IThis year has been a remarkable year, with severe heatwaves and extreme storms ravaging many parts of the globe and causing weather havoc. Last month, these culminated in devastating floods that hit eastern Spain and killed hundreds of people.
Ahead of this week’s Cop29 summit, scientists believe such disasters are becoming more frequent due to major changes in the climate as emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to rise.
As a result, they predict that 2024 will likely be the warmest year on record, with average global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It is also unlikely that this increase will reach a plateau in the near future.
There is clearly a lot to discuss at Cop29. Here are the 10 biggest issues on the minds of attendees this week.
break the record
Global carbon emissions continue to increase. Last year, that amount reached a staggering 40.6 billion tons, and this record is expected to be broken by the end of 2024. Carbon levels in the atmosphere are now more than 50% higher than before the industrial revolution. Therefore, it will rise by 1.5℃. Unfortunately, the world’s response to this alarming deterioration in atmospheric conditions has been painfully slow.
It’s getting hot
At the Cop28 summit held in Dubai last year, an agreement was reached to “exit” fossil fuels. Remarkably, this was the first time that an international commitment to explicitly address the root causes of the climate crisis had been agreed. In other words, it will take 30 years for this fairly weak commitment to reach a state of global acceptance, although we are far from the complete phase-out of fossil fuels that many countries and most activists advocate. This means that negotiations are necessary. I keep pushing. The arrival of Donald Trump is unlikely to help their cause.
America
Trump’s victory in last week’s US presidential election casts a particularly dark shadow on the already dark preparations for this week’s COP29 climate change summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron are also among those not scheduled to attend, raising concerns that the hoped-for resolution of the situation may not materialize.
“Big hoax”
Donald Trump, who has described climate change as “a big hoax,” has entered this arena squarely, repeating his previous decision to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris Agreement when he takes office. It is expected that “There is now a glimmer of hope that the world will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but Donald Trump may wipe it out,” said Bob Ward, director of policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. I can’t do it.”
boiling point
In contrast to President Trump’s views, UN Secretary-General António Guterres was particularly blunt in warning of the dangers currently facing the planet in the lead-up to Cop29, saying humanity was committing “mass suicide”. Blaming fossil fuel companies. Having “humanity down to the throat.” The era of global warming is over, he argued, and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”
fall down
The global climate alarm comes in part because researchers say the 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures that climate change negotiators had hoped to avoid is likely to be breached over a multi-year period by the end of the 2010s. climate researchers are concerned that limiting temperature rise to below 2°C is also likely to prove impossible.
In such a scenario, we are likely to pass a major tipping point. These include the destabilization of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the sudden thawing of the world’s permafrost regions, the disruption of the North Atlantic circulation, and the large-scale die-off of tropical coral reefs. Widespread flooding will occur, temperatures will continue to rise, and deadly droughts and storms will become more frequent. Hundreds of millions of people, mostly in developing countries, will find themselves unable to live in their homelands any longer.
follow the money
Preparing for the climate misery that threatens to engulf the world will be a key driver of Cop29. New financial targets to help developing countries build green energy systems and adapt to a warming world are high on the agenda for negotiations over the next two weeks.
The amounts involved are eye-opening. Most estimates suggest that developing countries will need between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year in additional climate finance from international sources. This is at least five times the $100 billion pledge currently in place.
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Much of this funding will come from multilateral development banks, as well as corporations and private investors, to protect threatened landscapes, create suitable energy sources for developing countries, and make them more resilient to climate change. It will be spent on adapting infrastructure and paying for infrastructure improvements. Damage suffered by nations due to global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions from developed countries.
gas lamp
It remains to be seen how much progress these plans will make in Baku over the next two weeks. After revelations that Elnur Soltanov, a senior official in Azerbaijan’s Cop29 team, was filmed discussing “investment opportunities” in Azerbaijan’s national oil and gas company with a man pretending to be from Azerbaijan. Hopes for a breakthrough, which were already at a low level, have fallen further. potential investors. “There are a lot of gas fields slated for development,” he says. These comments gave many delegates a bad reputation.
stepping stone
However, there is still hope for success in Baku. “We should see the meeting in Baku as a stepping stone to Cop30 in Brazil,” said Lord Stern of the Grantham Institute. “Successful police meetings are often done in pairs and I hope this is an example of that,” he said last week. “I will be cautious about any concrete agreements or outcomes, but I am hopeful that we can get at least some framework for climate finance that could be finalized at Cop30.”
Next year, in Belém, the Amazon, countries must arrive with new national plans known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to implement tougher greenhouse gas emissions cuts than previously promised. There is a need. These must be in line with the globally accepted goal of limiting global temperature rise. A strong agreement in Baku on funding for developing countries will encourage higher ambitions.
Time is up
The problem is that the world is running out of time, emphasized Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “With Trump’s victory, we now face, at best, a repeat of his previous term’s climate inaction. A four-year hiatus in this critical decade is simply not acceptable.”
But Stern took a more optimistic view of the situation. “I was in Marrakech for the Cop22 summit in 2016 when the news broke that Trump had won the election,” he told the Observer. “We knew what that meant, but it was amazing how determined the participants were to keep us going, and to keep going this time.
“His presidency will make life even more difficult, but we will not give up. That would be the worst possible option.”
