Sergio Abranches

Brazil wants an ambitious outcome to the Rio+20 summit. Diplomats say, however, that they will work to prevent this outcome from being exclusively oriented towards environmental issues.

I asked ambassador Andre Correia do Lago, how could that be. As a projection of Rio 92, the Rio+20 Summit should be all about the environment. Correia do Lago is Brazil’s chief negotiator, and head of the Environment Department at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. He answered that this question begs an important conceptual distinction. One that opposes a sort of “neo-malthusian environmentalism” to a model for effective sustainable development. The first, he argues, has as its main target the conservation of natural resources and birth control, regardless of economic and social concerns. The latter is a “work in progress” since the Brundtland Report put forward the idea of sustainability. More progress has been achieved at Rio 92, leading to the Climate Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. In Johannesburg, at the Rio+10 summit, the concept of sustainability was further clarified, he argues, by adding the “three pillars” of sustainable development: the social, the economic and the environmental.

Ambassador Correia do Lago sees some of the proposals for the Rio+20 summit as coming from a “pre-Stockholm” mentality. An extreme conservationism that would be greatly detrimental to the needs of the developing and emerging nations. He claims that one of the major challenges for the Rio+20 is to “incorporate the environmental dimension into the reasoning of economic decision-makers”.

Correia do Lago says that this is the reason why Brazil strongly supports the commitment to ‘sustainable development goals’ at Rio+20. This summit could represent far more than the written resolution that is under negotiation. I argued that formal negotiations would only take place on the week before the summit starts. He agrees that the schedule is too tight, but ongoing informal conversations could help to build the necessary consensus to give more substance and efficacy to the Rio+20 resolution.

Brazil was, at first, trying to avoid turning the Rio+20 summit into an extension of the Durban climate talks, at COP17. At the time the Rio+20 agenda started to be negotiated there was little hope that any meaningful outcome would come out of Durban. Against these expectations, the Durban talks produced a clearer mandate, and a timeline for the global negotiation of a new climate change regime. The risk of preemption of the Rio+20 agenda by the climate agenda has been sharply reduced. This effort has diverted part of the initial discussions of the Rio+20 agenda, and only after Durban this agenda has really began to take shape. I would argue that the Earth summit’s agenda is itself a work in progress.

The Brazilian chief negotiator says Brazil agrees that the Zero Draft lacks ambition. Several developed and developing countries say the same. Yet, there has been little progress so far towards a more ambitious outcome. Brazil will host an informal meeting this month of countries from the Latin America and Caribbean region to discuss the Zero Draft and to try to arrive at a more consensual regional view. In April, the Brazilian government will host another informal meeting open to all interested countries. But a group of 40 or 45 more influential countries representative of all regions will be expressly invited to this informal round of talks. Negotiators hope this will help to remove some stumbling blocks on the way towards a better proposal for the summit’s resolution.

Negotiators and observers from other countries, especially the G77+China are also of the opinion that the Zero Draft lacks ambition. There is a political puzzle to be solved: there seems to be consensus on the Zero Draft’s lack of ambition, but there is no agreement on the set of issues that would lead to an ambitious and meaningful resolution. One of the reasons for this puzzling situation is that there are cross-cutting cleavages producing deep fractures within and among the several groups that seem so far intractable. In other words there is a negative consensus, but several deadlocks prevent a positive consensus from emerging. Although there still are some elements of the traditional North/South divide, it is no longer the dominant one.

Since Copenhagen, the interests of the small island states ant other developing countries have diverged from the interest of large emerging economies, although they’re all under the umbrella of the G77+China. These divisions have given far more effective voice to other groups, such as the AOSIS, representing the small island states; the BASIC (Brasil, South Africa, India and China); and the African Union. Developed countries are also divided among themselves. The European Union and the United States have very different views and interests regarding several issues at stake in the climate negotiations as well as at the Rio+20 Summit.

