the COP Agreement released on December 13: “The global stocktake is considered the central outcome of COP28 – as it contains every element that was under negotiation and can now be used by countries to develop stronger climate action plans due by 2025.” It was a “global stocktake” supposedly signalling the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, to be facilitated by “laying the ground for a swift, just and equitable transition, underpinned by deep emission cuts and scaled-up finance.”
These words have been treated as sacerdotal by many of its participants, the be all and end all, the event’s great culmination. But long hours of deliberation can confuse effort with achievement, and this proved to be no exception. Tinkering with meaning can be taken as a triumph. Recognising words such as “fossil fuels” and “science” can make delegates weak at the knees. Promises to set targets for a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) make others swoon.
It was such tinkering that led to the call for a “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable way with developed countries continuing to take the lead.” The emphasis here is on a “transition away” from their use, not their “phase out”, which is what 130 of the 198 participating parties were willing to accept.
The term “phase-down” was used regarding “unabated coal power” while “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” would be phased out, presumably leaving the question open as to what, exactly, efficient subsidies might look like. Parties were also “encouraged to come forward with ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all greenhouse gases, sectors and categories and aligned with the 1.5°C in their next round of climate action plans (known as nationally determined contributions) by 2025.”
Jaber was in a gleeful mood at the outcome. The naysayers’ warning that the summit would be an unmitigated failure had been disproved. “Together, we have confronted realities and we have set the world in the right direction. We have given it a robust action plan to keep 1.5°C within reach. It is a plan that is led by the science.”
US climate change envoy John Kerry thought the document convincing: it sent “very strong messages to the world” providing a much firmer statement on preventing global warming from exceeding the 1.5°C limit. Danish Climate Minister Dan Jørgensen seemed to angle for praise in noting that his country, being “an oil rich country surrounded by oil countries that are now signing a piece of paper saying we need to move away from oil” was “historic”.
The agreement had an eager audience desperate to identify signs of progress. Prof. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization called the COP28 agreement “historic in that – for the first time – it recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels for the first time.” Even the Scientific American made the observation that none of the previous 27 climate change conferences had even mentioned fossil fuels and its link to a rise in global temperatures.
A good gaggle of climatologists and geophysicists were less enthused. “The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels,” opined Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, “was devastating.” To use such an expression as “‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”
An editorial in Nature was also steely in rejecting the way science had been manipulated at the summit, noting Jaber’s own declaration on November 21 that there was no scientific basis that would necessitate phasing out fossil fuels to restrict global warming to the agreed limit. While the editorial had gone to press before the release of the final agreement, the journal was correct in assuming that it “would not include language on phasing out fossil fuels. That is more than a missed opportunity. It is dangerous.”
The dangers are considerable, given the number of transitioning states. They include, for instance, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who seeks the expansion of renewable energy while building coal-burning power plants, and the current US administration, whose Bureau of Land Management approved more oil and gas leases on federal lands in the first two years and seven months than the previous Trump administration did over the equivalent period. In the usual doublespeak of the Biden administration, such a policy could comfortably exist alongside its overall green strategy.
As weak tea as the document is, it’s not even binding. Countries can still pursue fossil fuel projects, at the behest of strong coal, gas and oil lobbies, even as they claim to be pursuing abating technologies that supposedly minimise emissions. In Australia, opposition spokesman for climate change and energy Ted O’Brien provided something of an exemplar of this. “While the final communique names fossil fuels, it also promotes carbon, capture and storage as abating technology for such fuels along with nuclear energy which can be a zero-emission substitute.”
The record of actions taken to such agreements is not promising. For one, COP28 seemed riddled with pledges and gestures, a matter of theatre. The heralded “loss and damage fund” received commitments to the total of US$700 million, but this is wretchedly meagre when compared to the annual US$200 to US$400 billion required by Africa alone, let alone the US$400 billion a year for climate change adaptation.
Debates of herculean obstinacy over word changes in a text can spell the doom of its object. In future experiments in hot air summitry of the sort witnessed at Dubai, the powerful and wealthy will have room to stretch and delay meaningful change, adopting that famous plea by St. Augustine: “Please God, make me good, but not just yet.”
Greenland’s ice sheet is under pressure from human-induced climate change.(Image credit: Paul Souders/Getty Images)
Northern Greenland is under attack by global warming at the same time as delegates to COP28 heap praise on a purported landmark deal to transition out of fossil fuels but beware of the true meaning behind the language. Its disingenuousness is a stamp of approval for much more climate upheaval imprinted onto one more UN Conference of the Parties, COP flop.
According to Dr. Friederike Otto of Imperial College London:
The lukewarm agreement reached at COP28 will cost every country, no matter how rich, no matter how poor. Everyone loses. It’s hailed as a compromise, but we need to be very clear what has been compromised. The short-term financial interests of a few have again won over the health, lives and livelihoods of most people living on this planet.” (“COP28: Landmark Deal to Transition Away from Fossil Fuels Agreed- As It Happened”, The Guardian, December 13, 2023.)
Down to Earth’s publication dated December 14, 2023, hit the nail on the head re COP28:
Despite the hottest summer in 120,000 years, the oil, gas, coal, and farming companies that are heating the planet can continue to expand production for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, new research has identified extremely disturbing deep trouble brewing in Greenland: Three of eight major ice shelves in the northern region have collapsed or retreated, leaving five ice shelves as gigantic corks holding back major glaciers from rapidly flowing into the sea, in turn, raising sea levels beyond comfort levels. The three biggest are Petermann, Ryder, and Nioghalvfierbrae. This threesome alone equals 3.6 feet of sea level rise. (“Alarming Collapse of Greenland Ice Shelves Sparks Warning of Sea Level Rise”, LiveScience, November 2023.)
A separate study by Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences/The University of Texas found Greenland’s glaciers melting 100 times faster than previously thought. (K Schulz, et al, “An Improved and Observationally Constrained Melt Rate Parameterization for Vertical Ice Fronts of Marine Terminating Glaciers”, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 49, Issue 18, September 20, 2022.)
Moreover, according to the Oden study:
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a major predictor of sea level rise. This frozen stretch of glaciers is the second largest on Earth and covers about 80% of the Nordic nation. If it melts entirely, as it did at the height of the Eemian interglacial period about 125,000 years ago, global sea levels could rise by 20 feet—or approximately 6.1 meters.
An entire meltdown would take centuries, but we’re only concerned with the first several feet which will likely happen this 21st century, enough to flood coastal cities, for example, wiping out Miami Beach, unless Florida encircles the entire state with a gigantic seawall creating a medieval city/state moat.
For as long as anybody can remember, the eight ice shelves in the northern region of Greenland were always stable. However, stability has suddenly disintegrated, according to the report:
We show that since 1978, ice shelves in North Greenland have lost more than 35% of their total volume, three of them collapsing completely. For the floating ice shelves that remain we observe a widespread increase in ice shelf mass losses. (R. Millan, et al, “Rapid Disintegration and Weakening of Ice Shelves in North Greenland”,Nature Communications, November 2023.)
There’s no emphasis required to know that COP28’s greenwashing compromise and the global warming threat to Greenland are not only interrelated but really bad news. And, once again, it exposes the hollowness of annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP) that should address the compelling issue of excessive CO2 emissions creating a blanket trapping global heat. Ipso facto, Greenland’s glaciers, 100 times faster, start filling up the oceans. This, in turn, creates the mystery of all mysteries as nobody knows how high, or when, sea level rise overwhelms coastal metropolises. But based upon the feebleness of 30+years of COP meetings that are attended by world leaders (154 heads of state at COP28), it looks dismal.
Amongst the referenced ice shelves, the Peterman ice shelf is a focal point. It lies at the seaward end of a deep sub-ice canyon that could open-up ocean penetration into the center of the entire Greenland ice sheet. The initial step to such a horrifying prospect would be loss of Peterman’s ice shelf.
