Degrees of division continue to dog debate on climate action
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is about to release the most politically charged report in its history.
It was a last-minute and unexpected development in Paris three years ago when the goalposts were shifted on where the world should aim to consider itself successful in dealing with climate change.
A target of limiting future global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels had been the target throughout negotiations to bring the world together into a single non-binding pact. But under pressure from a group of countries led by small island states, a high-ambition cohort set out to lower the bar to 1.5C.
The immediate response of many in Paris was that 2C would be difficult enough; lowering the target simply would ensure it was missed by a bigger margin.
But the global climate science community was tasked with preparing a special report to give governments an indication of what practical difference there would be between 1.5C and 2C warming, and what would be needed to get there.
The substance of that report is being thrashed out in South Korea this week.
It has been revised and debated throughout the year but finally will be delivered on Monday, only weeks before a crucial meeting in Poland where the rule book to give power to what was agreed in Paris is due to be finalised.
The 1.5C document has been described as the most politically charged in the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It underscores what scientists say has been the increasing physical evidence of a warming world. And it suggests the radical actions that will be needed to achieve what many still consider to be an impossible ambition.
The special report will be delivered against a background of chaos in another pivotal leg of the Paris Agreement process — the delivery and management of $US100 billion ($139bn) a year in climate finance from 2020 to help developing nations cope with the impacts of climate change.
A Green Climate Fund, which was supposed to be the forerunner of the bigger funding effort from developed countries to the developing world, has been frozen in its decision-making.
The background has been a withdrawal of financial and political support from the US, which was supposed to be the fund’s biggest contributor.
Likewise in South Korea this week, the US is being portrayed as a wrecker. Heavily coal-dependent Australia is also cast as a villain in the greater global effort.
IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee told this week’s gathering: “This will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history.”
The final draft of the report contains more than 6000 cited references. In all, 42,000 comments were received, Lee said, 4000 of them from government.
The IPCC is keen to keep details of the draft special reports into 1.5C warming secret until the official summary for policymakers has been finalised. But draft reports have been leaked and reported throughout the year, including the final.
What is known is that the final draft report says there is high confidence that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present rate, human-induced warming will exceed 1.5C by about 2040.
Risks to natural systems are lower at 1.5C warming than 2C depending on geographic location, levels of development and vulnerability, and on the choices of adaptation and mitigation options.
According to published draft reports, there is no simple answer to whether it is possible to limit warming to 1.5C.
But there are substantial increases in extremes between the present day and global warming of 1.5C and between 1.5C and 2C, including hot extremes in all inhabited regions (high confidence), heavy precipitation events in most regions (high confidence) and extreme droughts in some regions (medium confidence).
“Limiting global warming to 1.5C would require rapid and far-reaching systems transitions occurring during the coming one and two decades in energy, urban, land and industrial systems,” the draft says. “In energy systems a 1.5 degree consistent pathway includes a substantial reduction in energy demand, and a decline in the carbon intensity of electricity to zero by mid-century.”
To meet a 1.5C pathway, renewable energy use would need to rise by 60 per cent between 2020 and 2050 while primary energy from coal would need to decrease by two-thirds. By 2050 renewable energy is expected to supply between 49 per cent and 67 per cent of primary energy while coal would be expected to supply 1 per cent to 7 per cent.
The draft says land use changes “may include sustainable intensification of land use practices, enhanced agricultural productivity and diet changes”. It says such changes often are limited by institutional, environmental and sociocultural feasibility, though “experiences show that these constraints can be overcome”.
The language makes clear the war on coal soon will become a war on meat. And that the objectives of the IPCC process stretch well beyond temperature rises to bigger issues of sustainability and equity.
Greater efforts on financing to help poorer regions cope is a standard feature of all IPCC deliberations, as is the differing responsibilities and expectations of developed and developing countries to creating and solving the problem.
In his opening remarks in South Korea, IPCC chief scientist Jian Liu said the world’s environmental problems, including climate change, were interlinked and in many cases emanated from the same sources and drivers.
“Resolving these issues needs source solutions and engaging everyone,” Liu said.
“Pollution today causes more victims than World War II, air pollution accounts for more than half, 92 per cent of the world population suffer air pollution, and economic loss each year is equivalent to the GDP of Japan. Climate warming and air pollution are twins, with multifaceted interlinkages. It could also provide the opportunity to achieve co-benefits, through initiatives such as the Clean Air and Climate Coalition.”
The British Labour Party has already outlined the measures it would be prepared to take.
“For too long, approaches to sustainability have focused on the choices made by individuals, and levels of voluntary corporate social responsibility in the private sector,” the party’s environment policy says.