A Chinese political analyst told me that even within the BASIC there is an increasing differentiation of views.  This analyst thinks that although the BASIC has been active only at the climate change negotiations, it should have its role enlarged to help building consensus among its member-countries on the Rio+20 agenda. There are some signs that the Brazilian government holds a similar view, particularly regarding sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Informal talks may be a working tool to reach consensus around some issues, and an agreement on a set of meaningful decisions. Under less strict “rules of engagement” they may very well help negotiators to sort out and fractionalize conflictive issues reducing the area of conflict, and creating the environment to solve one piece of the puzzle at a time. These informal meetings have been helpful in Cancun, during COP16, and in Durban, during COP17.

Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, was in Brazil last week to discuss the Rio+20 outcomes. She said that it would be “extremely important” that “Rio delivers a tangible outcome, something citizens could relate to”. She proposed a “paradigm shift, into a more green economy, into more green growth”. Connie Hedegaard stressed the fact that “there are specific things we can do”, like agreeing on a goal to give global access to renewable energy. According to the Commissioner we know how to do it, we have the technological means to do it, what we need is the political decision to do it, and to secure the financial means required. Other goals, she argues, are not as clear at this point. Governments should commit to format them adequately on a short span of time so that they could be adopted as soon as possible.

This view coincides with the Brazilian outlook for the Rio+20 outcome: a few clear decisions on the steps towards a green economy, and a clear mandate, a guideline, for the  definition and adoption of a few relevant decisions, including the sustainable development goals (SDGs). What I would extract from all the diplomatic fuzzy wording is that SDGs could be decided during the Rio+20 Summit with a clear mandate and deadlines to format them conceptually and methodologically on the short run, so that implementation could begin within a few years.

Sergio Abranches

G20′s Finance ministers and Central Bank governors met last week, February 25-26 in Mexico City to discuss global economic troubles. In their communiqué they have conceded a few words to the green economy, and to disaster risk management. Should we see it as a sign that there is hope they’ll someday get smarter?

The communiqué said that the world’s top economic officials recognize the importance of the green economy, and have asked the OECD, the World Bank and the United Nations to prepare a report that provides options for G20 countries on inserting green growth and sustainable development policies into structural reform agendas, tailored to specific country conditions and level of development.

They also said that they ”will continue to work on climate finance” and report to their Leaders in June.

Not much really, but at least the official economic discourse is progressively incorporating the notion that a transition to a green economy is a necessary and legitimate concern on the global economic agenda.The reference to the green economy is the 11th point of the 12 point communiqué.

“Recognizing the importance of “green growth” we ask the OECD, with the World Bank and the UN, to prepare a report that provides options for G20 countries on inserting green growth and sustainable development policies into structural reform agendas, tailored to specific country conditions and level of development. We will contribute to the preparation of the report by voluntarily informing on our actions to integrate green growth and sustainable development into structural reform agendas. We will continue to work on climate finance and report to our Leaders in June.”

The 12th point says that disaster risk management tools and strategies to better prevent disasters, protect populations and assets, and financially manage their economic impacts are valuable, and its use needs to be expanded.

“We recognize the value of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) tools and strategies to better prevent disasters, protect populations and assets, and financially manage their economic impacts. We also acknowledge the need to expand its use. To that end, we have asked the World Bank to prepare a compilation of country experiences and the OECD to recommend a framework that countries may use for the implementation of DRM strategies.”

Extreme summer temperatures are already more frequent in the United States, and will become normal by mid-century if the world continues on the current path of greenhouse gases emissions.

A study led by Phil Duffy of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analyzed observations and results obtained from climate models and found that previously rare high summertime (June, July and August) temperatures are already occurring more frequently in some regions of the 48 contiguous United States.

“The observed increase in the frequency of previously rare summertime-average temperatures is more consistent with the consequences of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations than with the effects of natural climate variability,” said Duffy, who is the lead author of a report in a recent edition of the journal, Climatic Change. “It is extremely unlikely that the observed increase has happened through chance alone.”

The geographical patterns of increases in extreme summer temperatures that appear in observations are consistent with those that are seen in climate model simulations of the 20th century, Duffy said.

Duffy and his colleague Claudia Tebaldi, a senior scientist at the nonprofit news and research group Climate Central, showed that the models project that previously rare summer temperatures will occur in well more than 50 percent of summers by mid-century throughout the lower 48 states.