Ice shelves are the parts of an ice sheet that float on the water, preventing glaciers on the land from slipping into and melting in the ocean, which would increase sea levels. If the glaciers the North Greenland ice shelves support were to collapse, sea levels could rise by nearly 7 feet (2.1 meters). (LiveScience report)
Therefore, the Millan scientific analysis should raise eyebrows of policymakers to the necessity of immediate powerful mitigation measures, not mealymouthed halfway-commitments that are broadcast as “landmarks,” oh, please! Yet brokenheartedly, the recently concluded Dubai 28th annual UN climate conference did not address the issue of excessive CO2 emissions forcing increased warming, other than to stress “transitioning” out of fossil fuels pretty much on a ho-hum basis. This approach has not worked for more than 30 years of COP meetings, frustration reigns supreme. According to COP28 president Al-Jaber, COP28 is a “true victory,” but “his comments clash with reactions by scientists who have praised parts of the UAE consensus but criticized its vague, weak and caveated language on fossil fuels, which are the main cause of climate change.” (The Guardian, December 13, 2023.)
As a result of decades of weak COPs, there’s a price to be paid: “We are heading toward an ice-shelf-free Northern Hemisphere.” (Millan) The implications are horrendous and impossible to describe and based upon the results of COP28, a major question going forward is whether adaptation measures, such as tall seawalls, can be erected ahead of rising sea levels?
The results of too much ocean heat (oceans absorb 80-90% of planetary heat) entering underneath the ice shelves has been studied in detail by scientists based at institutions in France, the US, and Denmark, using satellite data, ocean observations, and climate modeling to measure changes in the ice shelves’ spatial area and thickness. Grounding lines where the ice shelves come aground were evaluated. The areas where the floating shelves end, and the grounded glacier begins are retreating inland across nearlyall the shelves, a key sign of weakening. This is a prime example of the nemesis of global warming fueled by rising CO2 emissions at work. COP28 was supposed to deal with issues like this. It did not.
As previously mentioned, Greenland’s ice shelf melt down is 100 times faster than expectations by the scientists, as of 2022. It’s literally impossible to drive a car 100 times faster than cruising speed; it cannot physically be done; yet humongous ice shelves are melting 100 times faster. It’s something to think about.
When Australian Greens Leader, Adam Bandt raved last week about the US administration’s $1.5 trillion Inflation Reduction Act subsidy largesse for America’s green energy reindustrialisation, he again called for a $100 billion response from our federal government and a tax on fossil fuel companies to pay for it. I immediately thought of that joke about…
Toronto | Traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat – Phil Pothen, Environmental Defence’s Counsel and Land Development Manager, is available to provide insight following Minotar Holdings’ filing of an application for judicial review of the restoration of Greenbelt protection to its agricultural landholdings in Markham’s protected countryside.
Background Information:
The agricultural lands which are the subject of the application were among the 15 parcels stripped of Greenbelt protection in late 2022, despite the Ontario government’s express promise never to remove land from the Greenbelt.
Enshrining protection of current Greenbelt lands in statute, rather than allowing removals by regulation at the discretion of Cabinet, was necessary to restore the certainty of permanence which is vital to the Greenbelt’s functioning, and which was undermined by the Ontario government’s recent attack on the Greenbelt.
Experts warned land speculators from the start that the removal of land from the Greenbelt was inappropriate and would soon need to be returned, and it was reckless for Minotar to disregard those warnings.
Permitting Minotar to be compensated would create perverse incentives for real estate investors in future to use expenditures as a way to “lock in” inappropriate government giveaways.
When: Friday, December 15, 2023
Who: Phil Pothen – Counsel and Land Development Program Manager, Ontario Environment
Where: Toronto, Ontario and available remotely
ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENCE (environmentaldefence.ca): Environmental Defence is a leading Canadian environmental advocacy organization that works with government, industry and individuals to defend clean water, a safe climate and healthy communities.
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For more information or to request an interview, please contact:
The number of policy recommendations and funding announcements at COP28 was overwhelming. Here’s a list of all the major food outcomes to help you digest it all.
“Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10 times harder when it comes to opposing livestock farming.”
George Monbiot summed it up in his Guardian column yesterday. All eyes were on fossil fuels in Dubai the least couple of weeks, with countries fighting each other to decide if oil and gas are actually bad for the planet, as science has told us consistently and constantly. The resulting document was described as ‘historic’ by some, and ‘weak’ by others.
But this was supposed to be a food-focused COP, with the first dedicated agrifood day and a majority of food being meatless. And whether or not true progress was made, a lot of announcements were. We could barely keep track, but as the summit is over and there’s a moment to breathe (until the fossil fuels take over, that is), here’s a list of every major food-related development at the UN climate conference.
Food systems policy developments at COP28
The FAO published its much-anticipated agrifood roadmap to limit warming to 1.5°C, with 120 actions recommended to meet 20 key targets. Measures include cutting livestock methane emissions by 25% by 2030 and halving food waste by 2030. It acknowledged the need to change diets to reduce meat and dairy emissions, but said that plant-based foods can’t be an adequate source of certain nutrients. Plus, only the FAO’s website (and not the report) calls on higher-income countries to cut their consumption. In fact, the report said meat production needs to be ramped up to address health challenges in poorer nations.
In response, a group of organisations including ProVeg International, Mercy for Animals, Friends of the Earth, and Changing Markets Foundation – as well as Green Queen – highlighted gaps in the roadmap in a joint letter. “The roadmap falls short of highlighting the specific benefits of transitioning towards more healthy, plant-based diets, especially in regions with excessive consumption of animal-based foods,” said Stephanie Maw, policy manager at ProVeg.
“I call this approach guillotine syndrome,” wrote Monbiot on the report’s suggestions to cut livestock emissions. “There might be a slight improvement in efficiency, but it’s still decapitation.” He added: “Following the report it published this week, I feel I can state with confidence that the FAO is a major cog in the meat misinformation machine.”
The final Global Stocktake text was published, and it included mentions of food or agriculture in both the mitigation and adaptation sections. But this almost didn’t happen, with previous drafts removing any mention of food systems at all. It’s an encouraging start and gives countries something to work with, but there is a long way to go before we can be sure of a transformative outcome.
A group of over 100 organisations issued a statement, and they were not impressed: “‘Food’ appeared three times, in rote recitations from the Paris Agreement. This entirely fails to capture the importance of food systems that was extensively documented in the two-year global stocktake’s technical phase meant to inform the final outcome.”
160 countries and territories signed the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action – encompassing more than 75% of all food-based greenhouse gas emissions and over 70% of all food consumed. This was an encouraging way to start the summit, but these commitments have to turn into action – there are plenty that haven’t!
Reacting to the news, João Campari, global food practice leader at WWF, said: “This commitment keeps the hope alive, but it must urgently lead to action to protect, sustainably manage and restore landscapes, seascapes and riverscapes that are critical to sustain life on Earth – particularly those being degraded by unsustainable food systems.”
The WWF was also one of over 150 non-state actors who signed a Call to Action for the transformation of food systems for people, nature and climate. The signatories spanned groups like farmers, Indigenous populations, businesses, civil society organisations, cities, philanthropies, and financial and research institutions – including Nestlé, Unilever, Danone, Rockefeller Foundation, CGIAR, World Farmers Organisation and NYC Mayor’s Office of Food.
“Climate change poses an enormous threat to farmers and food production,” said Elizabeth Nsimadala, a Ugandan smallholder farmer and president of the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation. “We need greater recognition of farmers, with a particular focus on women and youth, as equal partners in addressing this global challenge.”
Endorsed by 143 countries, the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Healthhighlighted the importance of food systems for climate and health, noting – in the second paragraph, no less – “the urgency of taking action on climate change” and “the benefits for health from deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions… and shifts to sustainable healthy diets.”
“The climate crisis is a health crisis, but for too long, health has been a footnote in climate discussions,” said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a joint statement, a group of animal advocacy organisations added: “Countries must now act to support sustainable food production as well as sustainable diets – through public education, government legislation and fiscal incentives in order to deliver effective, long-term solutions”
Negotiations around coordination and governance on the Joint Work on Agriculture and Food Security (SSJW) – a three-year-old collaborative roadmap addressing gaps in agriculture and food security – reached an impasse. Talks concluded with no progress, and the next meeting isn’t until June 2024, which is a major blow to farmers and producers.
WWF’s Campari said: “An opportunity to take a big step forward on climate action has already been wasted – negotiators can’t squander another by excluding food systems transformation from the Global Stocktake. It has to be reinstated – and meaningfully.”
