COP24 starts today, the IPCC has published new scientific evidence on the devastating impacts of climate change, the probability that those changes will be manageable are decreasing, and, once again, there is a stalemate in international climate negotiations. Time is running out fast - or more appropriately, as UNFCCC Executive Secretary Espinosa stressed, time is a luxury we no longer have. So, actually the question is how soon is now?
Or, in other words, can we turn our attention during the climate conference more towards the approaches that the climate community is already delivering on today instead of getting lost in the details of the “Paris Rulebook”, which should be one of the major outcomes of the negotiations in Katowice?
No doubt, the rules to be agreed will be another milestone in the young history of the Paris Agreement, but it requires some fantasy to imagine how more than 300 pages of draft text can be transformed into a document to guide implementation. In the meantime, it may be worth watching out for some good news on the negotiations corridors in Poland about the ideas needed to flesh out the Paris architecture.
This is especially important looking to 2019 when countries need to come up with ambitious ideas for their updated emission reductions pledges to contribute to closing the emissions gap outlined by the just published UNEP report: “According to scenarios factoring in current policy and NDC’s, global emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let alone by 2020.” Another reason to point out that action now does really mean now - and not soon.
Linking climate change and peacebuilding in Colombia through land access
Colombia’s long-standing internal conflict and the country’s contribution to climate change share one common root cause: land concentration. Policies to strengthen access to land and to ensure sustainable land use might therefore hold the key to promoting peacebuilding in Colombia, while simultaneously reducing emissions.
Climate-related disasters pose grave challenges to health in South Asia
As disasters wreak havoc all over South Asia, health impacts have increasingly emerged as a major concern for communities and governments in the region. It underscores the need for concerted efforts towards building synergies between the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, particularly now, in the post-disaster reconstruction phase, to ensure “building back better” and future disaster prevention.
Forty years of tree-planting in China: successes and failures
In the Inner Mongolian county of Horinger, Northwestern China, afforestation efforts have transformed a barren, dusty landscape into a pine forest. Planting trees has diminished the sandstorms, boosted biodiversity and improved the environment generally. As the climate emergency worsens, the potential for planted trees to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is being re-examined. What can the world learn from the Chinese experience with afforestation?
Two events in August 2019 underlined the complexity of paving the way to a climate-neutral world: the publishing of the new IPCC report and the Amazon fires. Both events demand that climate diplomats move beyond a narrowed focus on energy in decarbonisation debates.