“The role of government has largely been limited to adjusting price signals in the belief that the market will take care of the rest.
“It is now clear that a dogmatic faith in market mechanisms has failed to reverse or even slow the pace of environmental loss.
“We are past the point where piecemeal actions will do. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour says addressing environmental challenges will require great levels of planning, co-ordination and deployment of resources.
“The market left alone can simply not deliver this. Building a sustainable economy for the long run requires nothing short of societal transformation.
“Tackling the underlying drivers of environmental degradation will require a fundamental rebalancing of economic power, so that economic decisions are made by the many who will suffer the consequences of climate change rather than the few who have benefited from it.”
The US position could not be more stark. According to reports published by Climate Home News yesterday, the US had set the scene for a political battle over the 1.5C report summary deliberations.
In notes to the executive summary seen by Climate News, the US has called for more emphasis on technologies such as carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power.
The US says the special report narrative “fails to communicate the scale of the global technological and economic challenge to meet the 1.5C objective”.
It says the report “implies that these challenges will be minor and any trade-offs easily resolved, whereas the underlying report and the published literature clearly demonstrate the scope and depth of these barriers to limiting emissions consistent with 1.5C”.
At the same time, the US reportedly raised doubts about the science behind the report.
“There is no discussion — or a summary thereof — in the SPM (special report) regarding the credibility of models (or methodologies) used in the report to project future impacts,” the US says.
Climate Home says the US had complained the draft failed to acknowledge a previous IPCC finding that “most” climate models had over-estimated the rate of global warming since the 1990s. It also accuses the document of overstretch.
“The IPCC should not take it upon itself to plot a vision for global attainment of sustainable development goals via climate policy,” it says.
The US also questioned whether limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C was the best way to slash poverty and improve wellbeing.
“The SPM fails to note that recent decades have seen the fastest declines in global poverty in both numbers and proportion of population even as fossil fuel use has exploded,” the US says. “The fastest and greatest declines in poverty have occurred in China and India even as they have ramped up their use of fossil fuels.”
The global temperature is already 1C above pre-industrial levels, yet, the US says, “humanity has never been more prosperous, less poverty-stricken, less hungry, longer-lived and healthier than today”.
The US position is explosive in the context of the case being argued for urgent action.
A briefing circulated to Australian journalists by climate lobby groups outlines the consequences of future temperature rises.
It says that without effective global action, Australia will face risks to the health and resilience of our coasts and beaches including natural systems such as the Great Barrier Reef, cities and the built environment, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, water resources and natural ecosystems, and the health and wellbeing of Australians, with consequent economic costs.
“Even though ‘half a degree’ below 2C may sound small, limiting warming to 1.5C significantly reduces harm, cost, and risks that Australia experiences from climate change compared to higher temperature rises,” the briefing says.
It says recent work by researchers at Stanford University concluded that the costs of reducing emissions in line with 1.5C are 30 times less than the economic damage that would come from allowing warming to increase above this level to 2C.
What is clear is that the politics of climate change are as riven as they have always been.
Deliberations in South Korea cannot deliver a blueprint to stop the world warming past 1.5C.
The political task is to add momentum to the talks in Poland in December to get the Paris Agreement over the line and into action.
The report will be used to cajole governments to increase the ambition of what they promised to do three years ago in Paris.
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Key findings in the IPCC draft report in limiting global warming to 1.5c
The report lays out what it will take to prevent Earth’s average surface temperature from rising beyond 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
The IPCC report finds with ‘high confidence’ that we will zoom past the 1.5C marker around 2040.
To have at least a 50/50 chance of a 1.5C world, the global economy must, by 2050, become ‘carbon neutral’, with no additional CO2 going into the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide emissions should peak not later than 2020, and curve sharply downward from there.
The 22-page summary also details humanity’s ‘carbon budget’, the amount of carbon dioxide we can dump into the atmosphere and still stay under the 1.5C threshold.
The allowance, for a two-third’s chance, is 550 billion tonnes, an amount we will emit on current trends within 14 years.
The share of primary energy coming from renewables would have to jump from a few per cent to at least 50 by mid-century, and the share of coal drop from about 28% to between one and seven.
Pathways
IPCC authors refuse to say whether the 1.5C goal remains feasible. That, they argue, is for leaders to decide.
But the report does lay out four scenarios that shadow current and future policy debates on the best way to ramp up the fight against climate change.
One pathway relies heavily on future technologies to radically reduce energy needs, while another assumes major changes in consumption habits, such as eating less meat and abandoning internal combustion engine cars.
Two others depend on sucking massive amounts of CO2 out of the air, either though large-scale reforestation, use of biofuels, or direct carbon capture.
AFP