The Global Goal on Adaptation also featured a mention of food and agriculture, urging countries to achieve climate-resilient food and agricultural production, supply and distribution, and increasing sustainable and regenerative agriculture and equitable access to food and nutrition. But there’s no mention of small-scale family farmers (responsible for producing a third of the world’s food).
“The GGA has some nice food and agriculture elements too, including strong language on nutrition for all – a crucial goal on its own, which also happens to encompass many of the key elements of resilient and sustainable food systems,” said Avery Cohn, partner, food and agriculture at Ode Partners. Paul Newnham, executive director of the SDG2 Advocacy Hub, added: “It’s encouraging to see food making it into the GST and GGA, but we need more for mitigation so that food systems transform to deliver good food for all without damaging our planet. We’ve made progress, but still have a way to go.”
Six food giants – Bel Group, Danone, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Lactalis USA, and Nestlé – formed the Dairy Methane Action Alliance with the Environmental Defense Fund to help dairy farmers reduce methane emissions and make farming more sustainable.
It’s “a step in the right direction”, but needs to be followed by clear targets,” said Changing Markets Foundation CEO Nusa Urbancic, calling the absence of dairy giants like Arla, Fonterra and Dairy Farmers of America a “big disappointment” as they’re “opting out of action on their main source of emissions”.
The World Economic Forum launched the First Movers Coalition for Food with support from the UAE government, which aims to create a procurement commitment for low-carbon agricultural commodities with an estimated $10-20B value by 2030. It includes food giants like Bayer, Cargill, Tyson, Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo.
Manny Maceda, CEO of Bain & Company, said this will enable a shift towards planet-friendly production: “This will decrease the risks associated with required investments in low-emissions agri-food production, make it easier to expand to net-zero and nature-positive technologies, and help farmers adopt greener practices such as regenerative agriculture.”
The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformationwas launched, with Brazil, Sierra Leone and Norway as co-chairs and prominent members including Rwanda and Cambodia. The goal for the “high ambition coalition for food” is to boost national visions and food systems transformation pathways consistent with science-based targets in 10 priority areas.
“This vanguard group of countries, spanning the global south and north and representing a variety of food systems, is committed to a whole-of-government approach within national borders,” said Edward Davey, UK head of the World Resources Institute Europe. “Recognising that transforming food systems will look different in every country, members aim to collaborate, share lessons and knowledge, and accelerate innovation to work better for people, nature and climate.
Financial pledges for food systems at COP28
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UAE announced a partnership to support smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Together, they pledged $200M million for innovation, much of it to be delivered to CGIAR.
The Gates Foundation will also contribute $7.95M to a Grand Challenges Request for Proposal focused on transdisciplinary approaches to better adapt to, mitigate, or reverse the combined deleterious effects of climate change on health and agriculture.
The Bezos Earth Fundannounced $57M food-related grants as part of its $1B commitment to tackling the food system’s impact on climate and nature. It will allocate the remaining $850M by 2030.
25 leading philanthropies issued a joint call for a tenfold increase in funding for regenerative and agroecological transitions, and to phase out fossil-fuel–based agrochemicals in industrial agriculture.
Norwayannounced NOK500 million (about $47M) in funding for adaptation, much of it directed towards smallholder farmers, agrobiodiversity and preventing food loss.
Kenya announced two major programmes, including a $1.5B partnership with Fortescue to produce green fertilisers, and a $270M partnership between United Green and Kenya Development Corporation partner for a 15,000-hectare sustainable agriculture project.
The Africa and Middle East SAFE Initiative, a $10B public-private partnership between countries and Institutions from Africa and the Middle East, was officially launched. This initiative endeavors to Scale-up Agriculture and Food systems for Economic development in Africa and the Middle East. It has been facilitated by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
CGIARsecured $890M million in funding to support smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries, reduce emissions from farming, and boost access to nutritious, healthy diets. Commitments included $136M million from the Netherlands, $132M from the UK, $100 million from the US and the World Bank each, and $51 million from Norway.
Ghana launched Resilient Ghana with a $110M investment from partners including Canada, Singapore, the US, the UAE and the LEAF Coalition for a package of initial programmes and partnerships across four thematic areas. These include sustainable agriculture and enabling conditions that support a just transition, strengthened governance and integrated land use planning.
The UN’s International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and partners launched a new blended financing mechanism to boost support to small-scale food producers in rural communities in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to adapt to a changing climate. The Africa Rural Climate Adaptation Finance Mechanismwill provide $200M to poor small-scale food producers and rural microenterprises, while small and medium-sized rural agribusinesses will also access concessional loans through this new scheme.
The Green Climate Fund and AGRAlaunched the regional Re-Gain Programme in Africa, leveraging $100M for smallholder tech and food loss solutions to boost food security while tackling climate challenges.
While there were some promising signs, there’s still a long, long way to go – but we’re short on time. “We need to be brave in confronting livestock production and the dark arts used to promote it,” wrote Monbiot. “We simply seek to apply the same standards to this industry as we’d apply to any other. But when we raise our hands in objection, they are met with fists raised in aggression. That’s the strategy, working as intended.”
After a whirlwind of a couple of weeks, COP28 is finally over – with promises fulfilled and promises broken, often simultaneously. It was billed as the UN’s first food-focused climate summit, but did it live up to the hype? Here’s what food system leaders think.
This year’s COP28 was always going to be controversial, more so than the rest. It was helmed by the CEO of the host country’s national oil company, who – four days into the conference – claimed that there was “no science” indicating a fossil fuel phaseout would help us tackle the climate crisis.
It sparked a frenzy, as fossil fuels became the main talking point of the conference – so much so that COP28 had to invoke a reserve day, as leaders couldn’t come to an agreement about the language in the Global Stocktake (GST). And when they finally did, it was deemed historic, but far from enough.
And that has been the case for food systems too. COP28 was touted to be the first food-focused conference of its kind, with a dedicated food and agriculture day, two-thirds of meatless food, and an FAO roadmap to keeping post-industrial temperature rises under 1.5°C.
Before the conference, it was reported that this plan by the FAO would encourage a reduction in meat consumption in richer countries, as well as a better livestock output in developing nations. The latter was part of the final text. The former? Not so much. There was a hint, but nothing explicit – and even if it were more direct, it wouldn’t have been good enough, given how crucial food system change is to the climate crisis.
Of course, there were some positives: the fact that food was even given a spotlight demonstrates progress. One of the biggest headlines was for the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action, signed by 134 countries. And 143 nations signed the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health (which highlighted the importance of agrifood in this context. Meanwhile, over 150 non-state actors signed a Call to Action for food systems transformation, while both private and public sectors pledged billions for more sustainable, nutritious and equitable food systems.
What do the stakeholders – the insiders at the heart of negotiations and leaders working to create change across global food systems – think about the outcome of COP28? We asked a range of food system players, including non-profit leaders, sustainability experts, think tanks and alternative protein founders, for their reactions. Here’s what they said:
Oliver Camp, senior associate, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), maximising positive impact for both nutrition and the environment
Progress at COP28 was necessary, but not sufficient. The Emirates Declaration and the Declaration on Climate and Health represent a major success for the food systems community, but the official negotiations could have gone much further in positioning food systems at the heart of the solution to the challenges we face.
Nonetheless, taken as a whole, this represents a strong platform to build upon as we continue in our mission to ensure that everyone has access to a nutritious and safe diet from an environmentally sustainable food system.
Andrew Jarvis, future food director, Bezos Earth Fund, backing climate and nature projects via philanthropic grants
COP28 was a landmark moment for food and climate. For the first time, food was in the midst of the agenda, and having 158 nations (and counting) sign the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, and having an ambitious call-to-action for non-state actors signed by so many important organisations, was unprecedented. The volume and vibrance of dialogue amongst food system actors was a highlight for me, with controversial topics being openly debated. We need this to continue, unabated.
Unfortunately, what happened outside of the negotiations was light years ahead of what was discussed inside negotiations. The Sharm dialogue on agriculture stalled, and the GST gave only a cursory nod to food systems. For those of us working in food systems, this is just the start – we must deliver the commitments made in the declaration and calls to action. Implement, implement, implement.