The team first compared the period 1975-2000 to the preceding 25 years, and found that both observations and results based on 16 global climate models show that summertime-average temperatures that were rare in the earlier period occurred more often in the later period, in certain regions. The agreement between observations and models demonstrates that the models are able to simulate changes in the occurrence of extreme summertime temperatures, Duffy said.

Next, Duffy and Tebaldi assessed the present period, by using results obtained from climate models for 1995-2024; they found that summer temperatures that were extreme during 1950-1979 occur more often in the later time period. This supports the conclusion that extreme summertime temperatures are already occurring more frequently in parts of the lower 48 states. A second statistical analysis showed that this increase is very unlikely to be due to weather variations of irregular periodicity, such as El Niños or La Niñas.

Finally, the team evaluated model results for 2035-2064 (representing the middle of this century) and found that extreme summertime temperatures that were rare during 1950-1979 are projected to occur in most summers throughout the 48-state region in the mid-century period. For the mid-century, summertime mean temperatures that historically occurred only 5 percent of the time are projected to occur at least 70 percent to the time everywhere in the 48 state region.

“The South, Southwest and Northeast are projected to experience the largest increases in the frequency of unusually hot summers,” Duffy said. The strong increase in extremes in the Southwest and Northeast are explained by strong historical and projected warming there. This result is based upon assuming a commonly used scenario for future emissions of carbon dioxide, the main driver of human-caused climate change.

“What was historically a one in 20-year occurrence will occur with at least a 70 percent chance every year. This work shows an example of how climate change can affect weather extremes, as well as averages.”

Sources:

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Eureka Alert

Sergio Abranches

Last week, China’s National Development and Reform Commission reportedly directed seven regions to set overall emissions control targets and submit proposals for how caps should be allocated. The directive, which encompasses the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin and the provinces of Guangdong and Hubei, aims to establish cap-and-trade pilot projects for the country’s carbon market, meant to be in place by 2015.

The Chinese government had signaled at the COP17 climate negotiations in South Africa last December that it could adopt a more ambitious emissions reduction policy by 2015 and 2020. As part of the Copenhagen Accord, it had already committed to reducing carbon emissions intensity by 40-45 percent between 2005 and 2020.

That (albeit non-binding) commitment is reflected in the nation’s 2011-2015 five-year plan, which sets a 16-17 percent reduction target for carbon intensity.

China has never committed globally to actions that were not already a part of its ongoing domestic policies. The carbon intensity targets pledged under the Copenhagen Accord were decided internally way before Prime Minister Wen Jiabao closed a deal with the United States and other countries in Copenhagen in 2009. Now, China is poised to implement a new stage of its emissions reduction policies with fixed emissions caps.

Chinese leaders are apparently more willing to sign multilateral agreements, provided they are not a constraint on domestic policies. The way to do that is to use the Chinese planning structure to their advantage. By formulating the future stages of their policies ahead of the international agenda of negotiations, especially in the environmental realm, Chinese leaders can shift from a veto position towards a cooperative one, while maintaining complete sovereignty over domestic decision-making.

China has plenty of reasons of its own to reduce pollution, resource use and greenhouse gas emissions. It needs no outside push. The impact of land, air and water pollution on public health and well-being justifies the adoption of a more ambitious environment and climate policy. The major problem is, and will continue to be, how to balance the goals of cutting pollution and boosting efficiency with economic growth.

Carbon intensity targets pose no constraints at all on growth. Emissions can still increase while intensity decreases. China is implementing the world’s most ambitious renewable energy program, with very aggressive targets. Although solar and wind power generation are growing at staggering rates, the use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, have also increased.

This means that while China’s green energy sector is becoming very significant, its grey energy sector remains an enormous one and keeps growing, though at falling rates. The difference is that in the new Chinese policy guidelines, the gray energy sector comes with a negative sign for growth, and the green energy sector comes with a positive one. Each new plan aims at further reducing the gray sector, and increasing the green one.

