News from COP27 and the Environment
By Sally Campbell. Featured image shows the Arran March for Climate Justice on 12th November 2022
COP27 overshadowed by Lack of Ambition
‘No credible pathway’
There is “no credible pathway” to keep the rise in global temperatures below the key mark of 1.5 degrees, according to a new UN report, which also found that progress on cutting emissions has so far been “woefully inadequate”.
Keeping global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees is seen as a key way to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change. Already, with global temperatures around 1 degree above pre-industrial levels, many countries have been hit with devastating weather events and severe heatwaves. The news came with the UN climate summit in Egypt scheduled to start in early November
2022.
During the Conference
At the talks themselves, discussions continued to be dominated by the question of how much money rich countries should give poor ones to help them adapt to and mitigate climate change, essentially reparations for historic emissions of industrialised countries. Climate Home reported that a group of countries — including Bangladesh, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Ghana — had put together “prosperity plans” in a bid to stop climate change hampering their economic growth. Bangladesh’s plan focuses on adaptability, Sri Lanka’s on renewables and measures like having mosquito nets in public spaces. While it is still unclear how much buy-in these plans will get, a series of announcements raised hopes of a positive outcome to the conference, with a number of rich nations stating that they will boost funding for climate disaster relief. UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly announced his government would provide £200 million to a climate action fund set up by the African Development Bank Group. Meanwhile, the US has said it will double its climate adaptation funding to $100m.
Still at COP, in the week where new research found that emissions from oil and gas facilities are about three times higher than their producers claim, Global Witness and other NGOs discovered that 636 fossil fuel lobbyists registered for the climate talks, a 25% increase on last year. There were more fossil fuel lobbyists registered than representatives of the 10 countries most impacted by climate change.
Brazil’s president-elect Luis Inacio Lula da Silva – known universally as Lula – spoke at COP and injected a much-needed shot of energy and optimism into a gathering that had seemed distinctly lacklustre. He will not become president until January 2023 but he gave the COP crowd what it wanted, promising to halt Amazon deforestation – both legal and illegal. He also pledged to protect Indigenous people – to cheers from Indigenous people in traditional dress in the audience. “There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon,” he said, adding: “We will do whatever it takes to have zero deforestation and the degradation of our biomes.” This goes even further than his previous presidency, when he aimed to stamp out illegal Amazon deforestation and made a pretty good fist of it – deforestation fell by around three-quarters between 2003 and 2010.
The international climate conference in Egypt drew to a close on 20 November, and now that the dust has settled – what are we left with? In a sentence: there was a historic breakthrough on loss and damage (compensation by historic polluters for countries on the frontlines of climate breakdown) but a failure to move the dial on the near-term mitigation of global heating. For all the details read the forensic Carbon Brief breakdown. (www.carbonbrief.org).
Here are some of the key Unearthed takeaways:
• It is hard to understate just how important the creation of a fund for loss and damage compensation is to countries and activists who have been fighting for it for decades. “From the bottom of my heart, vinaka vakalevu [thank you very much] to our tireless Pacific negotiators for securing a loss and damage fund at COP27,” Fiji’s prime minister said on Twitter.
• The final hours were a fraught diplomatic battle over whether to apply the COP26 line on phasing down coal use to all fossil fuels. It was proposed by India, driven forward by the EU, supported by many of the most climate-afflicted countries and even won the surprise endorsement of the United States.
• The petrostates, led by Saudi Arabia, whose oil lobbying empire is the subject of a brilliant New York Times feature, eventually won out, and the line did not materialise.
• Natural gas was given further reprieve with the last minute addition of the phrase ‘low carbon,’ which is meant to apply to renewables, nuclear and possibly carbon capture, but is so vague that it “likely aims to justify a longer lifeline for fossil fuel use – particularly gas,” a Chatham House analyst said.
• Food got its first ever mention in the COP cover decision, while the agribusiness lobby turned up in droves.
• And finally the COP26 deforestation pledge kind of fell apart one year on, with key signatories like Russia, China, Brazil and the DRC failing to show up for the meeting at Sharm El-Sheikh.
So, sadly at COP27 there was no progress whatsoever on reducing CO2 emissions, as the host nation allowed the large-scale lobbying by oil and gas producers- 636 representatives were given access. Given that next year’s COP28 will be in UAE (United Arab Emirates), another gas producer, the current dash for gas bandwagon may well accelerate.
How climate change is forcing Kenyan women to leave their homes behind
Kenya, where the worst drought in decades is forcing people to migrate in search of an easier life. Susan Akal and her children decided to leave their home in April. She did not know then that they would end up walking around 250km to find refuge.
When the drought came, everyone had to fend for themselves,” she told reporters. “Our friends and neighbours moved out of the country to find aid, but some remained and who knows what their next move will be? I feel as though my children and I would be living an awful life, if I remained back home. We would have ended up like our livestock.” She eventually settled, along with other displaced people, on the shores of Lake Turkana.
Across the world, the climate crisis is forcing people to leave their communities. It is common for people to settle within their countries, rather than go abroad. At the end of 2021, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 5.9m people around the world were internally displaced as a result of weather-related disasters. These included floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as non-climate-related events such as earthquakes.