Mirte Gosker, managing director, The Good Food Institute APAC, advocating for alternative proteins across the food system
COP28 was a mixed bag. I loved the energy of being together with like-minded people from all corners of the world, working collaboratively towards a more sustainable future. But then again, not all agendas were aligned, and I wonder whether the ‘circus’ that COP turned into had any influence at all on the negotiations. If not, the question is: do we need it?
If we were to bring in only the top voices – the absolute experts on every topic – and give them the opportunity to make their case to the negotiators, we could save a lot on carbon emissions and might be more effective in reaching our goals. But I realise that approach would diminish the plurality of voices, which is also the beauty of COP.
The ‘circus’ also allows for building stronger bonds and cross-topic connections, reflecting on new angles and ideas, and forging new collaborations. I’m very happy to see that the food systems were given more attention this year, and I foresee that they will play a leading role in years to come. I’m grateful for people of influence, like UAE climate minister Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, Singapore’s minister of sustainability and the environment, Grace Fu, and Dutch MP Rob Jetten, addressing the need for more sustainable food systems and acknowledging alternative proteins as an important climate solution.
The launch of the UNEP What’s Cooking report was also very promising. Overall, I’m confident that we’re moving in the right direction, but I’m also cognizant that we’re running out of time. Change needs to come faster. And we might need to rethink whether the current way COP is organised is the best way forward.
Irina Gerry, CMO & CCO, Change Foods, making dairy proteins using precision fermentation
COP28 was a whirlwind filled with panels and presentations, side events, evening receptions and dinners with food innovators. 100,000 attendees buzzing about made it feel like the world’s largest climate pageant. On one hand, it filled me with hope, that so many people showed up to participate in events, conversations and negotiations. On the other, I’m not sure much tangible climate action will come from it, especially on food.
To be honest, it feels a bit hollow. Yes, there was a big declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action, putting “food on the table” in climate conversation, but it stopped short of specific actions or policies. There is broad agreement that the world needs healthy and sustainable diets, and that food systems matter a great deal for climate, but little detail on how to get there. I’m still reading all the different reports and digests, but I know climate action can’t wait.
We can’t wait for policymakers and politicians to come to an agreement. We must focus on action and impact, whether as individuals or through our businesses and organizations. The future we want won’t make itself. So, as we reflect on the state of climate and the world post COP, let’s think about what we can do and get doing.
Lee Recht, VP of sustainability, Aleph Farms, producing cultivated meat in Israel and beyond
I know that COP is criticised by many and, to some extent, rightfully so, but you can’t deny the magic that happens right outside of the negotiations. Hundreds of dedicated experts are pushing for a holistic and inclusive agrifood systems transformation.
For years, the agrifood systems have been fighting to be at the table at COP28, being responsible for a third of the global GHGs. This year, there were notable achievements. Not only did we witness a government declaration that over 130 countries signed on to, but we were also recognised at the GST level.
So, yes, the work ahead of us is tremendous, but I choose to remain optimistic and focused on the doing. Aleph Farms and the Global Cellular Agriculture Alliance aim to complement sustainable animal agriculture, and we are actively advocating for climate action, resiliency in our food systems and strengthing food security through protein diversification.
Elysabeth Alfano, CEO & co-founder, VegTech Invest, investing in public companies innovating with plants
For me, COP28 was an overwhelming success. At COP27, I could barely get anyone to engage in side conversations around food systems transformation based on the key pillar of protein diversification. Fast forward one year and a food system shift was not only a central part of scheduled panel discussions but how to financially execute that transformation was a part of many panels every day – not just on the food and agriculture day. Only two of my panels were in food pavilions. One was in a business pavilion, and one was in a climate research pavilion. This, I believe, illustrates the broad interest in and understanding of food as a lever for change.
Currently, only 2%-4.8% of climate finance goes to food systems, but food systems are 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions, and animal agriculture is 60% of that. Financing food fast to have meaningful reductions in GHG emissions, as well as reductions in deforestation, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, was at the heart of the majority of panels I attended and the four panels in which I participated.
Blended capital was the buzz phrase in my meetings. It calls on governments, philanthropists, and finally, private capital from Wall Street to work together to address the inefficiency of our current food system. For me, this has always been the only strategy that I see working and I am happy to see that many are unifying around this same approach that we have had for the last two years at VegTech Invest.
Like everyone, I am deeply encouraged that 154 countries to date have signed on to the Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. However, I am more excited by the UNEP What’s Cooking paper and video that leaves no doubt about the math of animal agriculture and its destruction for people, planet, and of course, animals.
If I had a complaint, it would be that countries are understandably fearful of change and, thus, many are still not looking at food as a full systems shift based on the math of utilising our natural resources in a way that feeds everyone on the planet without frying it. Protectionists are still viewing the issue through the lens of how to keep the status quo rather than how to smartly manage the only planet we have for the benefit of all its inhabitants.
However, this is to be expected. A shift of this magnitude doesn’t happen overnight. Thus, for me, it is impossible not to feel positive about the progress made at COP28.
Robert E Jones, VP of Mosa Meat and co-founder of the Global Cellular Agriculture Alliance, cultivated meat advocate
The outcomes from COP28 are no doubt mixed. However, food and agriculture did take a positive step forward. Food systems are finally on the menu at COP, but now countries need to get specific about how they will pay the check. If we are to avoid the worst-case scenarios of the climate crisis, protein diversification needs to be one of the pillars of both resilience and mitigation strategies, especially in the global north. As a united industry, this is the message we delivered in Dubai through hundreds of conversations with ministers, NGOs, farmers, adjacent industry leaders, negotiators, and investors.
Food and agriculture systems took a significant leap forward during COP28 in Dubai – including the first-ever mention of “regenerative” food and agriculture in a high-profile international agreement. Although the negotiations missed a real opportunity to highlight food as a nature-based solution for mitigating the climate crisis, the inclusion of food in the adaptation section bodes well for further advances toward healthy, nutritious and regenerative food systems in upcoming work on the global goal for adaptation.
Tasneem Karodia, co-founder and COO, Newform Foods, developing cultivated meat in South Africa
As a first-time COP attendee, I didn’t know what to expect from the event. It was an overwhelming experience with so much to do and see. It was great to see the focus on food – it helped narrow down the focus and bring a concentration of food leaders across the value chain into the same room. I think there is great progress in bringing food to the fore, with the aim of breaking down the silos usually formed.
The difficulty is how we move this to action and continue collaboration. On a personal note, I have made connections with people I have only seen from a screen and it has helped bridge the gap on what we’re doing in the south and how this could be applicable in the north and vice versa. I look forward to seeing how these conversations progress to action.
Paul Newnham, executive director, SDG2 Advocacy Hub, drove drive global campaigning and advocacy strategy to promote food security
I leave COP28 feeling exhausted after a massive year and a big fortnight but encouraged to see food systems rise on the agenda. With 160 leaders signing the declaration on agriculture and food systems and many new initiatives and funds committed, it gives me hope. We have a lot to do to build on this work and turn it into more urgent country-level progress but it was a start. With practical teeth and commitment to CGIAR, IFAD and many others.
As negotiations come to an end, it’s encouraging to see food making it into the GST and GGA, but we need more for mitigation so that food systems transform to deliver good food for all without damaging our planet. We’ve made progress, but still have a way to go.
Avery Cohn, partner, food and agriculture at Ode Partners, using data and design to address climate and conservation issues
The headlines are likely to rightfully key in on the landmark progress on fossil fuels at COP28 and the finance that we’ll now need to mobilise for this. But this summit’s progress on food systems wound up being its second most important outcome, in my view.
Food employs three billion, causes a third of all emissions, and is the locus of some of the worst risks from our changing climate. Paris’s mitigation and adaptation goals will be totally out of reach without food. Yet although there have been some bright spots, the sector has traditionally suffered from challenging politics and badly lagged on ambition. So, even many of us who have long helped push for the COP28 UAE Food Declaration were surprised by food’s progress in Dubai.
We closed the summit with 159 countries endorsing a new vision and agenda on food systems and climate. Declarations are non-binding, but the GST and the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) decisions have a distributed array of ingredients that together closely align with the Declaration on Food.