The caveat is, again, the scale here. Even with downward movement at each new five-year plan, the Chinese gray economy will remain huge for decades to come. Carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel use will be on the rise well into the 2020s if not the 2030s.

Emissions caps are no guarantee that emissions will decrease faster. The experience with cap and trade systems shows they require additional measures for emissions to fall significantly. The good news is that China is also investing more in efficiency and quality improvement. Increasing the efficiency of clean energy along with energy-saving technologies can shift the economy toward more efficient patterns of energy and resource use, accelerating emissions reductions.

The best of all news is that China is abandoning the policy of growth without environmental constraints that led to the vast pollution and resource scarcity problems the country now faces. Chinese plans still aim at rates of growth far above the world average, but at the same time  they are adopting progressively greater constraints on the use of resources and fossil fuels.

(Post previously posted at National Geographic’s The Great Energy Challenge Blog)

Sergio Abranches

Brazilian state-owned financial institutions will finance research and development of cellulosic ethanol, reports the Brazilian daily newspaper Valor Econômico.

The National Development Bank, BNDES  and FINEP, the science and technology finance agency, will offer about R$ 1,1 billion (US$ 600 million) this year in subsidized loans, grants in aid and equity sharing to companies to develop pilot projects of cellulosic ethanol. There are already 14 business plans under consideration by the two financial agencies.

Brazil has a highly competitive sugarcane ethanol industry, but research on second generation biofuels has lagged behind. Ethanol companies are also facing mounting problems on their supply chain with falling productivity of sugarcane plantations. Extreme climate events have led to recurring harvest losses over the last years. Aging plantations have lower and falling productivity levels. There has been very little investment on plantation renewal over the last five years. Once a net exporter, Brazil has become a large ethanol importer. In 2011, the country imported about 1.1 billion liters of ethanol, mainly from the US, and this year estimates are it will have to import 1.7 to 2.0 billion liters. As crop yields will be around 10% lower in 2012 (they’ve been falling over the last four harvests) Brazil could end up by importing as much ethanol as it exports.

Second generation biofuels will allow greater production without competing with food crops. Brazilian cellulosic ethanol would help to increase production and productivity without demanding new areas for plantation. Brazil has at least two excellent sources for cellulosic ethanol: sugar cane straw, today burnt on the fields and doing severe harm to workers’ health and the environment, and eucalyptus offshoots left on the plantations’ sites after logging. Both have high cellulose content. Cellulosic ethanol production could increase ethanol production by at least 50% using straw and bagasse from existing sugarcane crops. Other agricultural leftovers and residues could also be used productively for cellulosic ethanol production further boosting the volume generated without increasing crop area. This would reduce the need for sugarcane plantations to expand over areas dedicated to other crops, thus becoming an indirect driver for deforestation and food insecurity.

The National Development Bank has also budgeted about R$ 2 billion (US$ 1.1 billion) to finance new biochemical products from sugarcane, and gasification of sugarcane bagasse to generate biofuels and plastics.

It is a good start, although investment on the development of second generation biofuels will demand far greater sums. The Brazilian government and biofuel companies have been neglecting R&D for second generation biofuels. The country is still under the risk of losing competitiveness and leadership on the future global biofuels markets. Brazilian competitive advantages on crop-based biofuel production comes more from the greater efficiency  of sugarcane’s photosynthesis, than from ethanol companies’ technical and managerial virtues. Now, the country will have public policies, public finance, and corporate programs supporting the development of second generation biofuel technology.

Sergio Abranches

Why the Durban Platform is a political breakthrough, but a dismal outcome in the light of climate science?

The second part of the question is far easier to answer. Negotiators in Durban have agreed to review the pledges for emissions reductions in the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and Cancun Agreement by 2015 in the light of the fifth assessment report on the state of science, to be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from September 2013. However, as the IPCC said on a press statement about COP17, “in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.”

Additionally, the IPCC also states that:

“The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

From the standpoint of science Durban has decided on too little too late.

In the political realm, though, COP17 was a watershed. First of all, it closes a whole chapter of negotiations on commitment periods under the Kyoto Protocol. There will be only a second one, with fewer ratifiers than the first. COP18 will still have to decide whether it will end by 2017 or 2020. There has been no consensus on the end date, and the alternatives ended up within brackets. But the main point has been resolved: it will be replaced by a new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”, no later than 2020. That’s the core decision contained in the Durban Platform.

