Jeffrey Gogo Climate Story
THERE is just so much positive expectation for Paris. Surely, after a quarter of a century of negotiations, the UN climate summit in the French capital this December cannot but deliver a solid agreement that safeguards the future of humanity on this planet.

While that would be the desirable outcome, evidence shows that the developing world’s hope for a climate proof future at Paris will be dashed, again.

It is in the French capital that a new global climate deal effective 2020 will be sealed, replacing the Kyoto Protocol which expired in 2012.

To date, more than 75 percent of the 195 members to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have announced their climate action plans, but their collective pledges are not compatible with capping global temperature rise at the higher safe limit of 1,5 degrees Celsius.

Now, the action plans, also known as intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), are what will constitute the core of the new climate agreement, inadequate as they are.

Last week, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most authoritative body on the science, reported that it had completed the first draft text of the Paris deal, reflecting INDC inputs from over 140 parties.

Many agree the INDCs show some progress on ambition, but never at the scale necessary to keep climate change at bay.

The trajectory points to a world hurtling towards an above 3 degrees Celsius warming as early as 2050, which will result in severe climate risks for the world’s poor, particularly agro-based Africa.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, a UN-linked data analysis group, existing policies from the world’s governments would see a warming of up to 3,8 degrees Celsius by 2100. An analysis of 19 climate action plans with a combined total of 71 percent of global emissions by CAT found many of them to be inadequate.

However, there is some chance that if the INDCs are fully implemented, in their current format, global warming would decline to 2,7 degrees Celsius by end of the century.

But that relies on the availability of mechanisms to review pledges on a continuous basis in the post-2020 period.

“The emissions gap is still set to grow rapidly towards 2030, and there is a major risk that if the INDCs are locked in to 2030, without review, the achievement of the 1,5 degrees Celsius goal may be locked out, and achievement of the 2 degrees Celsius goal fundamentally threatened,” CAT said.

The writing is on the wall, a future uncertain, impeded by the usual culprits — an industrialised world hell-bent on rejecting historical responsibility yet perpetually deferring action to the future.

As part of conditions for a new climate deal, rich countries have arm-twisted poor countries in Africa and elsewhere into taking on mitigatory actions, actions that may hinder growth in their fledgling economies.

The hypocrisy becomes even clearer given the rich countries’ reluctance to take on deeper emission cuts; their unwillingness to finance Africa’s adaptation at a scale compatible with the climate damage they have caused; and the reluctance to provide affordable technologies to help poor nations cope with climate change.

Africa is targeting that developed countries commit 1,5 percent of their combined GDP to adaptation and mitigation.

That’s over $600 billion of GDP of the 34 nations considered as advanced economies by the International Monetary Fund, which includes members of the G7, European Union, and the 4 “newly industrialised Asian economies”—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. The world’s 150 other nations are considered emerging or developing.

However, currently, there is only $5 billion of committed funding of the $10 billion pledges made by rich nations under the UN’s Green Climate Fund in the previous 11 months.

In 25 years, the endemically incremental UN climate talks have proved dysfunctional, with an escalation in global emissions and a multiplication of deadly extreme climate events in the developing world all there is to show for.

According to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, to meet the modest 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase target, the world has an emission budget of only 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide until 2100.

The world will consume most of this budget by 2030, leaving a small space for Africa to grow in the future.

Figuratively, Paris is to climate change what D-Day was to the second European war, a war that has mischievously and commonly been referred to as the world war.

It has become clearer, however, Paris will not deliver. What it will deliver is another legal instrument (as agreed four years ago at Durban) that keeps hope alive, hope that climate change will continue to occupy the global agenda for a very long time to come.

There is so much that will turn Paris into another comic show.

Current mitigation pledges do not meet up with Africa’s long-standing targets of 40 percent cuts by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050.

The UN panel on climate change will not be pleased either. Scientists who produced the Fifth Assessment Report said emissions would have to be cut by as much as 80 percent in this century to achieve the desired temperature target.

That would mean cutting by more than three quarters all industrial activity like fossil fuels extraction and use, and applying a corresponding increase in the switch to use of sustainable energy sources such as solar and wind.

The entire economic chain would have to limit emissions by that much to attain targeted warming levels.

With only a few weeks left before Paris, the absence of a clear pathway to achieving that goal has left the UNFCCC’s climate process in question, whether it has the ability to respond adequately to the urgency of climate change or if the process is still relevant at all.

Again, there is no guarantee the intended nationally determined contributions will be implemented fully.

Who will be there to monitor their implementation?

And even when monitored, who will be there to enforce penalties, penalties set by whom, in case of failure?

 The Kyoto Protocol, widely considered the most effective and binding mitigatory instrument to have come out of the UNFCCC, produced several defaulters.

None paid for it. Some like the US even refused to be bound by the Protocol, preferring, instead, self-regulation.

In the end, a deal will come out of Paris, no doubt, but it will not be enough to achieve the 2 degrees Celsius temperature goal, certainly not in this century or at any other time in the future.

God is faithful.

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