For example, in the mitigation section of the GST, you’ll find references to key food-sensitive issues like non-CO2 gas (including both methane and nitrous oxide), the Global Biodiversity Framework, innovation to reduce unit costs, poverty eradication, sustainable lifestyles, economy-wide absolute GHG reduction targets, and aligning nationally determined contributions with low GHG development strategies. The adaptation section contains a reference to resilient food systems, as well as many promising practices.
Meanwhile, the GGA has some nice food and agriculture elements too, including strong language on nutrition for all – a crucial goal on its own, which also happens to encompass many of the key elements of resilient and sustainable food systems.
The sum of everything food-sensitive in the GGA+GST is similar to the COP28 Food Declaration. Each is stronger in some ways, weaker in others. Taken together, I think we’ve now got a rapidly emerging high-ambition agenda on food systems and climate that breaks down the siloes between development, nature, adaptation, mitigation, and nutrition, and provides a resounding mandate to lean in. We’ll now need to turn to implementation and resource mobilisation. It’s time to take the win and get to work.
The legacy of the COP28 climate summit, which concluded this week in Dubai, hinges on the success of a new international fund that was announced to great fanfare on the very first day of the conference. The stakes could hardly be higher: The so-called loss and damage fund is considered an essential resource for the survival of the countries most affected by the 1.2 degrees Celsius of global warming that has already occurred.
The loss and damage agreement represents a different kind of climate fund: The money isn’t meant to help climate-vulnerable countries mitigate their emissions or plan adaptation projects like sea walls or water reservoirs. Instead, it’s supposed to help them pay for damages that have already been caused by a specific climate-linked incident, like a storm, flood, heatwave, or other extreme weather event.
The fund is primarily intended for use by relatively poor, developing countries in the Global South for two related reasons. The first is that these are the sorts of countries that have already seen the most severe losses and damages tied to climate change: record-breaking floods in Bangladesh, historic drought in the Horn of Africa, life-threatening sea-level rise in the Marshall Islands, and infectious disease outbreaks in South Asia. The second is that, due to their late or still-ongoing industrialization, these nations did much, much less to cause the climate change that is already harming them than their counterparts in rich and early-industrializing regions like the European Union and United States.
For decades, developing countries fought for the existence of a loss and damage fund. Now that it’s finally operational — it’s being housed, temporarily at least, at the World Bank — the hard part has arrived: filling up the fund, and getting the money to the countries that need it. More than $650 million has come in so far, with $100 million apiece from Germany and the United Arab Emirates, $75 million from the U.K., $17.5 million from the U.S., and $10 million from Japan. But these pledges, some portions of which the contributing countries relabeled or pulled from existing climate pledges, are insufficient to cover the scale of loss and damage developing nations are facing. Researchers estimate that countries need anywhere between $290 billion and $580 billion every year by 2030.
As debates continue over how to finance and deploy the fund such that it serves those most in need, one aspect is frequently lost in the conversation: how countries will use the money when they receive it.
To begin answering this question, Grist reporters spoke with representatives of 10 developing nations to understand their needs and aspirations for the fund. While we received a wide range of responses, national leaders were united in their emphasis that the fund would not only pay for past damages, but also fortify their people against future losses.
They were also unanimous in their opposition to a debt-based structure that would saddle them with costly interest payments, preventing them from making the future investments needed to continue fortifying their countries against climate change. And they were clear, above all, that they haven’t been waiting on the fund to figure out how they’re going to survive climate change. Indeed, many countries already have the knowledge, preparation, and expertise needed to confront the climate crisis — they are just seeking the resources necessary to act on them.
It started with the rain. During the first two months of 2022, torrential rain poured down on the western coast of Santo Island in Vanuatu. Then, in March, the rain-soaked mountainside buckled and a landslide sent soil, rocks, and debris plummeting, burying the village of Molpoi. Susan Balmet, a local fisherwoman, later said the loss of her village felt like the loss of her identity.
“Had I known in advance, we would have spent time taking pictures of the reef, moving some of the huge giant clams to other, safer areas, and telling our kids the stories of each stone and coral patch before it was taken from us,” she told the country’s Loss & Damage Taskforce. “There are things that can help us grieve, if they are done before it is too late.”
For decades, Vanuatu has been at the forefront of advocating for loss and damage funding. The South Pacific country is home to about 400,000 people across 83 islands, about 98 percent of whom are Indigenous Melanesians who speak more than 100 Native languages. But ocean acidification, sea level rise, coral bleaching, extreme rainfall, extreme drought, and cyclones are increasingly battering the islands’ land and waters.
International loss and damage funding would allow Vanuatu to create its own national loss and damage fund, which would allow communities to apply directly for money to support the work they’ve been doing to recover from climate disasters for decades, said Christopher Bartlett, head of Vanuatu’s climate diplomacy.
That money could help rebuild lost villages, reestablish taro gardens, and plant thousands of coconut and cacao trees. It could build schools, houses, and clinics. With additional loss and damage resources, Vanuatu could also develop micro-insurance programs to help local farmers and fishermen receive compensation when their crops are destroyed by extreme weather events. And perhaps most urgently, the funding could help Indigenous people document their traditional knowledge before it’s lost forever.
– Anita Hofschneider
Mozambique
Earlier this year, Cyclone Freddie struck Mozambique not once but twice, spiraling out to sea after its initial landfall only to regain strength off the Southeastern coast of Africa, breaking records and becoming the longest-lasting cyclone of all time. Nearly 200,000 people were displaced, crops were lost, and new outbreaks of cholera followed the storm’s path. Like its neighbors Malawi and Madagascar, the country is still rebuilding. Deadly cyclones have been a regular occurrence in the region in recent years, and more are likely to come as warmer waters create more ideal conditions for cyclones to develop. As a result, loss and damage funding is an urgent priority for the country’s leaders.
“Mozambique discovered that it is necessary to have a fund for losses and damages a long time ago, when the climate change situation began to intensify,” said Luis Machatine, who is in charge of planning and cooperation for Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management and Reduction. “For example, Cyclone Idai [in 2019] destroyed a lot of things that the state budget alone could not cover. But a fund could help in reconstruction of the losses suffered.”
At the top of the list of priorities is housing for those displaced.
“In the housing area, we have a lot of work linked to the resettlement of affected populations,” said Machatine. “We would also allocate it to boost our economy by rebuilding various infrastructures.”
But some things destroyed by climate change can never be replaced, according to Machatine.
“The real cost is tireless,” he said. “The damage caused is incalculable as it ranges from the loss of human life [to] flora and fauna [to] land and lakes.”
– Siri Chilukuri
Botswana
Thanks in large part to its enormous diamond mines, Botswana enjoys a better financial situation than many of its neighboring countries in southern Africa — but the desert nation is still highly vulnerable to climate change. Farmers and pastoralists rely on rainfall to feed crops and keep livestock alive, but drought cycles in the country are intensifying as the world warms. Recent dry periods saw thousands of cattle and goats perish as seasonal harvests failed. Even wildlife have begun to migrate in search of water: Elephants have rampaged through villages and destroyed homes, and some pastoralists have woken up to find lions on their verandas.
The national government already distributes aid packages with emergency food supplies and subsidies to farmers who lose their harvests, but this aid effort puts a strain on the country’s budget, according to Antoinette Moleele, a sustainable agriculture expert who serves as the consultant for Botswana’s national delegation to COP28.
“People in marginalized areas of the country, they’re poor, so they’re highly stressed by the droughts,” she said. “If we had a fund that is just there to be able to cover the relief, we would be able to feed children and pregnant women during these periods.”
Moleele said Botswana would also use loss-and-damage funds to invest in what she called “capacity building.” This would allow the government to design early-warning systems to alert pastoralists about dry spells. It would also increase scientific research into drought cycles and train young people to plant drought-resilient crops.
– Jake Bittle
Senegal
Idy Niang, a regional director at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in Senegal, describes climate change in his native country as a “slow-onset” disaster. While the frequency of extreme weather events such as flash floods has increased over the years, the greatest impacts of global temperature increase can be felt along the nation’s 330-mile coast, where sea level rise is salinating farmland and forcing villagers to retreat from the shore. Islands in the southern part of the country are starting to disappear.
These gradual yet devastating effects have catalyzed an uptick in migration to the capital city, Dakar, which is suffering the complications of rapid urbanization: a lack of adequate planning, insufficient public services, frequent power outages, and water infrastructure problems.