Beef and the Amazon an example of dishonest practices, driving climate change
A new investigation reveals that the Brazilian company JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, has bought thousands of cattle from deforested farms belonging to a notorious convicted criminal. When presented with the evidence, JBS admitted to the purchases, and claimed to be the victim of fraud. The cattle, which were bought between 2018 and 2022, came from farms in the Amazon owned by convicted criminal rancher Chaules Pozzebon or his family that had been illegally stripped of at least 2,844 hectares of forest cover. Trade records suggest the beef may potentially have been shipped overseas, including to the US. While trading with Pozzebon, JBS was receiving hundreds of millions in credit and investment from banks in the EU, US and North America.
This is a really important story, as Amazon deforestation is simply one of the most important climate and biodiversity stories at present, and cattle ranching is a main driver – Brazilian NGO Imazon estimates 90% of deforested Amazon land is occupied by cattle pastures. This is not just a Brazil story. JBS ships beef all over the world from its Brazilian operations. And banks and asset managers from the US, UK, Canada, and Europe are happy to provide JBS with the cashflow it needs to keep expanding.
Revealed: How the meat industry funds the ‘greenhouse gas guru”
Dr Frank Mitloehner runs a centre for environmental research at the University of California, Davis and he calls himself the ‘greenhouse gas guru’. It has been discovered that his institute has received or is due to receive more than $3 million from the livestock industry. More than a hundred pages of correspondence between the CLEAR Center and its agribusiness donors, including briefings that outline its communications campaigns. In 2019 they attacked the EAT-Lancet report into what constitutes a climate-friendly diet. In 2020, they promoted a new way to measure greenhouse gases that would benefit big meat producers. And last year they produced research that challenged the adoption of plant-based meat alternatives.
These documents show how the project was created as part of an agreement with the American Feed Industry Association, whose members include America’s biggest meat companies: Cargill, Tyson Foods and Pilgrims, which is owned by JBS. They describe an advisory board of agribusiness figures, who boost the Center’s output and connect Mitloehner with issues and individuals they care about. Mitloehner’s utility lies in his “neutral, credible, third-party voice” that can be used in conversations with journalists and policymakers, they state the project is seen by its donors as so successful that they’re looking to expand. Leading academics such as Walter Willett from Harvard and Jennifer Jacquet from New York University were shocked by the findings. One food expert, Marion Nestle, likened agribusiness’ approach to the tobacco industry playbook, which refuted health implications in smoking by clever PR for 40 years.
CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND DISHONESTY
Mines, pipelines, oil rigs: What HSBC’s ‘sustainable finance’ really pays for.
There is a rich seam of good stories under the general theme of ‘the nonsense that governments and businesses are doing instead of doing things that might actually slow global warming’.
First up is this excellent investigation from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Source Material into what megabank HSBC is counting towards its target of investing $1 trillion in ‘sustainable financing and investment by 2030’.
Companies benefitting from that ‘sustainable finance’ currently include an engineering firm which is “preparing to start work on the construction of an environmentally devastating oil pipeline that threatens to derail vital targets set out in the Paris Agreement” and a cement giant “which last year emitted more CO2 than Greece”.
At the heart of the story is HSBC’s use of “sustainability-linked bonds” (SLBs). These bonds are designed to allow companies to raise money to fund their transition to sustainable business models, but they do not impose tight restrictions on how the money is used. Instead, the companies have to agree to “certain targets related to sustainability”.
In a striking plot twist, it turns out that “these targets are often remarkably weak and the penalties for failing to meet them can be paltry – leaving SLBs as a way for companies to give the appearance of environmental concern while continuing to worsen the climate crisis”.
What Really Happens When Emissions Vanish? The need for vigilance!
Next up on the list of things that might arguably be described as ‘accounting tweaks instead of emissions reductions’: called “market based accounting”. A Bloomberg investigation has revealed major multinationals are relying on junk carbon offsets to call themselves carbon neutral. Bloomberg Green has dug through close to 6,000 climate reports filed by corporations last year, to show what is going on behind the enormous emissions reductions claimed by some blue-chip companies. These include Proctor & Gamble’s claim to have surpassed its 2030 target to halve its emissions a *decade early* and tyre company Continental’s claim to have slashed greenhouse gas emissions by 70% in 2020.
These enormous cuts rely on a rule which allows companies to “buy credits from clean energy providers to say they’re running on green power when they actually are not, wiping from their ledgers vast quantities of pollution caused by the electricity powering their offices, data centres, and factories”. Removing this flexibility would reduce P&G’s emissions cut to 12%, and Continental’s to just 8%.
Tree Planting and Land Pledges would need an area larger than the USA, report estimates.
Corporations do not have a monopoly on spurious climate claims. Governments make them too. Researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Climate Futures initiative have analysed the climate plans more than 200 countries have submitted to the UN and discovered that they are “dangerously overreliant” on plans to suck up all the carbon by tree-planting and other nature-based carbon-removal activities.
How overreliant? Well, they would require 1.2 billion hectares of land, an area that is “greater than the size of the US”, the Financial Times reports. Countries were turning to land-based solutions instead of doing “the hard work of steeply reducing emissions from fossil fuels, decarbonising food systems and stopping the destruction of forests and other ecosystems”, lead author of the study Kate Dooley told the FT.
To sum up – Of course in our market oriented world where corporates are accountable to investors there are always going to be these stories of skulduggery. But there are some very impressive advances towards the renewables economy too – till next time !
References:
Bloomberg.com (2022) Junk Carbon Offsets are What Make These Big Companies ‘Carbon Neutral”.
Carbonbrief.org (2022) COP27: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh
With thanks to Greenpeace for data from Unearthed
Sally Campbell
November 2022
