Acting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at COP25 Madrid. (AP Photo)
On the opening day of the 2019 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25) in Madrid on Monday, the president of the tiny Pacific island nation of the Marshall Islands recounted to a full house of nearly 30,000 delegates the battle for survival facing her country, as it had spent the last week battling waves as high as 5 meters.
The audience comprised top environmental bureaucrats and ministers from nearly 190 nations, officials of practically all the leading companies and business lobbies from across the world and, of course, civil society groups and the media.
Unfortunately, the pitiful tale recounted by Hilda Heine was not the first such story this elite group had heard. Over the past several years, similar tales have been told by leaders of various other countries, most of them tiny island nations in the Indian and Pacific oceans that have been on the receiving end of the world’s worst climate-related incidents. However, the messages — as moving and emotional as they may be — seem to be forgotten by governments and business leaders as soon as they step out of these meetings.
Each successive Conference of the Parties summit has contained scary forecasts about the future if the world does not rapidly slash its emissions of greenhouse gases. However, emissions have continued to rise alarmingly quickly.
Thus, as political and business leaders from around the world gathered in Madrid for a meeting to curb greenhouse gas emissions, no warnings were needed. But the climatologists delivered one anyway. The concentration of noxious gases responsible for near-catastrophic global warming have reached yet another high, having risen continuously every year since they became the focus of climatologists’ attention nearly three decades ago.
A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published on the eve of the summit said that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere reached 407.8 parts per million (ppm) last year, up from 405.5 ppm the previous year. The carbon concentration was at 400 ppm in 2015, the year the much-hyped Paris Agreement on climate change was signed. The WMO added that the last time the Earth experienced similar concentrations was about 3 to 5 million years ago, when the global temperature was about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher and the sea level was 10 to 20 meters higher than now.
The warnings could hardly be starker or more shocking, yet there have been practically no actions taken by politicians or big businesses to crack down on emissions in a major way. This is exactly what they pledged to do at the COP21 meeting in Paris.
Political leaders and big businesses claimed the Paris Agreement was the first legally binding global accord, with 190 governments signing up, and that it would ward off the worst of global warming, as each nation had taken it upon itself to curb emissions drastically and in a transparent manner.
Not everyone was enamored by the Paris Agreement and the skeptics pointed out the numerous holes in the deal, which would not only allow emissions to keep rising but also let governments and businesses miss their commitments without fear of any consequences.
One of the many weaknesses of the Paris deal is that it depended largely on self-declarations by member states regarding their goals and the steps they would take to reach them. The agreement lacked a policing mechanism — a must for any agreement, let alone a global treaty on climate change where each member has a lot at stake and hence a fair bit of incentive to cheat it.
Moreover, the Paris Agreement left the finalization of the procedures and processes that the countries will apply to curb their emissions until the Katowice meeting that took place in 2018. The details of the mechanisms are still being finalized, with adoption finally expected in Madrid.
But, most of all, the Paris deal was simply not ambitious enough, even if all members implemented what they promised to do and within the stated time frame. Even with these ideal conditions, the Paris deal would lead to an increase in global temperatures of anywhere between 2.5 and 3 C by the end of this century.
The warnings could hardly be starker or more shocking, yet there have been practically no actions taken.
Ranvir S. Nayar
As things stand, Paris has already unraveled in just four years. First, the US, which has traditionally been the largest emitter until it was recently overtaken by China, has given notice of its intent to withdraw from the deal. Ironically, with President Donald Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama at the helm, the US was one of the pillars that led to the signing of the Paris Agreement, along with France, the host of COP21, and Asian giants China and India.
Since then, several other nations have threatened to follow suit, notably Australia and Brazil. Even Justin Trudeau’s Canada’s commitment to its targets is highly questionable, as the country is wracked by internal conflict with major oil-producing states such as Alberta and Saskatchewan. In addition, practically every other signatory to the Paris deal is way behind in implementing measures that would actually see a leveling off of their emissions, let alone a decline.
Thus, in Madrid we can expect another round of platitudes and a series of pledges and promises, but rest assured, outside of the premises of Feria de Madrid, where the summit is taking place, it will continue to be business as usual and humanity will carry on poisoning its own home and atmosphere just as it has done for centuries.
- Ranvir S. Nayar is the editor of Media India Group, a global platform based in Europe and India that encompasses publishing, communication and consultation services.