Niang said that loss and damage funding will ideally help pay for the reclamation of salinated farmland using imported technology. It could also assist with the “very expensive” relocation of residents away from land that is getting swallowed by the sea. Niang emphasized that this climate migration would entail “non-economic losses” that cannot be quantified: the loss of culture and native land. Coming from a small fishing village himself, he understands this intimately.
“What we need to define is how to finance the non-economic losses,” he said. “That is a very big question.”
– Naveena Sadasivam and Lylla Younes
The Gambia
Like many other countries in West Africa, this tiny nation of around 2.6 million people depends heavily on cash crops that are vulnerable to climate change. Agriculture makes up around a quarter of the Gambia’s $2 billion annual economic output, and well over half the country’s labor force works growing crops like peanuts, millet, sorghum, and rice. During drought periods like the one that has wracked the country over the past few years, farmers delay planting and harvests fail altogether.
A cohort of African countries has created an insurance scheme called the African Risk Capacity program that pays out farmers who lose their crops to drought. The program paid out $187,000 in cash transfers to around 17,000 farmers in the drier eastern half of The Gambia earlier this year. This infusion of cash allowed the farmers to buy food supplies and substitute their lost income from the drought. But the Gambia’s government has struggled to make premium payments to the insurance program in recent years as it deals with a high debt load and rampant poverty, so the payments reached only a sliver of the affected farming population.
Isatou Camara, a development planner at the finance ministry of the Gambia, says her small country would likely use loss and damage funding to pay into this existing insurance plan, rather than trying to stand up a new fund for drought relief.
“From 2015 to now, the government was actually able to pay [for insurance premiums] from its own budget resources only twice,” Camara told Grist. “Having this loss and damage fund in a way could provide subsidies for farmers to at least receive payout when they experience these climate-related events.”
– Jake Bittle
Panama
Situated at the center of the isthmus connecting Central and South America, Panama is “like an island under the influence of multiple oceans,” said Ligia Castro de Doens, the director of climate change in the nation’s Ministry of the Environment.
Strings of hurricanes and short, powerful rainstorms have battered the country in recent years, damaging infrastructure and displacing Indigenous people. Loss and damage funding would be used to rebuild bridges and highways, Doens said, and to compensate for economic losses from the country’s vulnerable tourism sector.
Beyond these immediate threats, Panama is projected to lose more than 2 percent of its landmass by the mid-century. And while three Indigenous communities are poised to relocate to new government-built villages in January, another 63 are expected to require similar assistance over the next 25 years. Officials are also in the process of addressing an impending energy crisis stemming from changing rainfall patterns. Reservoirs in the western part of the country are shrinking due to a lack of consistent rainfall, imperiling the region’s hydroelectricity-heavy energy supply. The eastern end of the country has the opposite problem: Torrential rains threaten to overtop a reservoir and damage energy infrastructure. The loss and damage fund could help finance all of these efforts.
– Lylla Younes
The Dominican Republic
With more than 1,000 kilometers of Caribbean coastline, the Dominican Republic is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Beyond the expected hurricanes and torrential rain storms, this exposure has led to a type of microalgae known as sargasso blanketing the island’s pristine beaches, driving away tourism as a result. Milagro de Camps, the vice minister of Climate Change and Sustainability at the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of the Environment, told Grist that the unwelcome weed used to visit the island once a year, but now it sticks around all year long, sucking oxygen out of the sea and threatening biodiversity. It’s a relatively new problem that only impacts the Caribbean, she said, and officials are struggling to figure out the best way to address it.
“We’re talking about millions of tons [of the algae] across multiple countries, and we don’t even have a disposal site for it yet,” she said. “It’s a huge problem.”
In addition to dealing with the extremely costly sargasso buildup, the federal government is hard at work on numerous climate preparedness projects, like implementing a multi-hazard early warning system and climate-proofing public infrastructure. But their efforts to make progress on those efforts are often hindered by extreme weather events, which drain critical funding and resources. The average economic loss from hurricanes in the Dominican Republic is $345 million per year, which is roughly 0.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. That number is expected to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.
That’s why a loss and damage fund is so important for the Dominican Republic, De Camps said: Having quick access to funds in the immediate aftermath of destructive storms would help the country rebuild without causing any setbacks to its ongoing adaptation efforts.
– Lylla Younes
Barbados
Barbados is drowning in floods and debt. The low-lying island nation is one of the most prosperous Caribbean countries, but sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, and drought have handicapped the country’s agricultural industry. And when it does rain, it pours, destroying infrastructure and forcing the nation to borrow money from multilateral development banks and the private market, trapping it in a cycle of debt.
“Half of our debt increases are due to an event that we didn’t cause,” Avinash Persaud, the climate envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, told Grist.
Persaud says the government is trying to waterproof Barbados: It has built sea walls in the form of concrete structures or large rock conglomerations along the coastline, which it has then covered with a boardwalk. The resulting infrastructure both aids in preventing coastal erosion and also creates a public space for tourists and locals alike. With inland flooding becoming more common, Barbados has also installed drainage infrastructure and flood defenses inland. As in the Dominican Republic, warmer ocean temperatures have led to the proliferation of sargassum, and the seaweed is choking the country’s coral reefs and interfering with local fishing practices. The government, along with nonprofit groups and the private sector, is helping fishermen track the spread of sargassum and identify fertile fishing spots. Many of these programs are part of Barbados’ national strategy for climate resilience, which is called Roofs to Reefs.
A loss and damage fund would ease the burden of paying for some of these programs and help the country respond to both rapid and slow-onset climate events, said Persaud. If a natural disaster strikes Barbados, the loss and damage fund’s managers could conduct an assessment of the damage and provide assistance accordingly. For slow-onset disasters such as drought and sea-level rise, the country could apply for grants to fund projects that offset its losses. Farmers suffering from crop failure due to drought or flooding, for instance, could be relocated to new fields with built-in irrigation, reducing the risks of an unpredictable weather system. Persaud said the total cost of responding to climate change for the country is about $5 billion — 100 percent of Barbados’ gross domestic product.
– Naveena Sadasivam
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago has been part of a vital coalition of small island nations pushing for the creation of the loss and damage fund. The Caribbean island is warming two and a half times faster than the global average, and sea-level rise is so severe that it’s starting to topple local monuments. Extreme heat has destroyed harvests, pushing crops to their limit and limiting the vital rainwater that irrigates the country’s farmland.
No amount of loss and damage funding can neutralize these effects, according to Kishan Kumarsingh, head of multilateral environmental agreements for Trinidad and Tobago. He works within the country’s Ministry of Planning and Development, which coordinates government entities working on economic, social, and environmental development.
“There is no there is no impact or set of impacts from a climate event, like a flood or drought, that allows you to be pristine or set back to zero,” said Kumarsingh. “There will always be residual losses and damage.”
For Trinidad and Tobago, this means that getting a loss and damage fund up and running as quickly as possible is key — and the first step after that is intensive research to better understand the country’s needs. For example, because water availability affects everything from agriculture to sanitation, Kumarsingh believes that research into the country’s water problems will yield insights that can allow it to tackle multiple challenges with speed and efficiency.
All of this — the years of negotiation pushing for loss and damage funding and all the efforts that will accompany the money when it comes through — is in service of the most vulnerable residents of Trinidad and Tobago, according to Kumarsingh. He believes that to tackle an issue as vital and complex as climate change, only holistic solutions beyond merely decarbonizing can truly give communities a fighting chance.
“It’s not only about energy transition,” said Kumarsingh. “It is also about the loss of livelihoods of persons impacted directly by climate change [who] have very low carbon footprints — for example, coastal communities [who] depend on the natural environment for income.”
– Siri Chilukuri
Guyana
In January 2005, the South American nation of Guyana experienced a devastating flood that lasted for weeks. A round of heavy rains coincided with a high lunar tide to overwhelm drainage systems around the capital of Georgetown and its neighboring cities; more than two-thirds of the capital went underwater and thousands of homes were destroyed. The floods highlighted an extreme vulnerability that climate change will exacerbate with heavier rains: The vast majority of the nation’s population lives in coastal areas that sit well below sea level.
