Dangerous climate change

The core objective of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Since 1995, twenty-seven conferences of the parties (COPs) have outwardly sought to realize that objective. The resulting action has been grossly inadequate. Earth’s climate system is in dangerous disarray, with monumental adverse consequences for humanity and the environment. Indeed, 2022 was a year of rolling “natural” disasters manifested in devastating hurricanes, storm surges, floods, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and pestilence exacerbated by climate change [1].

Despite three decades of climate negotiations, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased from less than 360 parts per million (ppm) in 1992 to more than 420 ppm today– 50 percent higher than pre-industrial concentrations and higher than they have been for millions of years [2]. During that period, average global temperature rose about 0.2°C per decade to almost 1.2°C, and there’s a 50/50 chance of 1.5°C being reached within five years [3]. The past eight years have been the warmest on record [4].

When the UNFCCC was signed, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were about 33 gigatons per year; by the time of COP27 they had risen to around 50 gigatons [5]. Carbon dioxide emissions were expected to reach a record high in 2022 [6]. To limit global warming to 1.5°C, the aim that was weakly reaffirmed at COP27, global GHG emissions, which are still increasing, need to fall by almost half within seven years, a period during which they are predicted to rise by ten percent [7]. To have a two-thirds chance of staying below 1.5°C would require limiting all future GHG pollution to the equivalent of seven years of emissions at current rates [8]. Doing that is impossible short of a global catastrophe that curtails most societal activities that emit GHGs. As the UN Environment Program has noted, currently there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” [9]. Even if all current national pledges to reduce emissions are implemented–something that history very strongly suggests will not happen–warming is likely to be in the range of 2.5°C [10].

While there may be technical means to limit global warming to 1.5°C, there is no realistic political means for doing so. COP27 confirmed this. The negotiators at COP27 mostly behaved as their predecessors did over the preceding three decades: they muddled along, avoided agreement on the substantive mitigation of emissions and the massive funding for adaptation that is required to implement agreements from previous COPs. No substantial progress was made on limiting GHG pollution. Indeed, it was more the opposite. For example, China–by far the largest source of global GHG pollution–joined Saudi Arabia and other petrostates in their latest attempt to water down the 1.5°C target. That was tragically understandable given that China would need to cut its still-rising emissions drastically, and petrostates would have to end their addiction to trading petroleum products, if there were to be a realistic chance of staying below the 1.5°C threshold.

Salving loss and damage

The potential exception at COP27 to the rule of past COPs–do as little as possible to limit, let alone cut, GHG emissions while appearing to make progress–was formal recognition of the legitimacy of the most vulnerable countries’ demands for a loss-and-damage fund. It is by no means certain that this fund will be realized in anything like the form expected by those countries. The amount of funds required, which countries (or other actors) would pay into the fund, whether doing so would be mandatory or voluntary, which countries would be entitled to compensation and for what, and even the definition of “loss and damage” and how to measure it, are all subject to future negotiations. It would be a travesty if China, the world’s second largest economy and home to billionaires, were not required to contribute to the fund, but it has already stated its opposition to such a requirement, offering up only unspecified voluntary help [11]. It would be equally wrong if the now-affluent countries that are classified as “developing” in the climate negotiations–a group that includes China and Saudi Arabia, and the likes of Singapore and South Korea–were to receive compensation from the new fund, even if they are “particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change” [12], the benchmark set at COP27.

The loss-and-damage fund is ripe with possibility but also fodder for the stonewalling that has characterized all COPs. If past is prologue, the fund will provide some modest assistance to some countries, but it will inevitably provide a progressively smaller percentage of their ever-rising needs. After all, developed countries have yet to provide the $100 billion annually that they promised to help developing countries mitigate their emissions and adapt to climate impacts, despite that amount being vastly less than what is needed for loss and damage.

By agreeing to establish a loss-and-damage fund, the countries represented at COP27 were admitting that the twenty-six preceding COPs had failed to prevent dangerous climate change, with the consequence being rapidly mounting loss and damage around the world. Now the only options are to find ways of adapting to unavoidable climate change and, if justice is to prevail, compensating those affected by it, while continuing to make efforts to mitigate the problem insofar as national politics will allow. In this respect, COP27 affirmed the conjoined importance of politics and justice in international climate negotiations and associated national policies. COP27 demonstrated once again that politically influential actors hellbent on preserving the status quo, particularly continued use of fossil fuels, largely determine the trajectory of climate negotiations. Those retrograde actors do not entirely stop progress, but they routinely slow it to a crawl.

COP27 also revealed, hardly for the first time, that injustice perceived by the affluent and powerful countries–which for decades insisted that they could not be expected to bear much of the burden of the problem that they created–matters immediately and prominently, while justice demands of the poor and the weak percolate through negotiations decade after decade, affecting the wording of agreements (e.g., the 1990s notion of common but differentiated responsibility) while having far less practical impact. COP27 shows that climate justice has become a process of salving wounds and compensating survivors rather than avoiding pain and death. As such, agreement to create a loss-and-damage fund was, in the words of one expert observer, a “a bold, toothless step forward in climate justice” [13].

Success amidst failure

Not only does the COP27 agreement not call for the phaseout of fossil fuels–despite efforts by a number of countries at the COP demanding just that–it does not even call for the phase out of the worst among them–coal. Instead, it repeats previous calls for the “phasedown of unabated coal power” without yet defining the meaning of “phasedown.” That is an invitation for continued debate and obfuscation even as many countries, not least China, are still increasing coal extraction and combustion. Delegates could not even agree whether natural gas should be classified as a “low-emissions” energy system [14]. Observers are increasingly acknowledging the failure of climate COPS and regretfully pointing to what may be the inevitable need for unproven technologies to sequester carbon and for potentially dangerous forms of global geoengineering [15].

If we are to conclude that COP27 was just another meeting that exposed raw power politics and short-term economic self-interestedness, we can nonetheless say, as we could with some previous COPs, that it was a small step forward. If something satisfying comes of the loss-and-damage fund, progress of a kind will have been made. And there is this: despite failing, like all preceding COPs, to make much progress toward the core objective of the UNFCCC to avoid dangerous climate change, COP27 did keep the ball rolling toward mitigating the harm. Far too little is being done around the world to attenuate the problem or adapt to it, least of all compensate for loss and damage. However, much has been done and is being done, such as the increasingly rapid roll out alternative forms of energy production. Some of that action is due, at least in part, to agreements emanating from previous COPs and weakly reaffirmed at COP27.

Ultimately, global warming and other manifestations of climate change would likely be even worse without all the effort that has gone into twenty-seven COPs. That is hardly a proclamation of success, but if one is looking for a silver lining, at least it is something.