Good COP, Bad COP
The last global climate conference turned out to be both. That makes the next one even more important.
Just months after the last big global climate conference, it’s not too early to brace for the next one. It will be a doozy.
Why?
Tensions between rich and poor nations are rising again. Without long overdue action by the developed world and a dose of political realism in the developing world, the growing rancor could torpedo global climate diplomacy, as has happened before.
This November’s gathering will pick up right where last November’s left off — with India, backed by China, putting its foot down over just how much the developing world will sacrifice to cut emissions without more help. The twelfth-hour rift at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) last year came over whether the final agreement would announce a “phase out” of coal, as the Western drivers of last year’s conference wanted, or, as things ended up, merely a “phase down.”
This literally brought tears of frustration to the eyes of Alok Sharma, the British politician who presided over the conference. But India’s insistence on the “phase down” wording — with the world’s largest coal user, China, cheering it on — was a shot over the developed world’s bow.
It underscored the overall ambiguous outcome of the gathering, which had been billed as the last chance for the world to get real about addressing climate change. That billing now better applies to this year’s gathering. The upcoming COP27, to be held in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, really will be the last chance for global climate diplomacy to play a leading role in solving the problem of global warming.
The last COP, held in Glasgow, was hardly a failure. Without rattling off a laundry list of achievements, the most important was the simplest: For the first time, the entire world stated, officially and out loud, that fossil fuels are the root of the problem. The conference also worked out many nitty gritty details for precisely how to uniformly and transparently measure the ratcheting down of our collective carbon emissions that must begin now and accelerate rapidly after 2030. Finally, the conference began to truly address how this decarbonization effort gets funded — or, not to put too fine a point on it, when and how much the developed nations will pony up, making good on a promise they long ago made and so far have failed to come through on.
Glasgow also included the ramping up of “ambition,” particularly on the part of developed nations. This means they promised to do more than they had previously promised. Many countries laid out “net zero” pledges. These are vows, albeit non-binding, to cut carbon emissions to the point where they’re taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere each year as they spew into it by a certain date — usually 2050, but 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.
While not to be dismissed, all this amounts to zilch if collectively the world doesn’t begin actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions starting very soon.
This urgent imperative is what’s most threatened by newly rising developed-versus-developing world tensions.
Climate talks have foundered on these shoals before. The U.S. never ratified the first climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, because it didn’t require developing countries like China and India to cut emissions along with developed countries. The pass given to developing countries was intended to acknowledge that developed countries were responsible for nearly all the greenhouse gas emissions to that point. It was too much for the U.S. Senate to swallow. Tensions between rich and poor countries continued as the bete noire of climate negotiations before the watershed 2015 Paris Accord found a course that side-stepped them for a time.
Much has changed over the years. China is now the world’s largest emitter, with India ranking third (or fourth if the EU is considered as a bloc). Yet on a per-person basis the U.S. and Europe countinue to out-emit China and India by a long shot, to say nothing of Africa. And while India and China’s accumulated historic emissions are catching up fast, the Western world still tops that list.
The problem going forward is this: Energy consumption has likely peaked in the developed world, but developing countries will use much more in the coming decades. They will use more for precisely the same reasons the developed world did. They need to improve education and health care, raise incomes. They want to grow their economies and their international influence. They will generate this energy with the least costly, most efficient fuels they can get, just as the West did.
For many of these countries — certainly China, India and much of Africa — renewable sources can meet much of this need, while also saving money in the end compared to fossil fuels. This is thanks to massive cost declines solar and wind energy technologies have undergone in recent years. But getting these power sources in place, at this scale and speed, requires up-front investments beyond all but China’s resources.
This is where recent tensions arise. As the time to cut carbon emissions dwindles, where will the money for these humongous investments come from?
Both sides of the developed-versus-developing world divide have, in principle, agreed on the obvious solution. The rich world should provide most of it, since they have the money. Significant sums would arrive through direct government financing and aid schemes. The West’s robust private sector would pour in many hundreds of billions more in investments, with some of the risk shouldered by governments and international financing consortiums.
Developed nations agreed more than a decade ago that direct funding would reach $100 billion annually by 2020. It did not, in what James Roaf, assistant director fiscal affairs at the International Monetary Fund, recently conceded was a “major own goal” by developed countries attempting to accelerate decarbonization. The issue became a major irritant at last year’s climate gathering.
Developed countries are now on track to reach the $100 billion figure by 2023, and have promised to continue raising their annual contributions after that. But India alone says it will need $1 trillion by 2030 to meet its climate pledges. African nations say overall climate funding must reach $1.3 trillion annually by 2030.
Economic fallout from the years long covid pandemic is already hitting poor countries far harder than rich ones. The fallout from climate change is turning out to be at least as disproportionate as it intensifies. Not only are developing countries generally more vulnerable to rising seas, higher temperatures and more intense storms, their ability to raise the funds on their own in international markets is increasingly hamstrung by those very vulnerabilities, according to a recent IMF study.
In other words, a vicious cycle is setting in where climate change raises costs for developing countries even as it undercuts their ability to access capital to address climate damage and build the clean energy system the world needs them to build. To their minds, they’re suffering the brunt of the damage from the developed world’s legacy of fossil-fueled economic growth, even as global financial markets dominated by those developed countries undermine their ability to borrow to help themselves. This is where developing world demands for compensation — payments for damage and loss, even reparations — start to gain steam, as they did at COP26. And it’s where developed countries draw the line, refusing to seriously consider such demands. This is a major concern for COP27.
“We’re headed into a story at Sharm el-Sheikh where equity questions are going to become very, very charged, and they’re going to come together with the finance question and loss and damage question,” Navroz Dubash, a climate expert at India’s Centre for Policy Research, told a recent forum. “This is a shadow hanging over the negotiations that we ignore at our peril.”
To limit warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, global emissions will have to fall 25% to 50% below 2021 levels by 2030. Most of this cutting will have to be done in the developed world plus China, since that’s where the vast bulk of the emissions currently are coming from. Last year, emissions rose, especially in the developed world, including those coming from coal.
To avert a developed-versus-developing world collision at the next COP, the developed world must convince the developing world it’s prepared to clock substantial actual reductions in emissions before 2030. Developed nations also need to begin ramping up aid and investment in developing world climate adaptation and energy transition well beyond current commitments, to the point it’s clear they understand these investments are equally for their own benefit.
With those steps taken, developing countries need to understand that seeking to define these measures as “loss and damage,” much less “reparations,” is counterproductive, maybe satisifying politically for themselves but an impossible framework for just about any developed nation.
All of this will be especially challenging in 2022. With a new covid variant, the disproportionate damage the epidemic has wrought on poor countries is ever clearer to the developing world. On the other side of the tracks, rich countries are increasingly preoccupied with their own politics and struggles.
The U.S. is heading into the most divisive midterm election in decades. If current polls hold, Democrats, along with their climate agenda, could suffer a devastating blow back in Washington on day two of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference. Russia’s ominous maneuverings around Ukraine have become a major distraction for both Europe and the Biden administration, and could turn into something far worse.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be focused on the delicate task of assuring himself an unprecedented third term as president and head of the Chinese Communist Party, a historic moment that comes to a head just weeks before the start of COP27.
The world’s two heavyweights will likely remain sharply at odds, as well. That will leave China reflexively supporting the demands of developing countries, while few U.S. politicians will be eager to tout major outlays for developing countries, however many times they’ll pay off even for the U.S. in the future.
It’s only January, but not too soon for developed and developing world alike to begin the task of heading off a collision later this year.