Pradeepa Bholanath, a senior official at Guyana’s Ministry for Natural Resources and the Environment, says the country needs around $1.6 billion by 2025 for a series of big investments that would protect the coast against future flooding. These include building new sea walls along coastal cities like Georgetown, restoring mangrove forests that can protect shorelines from flooding, and expanding agricultural drainage canals to prevent crops from going underwater.
But the country also needs money for its direct response efforts in future floods: In 2020, while it was in the midst of planning coastal adaptation projects, the country suffered another flood that displaced residents, destroyed harvests, and forced the government to relocate key health and education infrastructure. Bholanath believes that the new loss and damage fund needs to support both long-term resilience efforts and short-term disaster response.
“Whilst we were doing all that preparing for the future, adjusting economic activities that are impacted by climate, making ourselves more climate resilient, the flooding happened,” she said. “Then what ended up being the priority was finding ways in which we can address health impacts, move people to higher ground, and save whatever crops could be saved.”
The first-ever day devoted to food and agriculture at the United Nations’ annual climate conference was expected to be momentous. But some of the buzz fizzled at the gathering in Dubai on Sunday after the U.N. released the first part of its much-anticipated “roadmap” to easing hunger and reducing climate pollution from food and agriculture, a source of about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It was far from the groundbreaking proposal that climate advocates hoped for. They say it lacks a vision to move away from chemical fertilizers and an industrial livestock industry that emits an astonishing amount of methane.
“The roadmap fails to name the fact that industrial agriculture is the second largest cause of emissions on the planet,” said Teresa Anderson, who leads the global climate justice program at ActionAid International, a humanitarian organization. “It sort of dances around the elephant in the room by refusing to name the real problem. It’s a ‘trying to please people’ sort of report, without calling anyone out.”
The first-of-its-kind roadmap aims to reform how food is produced around the world to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s essentially a guidebook drafted by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in the hope that member countries will eventually follow the recommendations. The document outlines goals for cutting a quarter of methane emissions from livestock by 2030, feeding the world in a way that’s carbon-neutral by 2035, and turning agriculture into an industry that soaks up more carbon than it emits by 2050. Addressing not only crops but also fisheries, food waste, forestry, and more, the FAO advocates for a “global rebalancing” of meat consumption and access to nutritious foods and calls for “improved efficiencies,” like shifting to livestock feed that cuts down on methane pollution.
Advocates have lauded world leaders for finally talking about food and agriculture at this year’s conference. But some think the roadmap falls short. In particular, critics say, it prioritizes incremental change over wholesale shifts in agriculture, such as moving away from industrialized farming and toward an approach that promotes biodiversity and carbon storage by integrating crops with surrounding ecosystems.
The roadmap also barely mentions fossil fuels. By one estimate, 15 percent of global oil, gas, and coal use is tied to food and agriculture. The FAO’s proposal has a section on clean energy, but it focuses on making biofuels more sustainable and on controversial technologies such as carbon capture rather than tackling the pervasiveness of oil and gas across agricultural supply chains.
“Industrial food systems are locked into fossil-fuel dependency,” said Patty Fong, who directs a climate program at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “They’re not actually calling for decoupling food systems from fossil fuels.”
The FAO document highlights 120 actions, such as curbing methane emissions from rice farming (a source of 8 percent of human-generated methane) and improving soil health by, for example, tilling less land and planting more cover crops like clover. The organization plans to release two more “volumes” of the roadmap at the next two U.N. climate conferences. The second installment will include regional analyses, and the third will have specific country action plans.
Before the organization published the document, climate advocates and critics had anticipated that it would call on wealthy countries like the United States, where the average person eats more than their body weight in meat each year, to consume less and help reduce the vast amount of methane generated by livestock, especially cows. But beyond saying that the world needs to “readjust consumption patterns,” the report doesn’t give details or call out specific countries for consuming too much.
The roadmap also says next to nothing about alternatives to meat — a solution that the UN’s own environmental program, in its first-ever report on alternative proteins, described as “important” just a few days before the roadmap came out.
Shayna Fertig, a co-author of that report and an adviser at the Good Food Institute, an international think tank based in Washington, D.C. that promotes alternative proteins, said efforts to improve animal agriculture are necessary but shouldn’t come at the “expense” of developing substitutes for meat and dairy.
Fong said she wasn’t surprised that the roadmap didn’t harp on meat consumption, a “highly political” issue.
One thing the report does advocate for is making livestock farming more productive by breeding climate-resilient cows and developing animal feed that’s more digestible — so that cattle belch less methane. Some researchers consider these reforms to be necessary as demand for meat rises, but others see them as distractions from the broader need to make the world less dependent on industrialized animal agriculture.
Despite what she considers drawbacks and omissions, Fong said the roadmap wasn’t a total letdown. She praised it for being “comprehensive” — because it touches on a lot more than agriculture — and for taking on often-overlooked problems like land use. The destruction of carbon-rich forests and wetlands by expanding animal agriculture is one reason farming accounts for so much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and among the FAO’s more ambitious goals is one to end all deforestation by 2035.
For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy.
Over the past several years, European governments and corporations have made moves to capitalize off this potential, investing in sprawling mega-projects to capture the sun’s energy from the region’s vast deserts and export the electricity north. The oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, which constitute the region’s financial and geopolitical powerhouses, are also developing green hydrogen plants and wind and solar farms, with the aim of using renewable energy domestically in order to free up more of their fuel reserves for export. Activists and locals worry that the flurry of new mega-projects will reproduce the same exploitative practices associated with the fossil fuel industry: land grabbing, unchecked pollution, and the disenfranchisement of indigenous people.
More than a decade after the start of the Arab Spring, when popular protests against repression and economic stagnation erupted from Tunisia to Syria, many of the same or equally oppressive power structures remain in place. Some of these governments appear to be prioritizing European countries’ renewable energy needs before meeting the demands of their populations. Given these challenges, what might a shift away from fossil fuels look like in the Arab world, one that distributes the benefits across the population, and what might other countries stand to learn from it?
This is the question that Hamza Hamouchene, an Algerian researcher-activist, has been exploring over the past five years. As part of his work with the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy institute based in Amsterdam, he has interviewed people across the region to ask about their experiences living near oil and gas deposits and planned renewable energy mega-projects. One of the products of that research is a new book of essays, edited by Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, also of the Translational Institute, and titled Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region.
Underlying the book is the unequivocal urgency of moving away from fossil fuels in this part of the world. Large swaths of the Middle East and North Africa are warming at almost twice the rate of the global average, with devastating effects: blazes in the forests of Algeria and Syria, sandstorms choking the air in Iraq, and deadly heat waves gripping urban centers. But rather than serve the communities of the Arab world, many of the proposed renewable projects are for exporting energy abroad, and will do little to serve local people. Meanwhile, Gulf states have indicated their determination to extract every drop of fuel from their land, with COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber even casting doubt on the science of climate change at the conference in Dubai earlier this month. Grist sat down with Hamouchene to discuss COP28, the new book, and the future of the region’s renewable energy. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Lylla Younes: Why should people who care about getting the world off fossil fuels pay attention to what’s happening in the Arab world.
Hamza Hamouchene: First of all, clearly, there are many examples in the region of what some people call sacrifice zones [to serve] the energy transition in Europe, through export-oriented projects and land grabbing. Second, if we look at the numbers, just in 2021, 35 percent of the oil produced in the world was produced by the Middle East. The region is a nodal point of the global fossil fuel regime. This is described by Adam Haniah, in his excellent chapter of the book. He’s raising a warning to the climate justice movement and saying that the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Gulf countries, are going to be indisputable protagonists in any discussion around phasing out fossil fuels. And we are seeing this right now, in COP28 in the Emirates, where Sultan Al Jaber, the President of COP28, is an oil executive and the president of the Abu Dhabi Oil Company.
HH: Right, that’s the thing. These Gulf countries will constitute a really huge challenge to that transition away from fossil fuels. So for the global climate justice movement, if they just focus on Western companies like BP, Shell, or Exxon Mobil, they are missing the point. You need to focus on Gulf capital as well, and that is tied up with the question of democratization in the region and the redistribution of wealth in the region.
When we talk about the Arab region, there is the tendency to put every country in the same basket, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Lebanon and the Emirates. These countries are in completely different categories. It’s not just that the Gulf is richer, much richer actually, than its neighbors, but it also participates in the capture of profits at the regional level, reproducing the same practices that we see from colonial countries – land grabbing in Egypt, Sudan, and even East Africa.