The above expression is a political breakthrough, one that has been progressively taking shape since COP15, in Copenhagen. There, for the first time ever, the United States and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) have agreed to offer quantified pledges for emission reductions under the United Nations Climate Convention (UNFCCC). They were voluntary, not legally binding, but they have been formally registered with UNFCCC”s Executive Secretariat. It was a major first step and, at the same time, a frustrating decision.

Much more was expected from the leaders of both developed, and emerging world powers. Besides, the leaders left abruptly, creating an authority gap, between the political summit and the official Conference of the Parties. A weak COP presidency and the resulting authority gap led the plenary to only “take note” of what the leaders had agreed. The Copenhagen Accord was noted as a political decision, but did not become an “official” agreement under the track of the Convention.

The second step towards the breakthrough was made in Cancun. The pledges under the Copenhagen Accord were adopted by the Cancun Agreement, that has also made official several other decisions made in Copenhagen, as well as some that were left to be finalized by COP16, in Mexico. In Cancun, the voluntary commitments became official ones, under the umbrella of the Climate Convention.

In Durban, negotiators from the United States, the BASIC group, and the European Union underlined the official nature of the Cancun Agreement, as a preparation of the groundwork for the Platform to launch the process leading to the new universal agreement with legal force applicable to all parties to the Climate Convention. In a nutshell, it was acknowledged by all relevant parties that these commitments are legal, although not binding. The difference: the Kyoto Protocol, besides being a legal instrument, explicitly states that the targets for the countries (“industrialized countries”) listed on its Annex I are mandatory. The Cancun Agreement is part and parcel of the Climate Convention, therefore it has legal status, but the commitments registered by the parties are voluntary, not mandatory.

Finally, the Durban Platform takes the decisive step: it commits all major emitters outside the Kyoto Protocol to the negotiation of a new agreement with legal force, under which all commitments will have the same legal treatment, although they could be quantitatively differentiated on the basis of each party’s capacities.

This is not an easy decision to make. Even before it is formally adopted it is likely to cause the countries to start planning domestic actions to enable them to meet the targets yet to be defined. It is unrealistic to imagine, as some environmentalists do, that a “top down approach”, by which a decision under the Climate Convention would bind countries to take actions, would ever work.

Even the Kyoto Protocol praised for its “legally binding” status has no enforcement mechanism. What enforcement mechanism could lead Canada to meet its targets for the first period of commitment next year? None at all. Even with UN officials stating that although outside the Protocol it still has the obligation, Canada will likely fail to meet its Kyoto target, and there will hardly be any consequence to its noncompliance.

Politics hardly moves ahead of the facts. It is not a proactive process. It is a responsive one. Politics responds to active interests in economy and society. It seldom reflects even the “inactive majority” or the majority of “public opinion”. Political decisions respond to “active interest groups”, to economic constraints and inducements, and to the domestic correlation of power. Countries that show greater ambition of emissions reductions also have greater active political support from domestic economic and social forces to policies aiming at coping with climate change. Their domestic policies are usually more ambitious than their multilateral commitments.

If one looks at China’s domestic policies to reduce emissions and other forms of pollution, one will easily see that they are far ahead of what Chinese lead negotiators are willing to commit to at the Climate Convention.

Politics, in this sense, consolidates what countries are ripe to commit to at the multilateral level. The approach that really counts, and leads to progress in the negotiations under the Climate Convention is the bottom up one.

What is meaningful and relevant about the Durban process is that over the last three years major developed and emerging countries have become readier to admit to the possibility of a single climate change regime encompassing them all. The US, China, India, and Brazil said that much several times during COP17, and signed into it at the end. This outcome was not guaranteed at the outset of the climate talks. It was the result of intense negotiation and consultation. Negotiators have likely had to obtain a specific mandate from their leaders, in mid-game, to go as far as they’ve gone.

