COP24 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

COP24 plenary. Image credit Wikimedia Commons Doman84.

The topic of climate change has fascinated me ever since the age of 17 and I haven’t looked back since then because it is something that is beyond my passion. I completed my Bachelors in Environmental Science at the University of Nottingham and now here at the University of Bristol I am enrolled in Climate Change Science and Policy MSc.

I am also part of a youth-based Climate Change NGO, Malaysian Youth Delegation (MYD), which constantly pushes for more ambitious national and regional climate policies and liaises with the government. The organisation also represents youth climate movement on national and International platforms, educates Malaysian Youth on UNFCCC in relation to Malaysian climate policies and holds Malaysian leaders accountable for their promises. Being in the organisation has taught me about the intricacies involved in climate policies such as the global north-south divide, climate adaptation, mitigation, finance and capacity building.

Being at the University of Bristol has made me intrigued to know more about the science-policy interface that occurs in climate negotiations like COP. I was also intrigued to find out more about how negotiations took place and the role of politics being part and a consequence. I am thankful for Cabot Institute for assisting and funding me with the logistics to my trip to Katowice. During my time at COP24 and aside from tracking negotiations, I was predominantly taking the youth narrative and was working with the organisation I represented – the Malaysian Youth Delegation (MYD) and Youth NGO constituency (YOUNGO).

My experience at COP24 was a profound one, primarily because I saw the subject of climate change coming to life through the form of formal and informal negotiations, high-level meetings and other side events in the premises. This COP was an important one since the draft text for the Paris Agreement Working Programme was supposed to be completed by the end of the conference – the document is vital for the implementation of the Paris Accord that took place in 2015. The two weeks that I’d spent at the COP were some of the most exhilarating and engrossing adventures in the world of climate policy – days often started at 6 am and completed around 2 to 3am the next day leaving a short time to rest each day. At the conference, I attended and observed negotiation sessions, youth constituency meetings, side events related to other aspects of climate change during the day and helped to produce position papers, proposals and write reports for MYD and YOUNGO in the evenings and overnight.

Highlights

One of my main highlights was that I got the chance to meet the Malaysian Minister for Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change, Ms. Yeo Bee Yin, and Dr. Gary Theseira, the special functions officer to the minister and a highly experienced negotiator in the UNFCCC. We, the MYD team, attempted to shadow the minister while she was at the conference. Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow the minister as many of her meetings were predominantly “closed door” meaning those meeting not being open to observers. However, the initial purpose of tracking the minister at the conference was to know her views on her unprecedented attendance of a climate conference and how she would take back any outcomes to Malaysia. We also had the opportunity to transcribe Ms. Yeo Bee Yin’s COP speech which can be read here.

Another highlight was having the opportunity to meet my tutor, Cabot Institute theme co-lead for Environmental Change research, Dr. Jo House, at the conference too. We visited the Polish “coal exhibition” center together where chunks of coal were stacked up. They were termed “clean coal” which were made to supposedly reduce the environmental impact of its combustion as compared to regular coal.

I was also presented with an opportunity to deliver an intervention (a term used in COPs where non-country stakeholders provide their expressions to the chair of a respective meeting) on behalf of YOUNGO. Due to time constraints and other internal reasons, this fell through but the position paper I was about to present was handed over as a written draft to the respective chair of the meeting.

The most important highlight of the conference was the production of the 133-page rulebook for the implementation of Paris Agreement, which was unanimously adopted at the conference. This contains the framework for the various articles and implementation modalities mentioned in the Paris Agreement.

The next COP will take place in Chile from 11-22 November 2019 with the pre-COP happening in Costa Rica at an earlier date. COP25 and the intersessional meetings before 2020 will make the rulebook less ambiguous to enact the Paris accord. The United Kingdom has also officially submitted a bid to the UNFCCC to host COP26. This conference would be crucial since it would be the first COP during the implementation period of the Paris agreement – the UK would have to successfully host nations and lead it to a productive outcome considering the interest of various parties.

The most deliberate question in our minds, as youth representatives, is that after the publication of the IPCC’s Special Report, will the Earth’s average surface temperature stay below 1.5C since pre-industrial levels?

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This blog is written by Varunkanth Muralikanth, a Climate Change Science and Policy masters student at the University of Bristol.

Varunkanth Muralikanth

Listen! Andy Rain/EPA

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The investment bank’s collapse was the drop that made the bucket of global finance overflow, starting a decade of foreclosures, bailouts and austerity.