LY: And all of these places are experiencing the escalating severity of the climate crisis.
HH: There have been deadly wildfires in Algeria in the last two, three years, flooding in Libya that killed I think more than 10,000 people, droughts that have impacted small scale farmers and food production. We have seen sea level rise threaten some islands in the Mediterranean like Djerba and Kerkennah in Tunisia. Desertification, heatwaves — the impacts are there and people are suffering from them right now. And they just exacerbate the multi-dimensional crisis that is already in the region. It’s not just an ecological or climate crisis, but also a food, energy, social, economic, political crisis that creates a kind of powder keg.
LY: Let’s talk about the idea for the book. Why did you bring these researchers together to write it?
HH: Most of the writing and the analysis out there around the ecological crisis, the climate crisis, the energy transition, are dominated by international neoliberal institutions like the World Bank, international aid agencies, the European Union agencies, USAID, and so forth. And their analysis is biased towards the most powerful. They do not take into account questions of class, race, gender, power, colonial history. The solutions that they propose are, let’s say, superficial. They do not go into the root causes of the ecological crisis, the food and energy crisis. So the book wanted to remedy this state of affairs by centering voices from the Arab region and to shine a light on some of the aspects of the energy transition there, and how to make it a just and equitable process for the communities and the working people in the region.
LY: Can you describe what climate injustice and fossil fuel extraction has looked like in the communities that you’ve researched across North Africa?
HH: In Algeria, I’ve done some fieldwork in two towns, Ouargla and Ain Saleh. Ain Saleh is the site of the anti-fracking uprising of 2014-2015. I thought it was important to study the case there and to interview people and leaders and activists who participated in that uprising. It was a proper intifada [Arabic word for revolution] because all elements of the community erupted — women, old people, young people, students, workers — because they saw it as, how can I say, another example of accumulation by dispossession. The Algerian military regime, along with national and foreign companies, came in there just to extract fuel and then created a new sacrifice zone by polluting the water, and the local communities did not benefit.
And then Tunisia and Morocco have phosphate mining. If you visit those sites, you will really understand the meaning of sacrifice zones. It really [affects] peoples’ bodies, their health, their environment, their air. Near the mine in Gabès, Tunisia, where the first part of the phosphate is processed for export, you see how the fishers are affected, the small farmers are affected, the water is plundered.
LY: You’ve described the exploitative legacy of the fossil fuel industry in North Africa and the Middle East. I’m wondering if you can also offer a vision of what you think it should move toward?
HH: It’s not going to be the same in every country. If we’re really talking about a just transition, we need to challenge the power of the Gulf, in terms of their authoritarianism, but also in terms of their capital accumulation and how they are dominating various sectors in the Arab region. We want to move away from an extractivist, fossil fuel, environmentally destructive, socially exploitative system, to a more sustainable, just, and equitable system for all its members. People call this different things. I call it eco-socialism. I’m not sectarian about this, as long as we agree on the principle and we want a more just and more sustainable future.
LY: That is a daunting aspiration.
HH: It is a utopia, right? What can we do right now? Let’s say we focus on the energy question. Energy shouldn’t be a commodity. It should be a public good for everybody. And there are a lot of examples that show how this is not impossible to do. So we need to de-privatize, wherever the energy sector has been privatized, and we need to resist all attempts to privatize renewable energy as we’re seeing in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and even Algeria. At the same time, the local communities and the workers need to be involved in those projects. And that’s where the question of democratization comes in. We’re not talking about elections, in the liberal, bourgeois sense of democracy. We’re talking about the communities really shaping those projects, embracing those projects. Nothing is going to be perfect, there will be compromises, there will be mistakes, but if we want to avoid creating new green sacrifice zones, that is what we want.
LY: Given that all countries, not just the United States and Europe, need to shift away from fossil fuels, how should we think about the renewable mega-projects being proposed in the region?
HH: All countries have a responsibility to move towards renewable energy. But because the historical responsibility of causing the climate crisis lies within the industrialized West, these countries need to move swiftly and rapidly to invest a lot of money to move towards renewable energy. And it’s not just the West, I would put the Gulf as well in there. They have a big responsibility. I would put China in there as well.
But for the Global South, you cannot go and tell Tunisia you need to move as fast as possible towards renewable energy, right? These countries have the right to develop. They have the right to provide a decent livelihood [for their people] before thinking of exports, but what we are seeing right now is the opposite. We are seeing these countries shoulder the burden of the energy transition. All these mega projects are being implemented for export, not to produce energy for local markets — Desertec in six countries across North Africa, Xlinks in Morocco, TuNur in Tunisia. They are developed by the private sector, by foreign companies. They tend to be either Western or Gulf companies and some of them are Chinese as well. And all these projects are done through private-public partnerships, which is a euphemism for privatizing profit, and socializing the losses. I’m not against those mega projects, because we need to move fast towards renewable energy, given the current escalating climate crisis. Compromises need to be made, but not at the expense of local communities, not at the expense of the development goals of less advanced countries, not at the expense of access to energy.
LY: It’s depressing that a lot of the places developing renewable energy for export are not meeting the electricity demands of their own population.
HH: Let me give you this example. In Namibia, there is a big green hydrogen project being built right now with the former colonial power, Germany. The project is owned by the Germans and the British. They are building a huge project, building solar panels, wind farms, and then using desalinated water to break the hydrogen molecule and export green hydrogen to Germany. In Namibia, 45 percent of the population does not have access to electricity, and the electricity it uses is imported from South Africa. This project would make sense if you were building solar plants and wind farms to produce green electricity for your own usage, right, but not to produce green electricity for export.
LY: In Palestine, the situation is even more challenging, because Israel’s military occupation limits peoples’ access to electricity.
HH: The colonial dynamics I mentioned in the export-oriented projects are clearly discernible in the renewable projects erected and being built in occupied territories such as Palestine, the Golan heights, and Western Sahara, because they take place at the expense of colonized people and go against their right for self-determination. Israel has portrayed Palestine pre-1948 as an empty, parched desert, which has become a blooming oasis after the establishment of the state of Israel. Israel covers up its war crimes against the Palestinian people by posing as a green and advanced country, in a superior position to a fearsome and arid Middle East. This position has been reinforced with the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan in 2020, and through agreements to jointly implement environmental projects – renewable energy, agri-business and water, which are are a form of what is described as eco-normalization – the use of ‘environmentalism’ to greenwash and normalize Israeli oppression.
We must always ask: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? And whose interests are being served? Because if we don’t ask these questions we will go straight to a green colonialism, with an acceleration of extraction and exploitation, in the service of a so-called common ‘green agenda’.
LY: We’ve talked about how both fossil fuel and green energy projects often extract resources from communities and give little in return. Can you think of a successful example, one that offers a sort of guide for equitable climate solutions?
HH: In 2011, at the time of the Tunisian revolution, the revolutionary council in the southern oasis town of Jemna recaptured land that had been taken away from them during colonial times. Even after independence in 1956, the state offered the land to two investors who captured all of its wealth. So in 2011, the people of Jemna recaptured the land and started managing the whole oasis, in terms of agriculture, in terms of selling the dates, in terms of marketing them. And all the proceeds that they got, they invested in the community. They remodeled the school, they bought an ambulance. That was truly inspiring. When people are given the power, and especially in a revolutionary context, people can do a lot.
LY: We are more than 10 years out from the Arab Spring, with some pretty discouraging results. How can communities across the region end their dependence on fossil fuels without sacrificing aspirations for democracy and freedom?
HH: What you’re asking me is how are we going to make the next revolution successful, right? There is no easy answer for this. From history, we’ve seen how most revolutions fail. This is the reality, and some revolutions take other revolutions to succeed. We’ve seen the French Revolution; it took more than a century to become a republic. It’s the same thing in the Arab region. We have seen two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011. Most of them have been defeated. This is the reality. And then we saw the second wave [in 2018], and most of them have been defeated. But what it shows is that there is a protracted, long term revolutionary process taking place, with ups and downs, sometimes victories, sometimes failures, sometimes defeats. What we know is that the people in the region are not passive victims. They say, ‘We are here. We are going to resist.’