What will happen next will depend on what happens inside each of these countries. The focus of pressure should be domestic politics, rather than diplomatic undertakings. Not that the COP process doesn’t matter. It does, very much. But its main function is not to shape climate change policies to be adopted domestically. It is to consolidate progress on domestic climate change policies at the multilateral level, adding cross-country constraints and global transparency to the agreed actions. This enables, for instance, a network of domestic and global civil society organizations to join forces to act as watchdogs, to ensure that policies are in line with targets. It does make a difference to have a global accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions, and to have a global registry for quantitative targets for emission reductions. These outcomes would strengthen the multilateral regulatory system, and would also give more punch to domestic pressure from civil society and opposition parties in overseeing their government’s implementation of climate change policies.

The year 2015 has become a new milestone for global climate change politics. Two crucial decisions shall be taken at COP21, if the Durban Platform is to be completed. Firstly, the review of the emission reduction commitments to seek coherence with the 2 degrees Celsius target. As pointed before, it is absolutely sure that the new IPCC report will show a serious gap between committed actions and warming trends. If parties are to take their commitments seriously, they’ll have to revise their targets upwards for the period 2015-2020. Secondly, they’ll have to decide on the new “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties” to be adopted no later than 2020.

The political engine is set to move. The pace and destination it will take will depend on the evolution of domestic economic and social forces over the next three years. Another important factor will be the domestic interplay of interests, and the power of pressure and advocacy groups. Bilateral and multilateral politics do have a role, but never a dominant one. Competition and coalition among nations and groups of nations, also help in shaping decisions. They’ll help to pave the way to future outcomes. But they do so by responding to domestic interests and projecting them on the global arena.

Crops that can cope with sudden fluctuations in the weather could be developed, thanks to recent discoveries about the survival mechanisms of plants. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh studying how tiny algae renew old or damaged cell proteins say their findings could be useful in developing crops suited to climates in which weather changes quickly.

They found that the speed at which protein renewal takes place determines how fast they can adapt to environmental changes, such as a sudden frost or drought.

“Until now, we knew that plants replaced their old and damaged proteins, but we had no idea how long this process took for individual proteins, or how this varied between different parts of the plant. Our findings will be useful in understanding more about how plants are programmed for survival,” says Sarah Martin of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Systems Biology, who led the study.

Renewal rates vary between proteins according to their role and their location within cells. Proteins that carry out photosynthesis – the process that converts sunlight into energy – renew quickly because they are at risk of light damage. Conversely, proteins that protect DNA in plant cells are at little risk of damage, and renew slowly.

These findings could help breed crops incorporating proteins that respond quickly to changing conditions. Conversely, it could also assist development of high-yield crops in stable environments, where little adaptation to conditions is required.

Scientists made their discovery by developing a method to detect how quickly algae take up nitrogen – which is used to produce proteins – from their food. The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and just published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, has issued today a statement on the Durban outcome. It shows concern about the decision to “adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020.” The Durban agreement reinstates the decision to review the Copenhagen/Cancun pledges to reduce emissions in the light of the IPCC next report, to be released in 2013. The IPCC has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The statement says that the IPCC is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013. But in its fourth assessment report, published in 2007, it already showed that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have damaging effects. It also says that greenhouse gases must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020.

The IPCC says that “the series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.” But it warns “that action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures.”

See the full text of the statement.

Statement by the IPCC

13 December 2011

Action must be taken swiftly to cut emissions to prevent a damaging rise in world temperatures, Climate Panel findings show

The series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.

Governments meeting at the annual climate conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon as possible, but not later than 2015, to be adopted and come into force from 2020. At the same time they recognized the need to raise their collective level of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been asked what impact these agreements will have on global warming.

The IPCC, which provides policy-makers with the current state of climate science, including the impact of climate change and what can be done to tackle it, is due to publish the first part of its next assessment report, the fifth, in 2013.

But already in its fourth assessment report published in 2007, the IPCC showed that a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could have a damaging effect on water supplies, biodiversity, food supplies, coastal flooding and storms and health.