The resulting tsunami hit the global economy and public sector, discrediting finance and its attempts to extract large rents from every aspect of the economy, including housing and food. An alternative was urgently needed.

Ten years later, private finance and large investors will play a central role at the COP24 in Katowice, Poland, and in the full implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Representatives from pension funds, insurance funds, asset managers and large banks will attend the meeting and lobby governments, cities and other banks to favour investments in infrastructure, energy production, agriculture and the transition towards a low-carbon economy.

Has finance cleaned up its act?

There is a US$2.5 trillion gap in development aid which needs to be filled if poor countries can adequately mitigate the effects of climate change. With little enthusiasm among rich countries to stump up, the role of private finance is inevitable. Policy makers trust financial capital as our best hope of securing investment to avoid the catastrophic warming beyond 1.5°C.

This has been the case for a while – the first announcement came at the UN Climate Summit in 2014, when a press release on the UN website said the investment community and financial institutions would “mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars for financing low-carbon and climate resilient pathways”.

Since then, networks that stress the role of private finance in rescuing the planet have multiplied, including the Climate Finance session at the Sustainable Innovation Forum, which will also take place in Katowice, on December 9-10 2018.

It is difficult to ignore that a strong reliance on private finance means putting the future of Earth in the hands of individuals and institutions that brought the global economy to the verge of collapse. It may be partially true that some are divesting from fossil fuels and funnelling their money into better projects. But before we pin our hopes on finance to solve climate change, there are some things we need to ask ourselves.

Poor countries like Bangladesh have little responsibility for climate change and need significant investment to adapt to it. Suvra Kanti Das/Shutterstock

Difficult questions for COP24 negotiators

How did we get to a point in history where it is taken for granted that public money alone can never be sufficient to finance our transition from fossil fuels? Is it an objective condition with no clear causation and responsibility, or something else?

What about the fact that global military spending in 2017 reached US$1.7 trillion while poor countries promised funding for climate change adaptation and mitigation in 2015 are still waiting?

What about the cost of bailouts to the financial sector, which in the UK alone has been estimated at US$850 billion? As Michael Lewis noted in his boomerang theory, states that have propped up financiers with public money are now asking those same financiers to step in and do the job that states should do. And this leads to the second consideration.

Climate change is historically, politically and socially complex. Although sustainable finance is not presented as the sole solution, analysing its role produces a series of strategic short circuits.

It oversimplifies and depoliticises the response to climate change. It legitimises the idea that sustainability can be achieved within continuous growth and expansion, which are essential to the survival of the financial sector.

It rewrites the way we think about our planet in the vocabulary of finance and its obsession for a return on investment. It marginalises any claim to address climate change based on present and historical injustices, redistribution and bottom-up projects organised by ordinary people.

It accepts that the financial way of defining sustainability and its achievements are inherently aligned with the rights, interests and needs of people and the planet.

Finance may be a partner in the fight against climate change, but it is certainly not a partner motivated by altruism. It’s motivated by generating profit from the transition. It is therefore unsurprising that energy generation, railways, water management and other forms of climate mitigation have been identified as priorities for sustainable finance.

Action on climate change has to involve standing up to the Wall Street Bull. Quietbits/Shutterstock

Fighting climate change on Wall Street’s terms

Wall Street can find large returns by investing in the transition to “greener” infrastructure, including the not-so-green Chinese green belt and road and dams like the Belo Monte, a project that originally applied for carbon credits and was labelled as a sustainable investment. Green bonds can help cities finance projects to reduce their environmental impact or adapt to climate change.

However, if money is the driver, we should not expect private investors to have any interest in projects that won’t generate a sufficient return, but would benefit people or cities that cannot pay for the service or for the debt, or that would protect vulnerable people from climate change. If climate change is fought according to the rules of Wall Street, people and projects will be supported only on the basis of whether they will make money.

Ten years ago, the world saw that finance had permeated every aspect of the global economy. Back then, it was clear that financial interests could not build a better and different world. Ten years later, COP24 should not legitimise large financial investors as the architects of a transition where sustainability rhymes with profitability.

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This blog is by Cabot Institute member Tomaso Ferrando, a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tag: COP24

Reflections and insights on COP24

Highlights

COP24: ten years on from Lehman Brothers, we can’t trust finance with the planet

Has finance cleaned up its act?

Difficult questions for COP24 negotiators

Fighting climate change on Wall Street’s terms