The fourth assessment report shows that emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming must fall by 2050 by 50-85% globally compared to the emissions of the year 2000, and that global emissions must peak well before the year 2020, with a substantial decline after that, in order to limit the growth in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In the near term, by 2020, emissions from industrialized countries (listed in Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol) need to be reduced by 25-40% below 1990 levels, while substantial deviations from the current trend in developing countries and emerging economies will also be required

This must be borne in mind in the package. The earlier action is taken, the cheaper and more effective it will be.

Trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame, according to a new study led by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent in the 20th century, the world’s most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s,” said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez, who conducted the study while he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. “Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.”

The study, to appear in the Journal of Arid Environments, was based upon climate change records, aerial photos dating back to 1954, recent satellite images and old-fashioned footwork that included counting and measuring over 1,500 trees in the field. The researchers focused on six countries in the Sahel, from Senegal in West Africa to Chad in Central Africa, at sites where the average temperature warmed up by 0.8 degrees Celsius and rainfall fell as much as 48 percent.

The Sahel is one of the poorest and most vulnerable regions in the world. Recurrent famines have already killed millions of people there. Amartya Sen, the renowned economist has a classic study on the Sahel famines, published in 1983, called “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” (Kindle Edition available). Gonzalez says that “people in the Sahel depend upon trees for their survival. Trees provide people with food, firewood, building materials and medicine.”

The Berkeley study found that one in six trees died between 1954 and 2002. In addition, one in five tree species disappeared locally, and indigenous fruit and timber trees that require more moisture took the biggest hit. Hotter, drier conditions dominated population and soil factors in explaining tree mortality, the authors found. Their results indicate that climate change is shifting vegetation zones south toward moister areas.

“In the western U.S., climate change is leading to tree mortality by increasing the vulnerability of trees to bark beetles,” said Gonzalez, who is now the climate change scientist for the National Park Service. “In the Sahel, drying out of the soil directly kills trees. Tree dieback is occurring at the biome level. It’s not just one species that is dying; whole groups of species are dying out.”

Other co-authors of the study are Compton J. Tucker, senior earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Hamady Sy, country representative for Mauritania at the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Funding from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey helped support this research.

Sergio Abranches, from Durban

The documents still circulating at COP17 show notable political progress, but fall short of adequately meeting the risks already pointed out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — fourth assessment of climate science. They are still under discussion, and final decision may still be significantly different. It is likely, however, they will keep the general thrust of the documents.

Politics is rarely moved by the science on the issues requiring policy decisions. Politics is moved by interests, interactions, power competition, alliances, and conflicts. All that play a strong role to shape the global politics of climate change. At the political level there are unprecedented moves reflected on documents not yet approved by COP17 plenary.

Perhaps the most important one is the support from the United States, China, India and Brazil of a a “process to develop a Protocol or another legal instrument applicable to all Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”. This process, says the draft document, shall “begin immediately and be conducted as a matter of urgency”, so that the new working group the plenary should create can “complete its work as early as possible but no later than 2015, in order to adopt this legal instrument” at COP21. It “shall raise levels of ambition and be informed, inter alia, by the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the outcomes of the 2013-2015 review”.

In short this means that by 2020 there should be a common legal regime on climate change encompassing all parties to the climate convention, that this legal instrument could even be a new protocol, thus legally-binding, it would have quantified mitigation targets for all major emitters. The new instrument should be ready to be adopted by 2015, at COP21. The quantitative targets should in line with the new IPCC assessment report, that should be used to guide the review of the commitments made in Copenhagen and reaffirmed on the Cancun Agreement.

The other breakthrough is the formal admission that there is a “significant gap between the aggregated effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emissions pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding warming below 2°C or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

In other words the document formally notes, and with grave concern, that there is a gap between the commitments to reduce GHG emissions and the commitment to keep the chances of warming below 2°C or 1.5°C. The 2°C is the target approved under the Copenhagen Accord, and the Cancun Agreement. The 1.5°C is a demand from the small islands states, the African Group, and the Less Developed Countries, admitted by the Cancun Agreement.

These hard to make political steps forward are a sine qua non for a more ambitious, science-based, rule-based future global climate change policy.