The global leaders are meeting at COP 27 that has been termed as ‘Implementation COP’ by Sameh Shoukry, the President of present COP.
He hopes to bring the greater bargains discussed at the COP 21 in Paris, to life: “COP27 creates a unique opportunity in 2022 for the world to unite, to make multilateralism work by restoring trust and coming together at the highest levels to increase our ambition and action in fighting climate change.”
This time, the Loss & Damage has officially become an agenda of UNFCCC COP, though the outcomes will be based on ‘cooperation and facilitation’ and not ‘liability or compensation’.
What’s going on elsewhere in the world?
According to the UNFCCC press statement release and feelings of Earth’s own residents: “At the same time, millions of people throughout the world are confronting the impacts of simultaneous crises in energy, food, water and cost of living, aggravated by severe geopolitical conflicts and tensions”.
“In this adverse context, some countries have begun to stall or reverse climate policies and doubled down on fossil fuel use.”
Why the focus on non-fossil fuel-based energy?
After a long time of leaders conflicting the very idea of climate change, it was found that the level of carbon in the atmosphere has been constantly rising since the Industrial Revolution and has reached its zenith compared to last 4 million years with its ‘rising rate’ reaching the highest in last 66 million years.
That’s absolutely threatening and terrifying.
Being a major greenhouse gas, it has contributed most efficiently to tweak the planet’s average temperatures since the industrial revolution and now changing the climate at a pace unmatchable for adaptation by several species.
Therefore, climate change cannot just be counted in tonnes anymore or the degree rise in worldly temperature, it has to be counted alongside the loss of lives.
With the changing climate and consequent heating leads to the flow of more energy in the system, thereby making climate events more frequent, intense and damaging to the core.
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has long indicated the Earth’s surface to have gone up by a mere 1 degree in the last 150 years, but this tiny change on the surface has led to grave changes in human lives and livelihoods.
As per recent research published in Nature, this sea-level rise that has begun has no apparent ending in the shorter run and will last even longer than the whole history of human civilisation compiled to date.
“People need to understand that the effects of climate change won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations. We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing”, explains the Research Scientist involved.
There are various scenarios and their possible outcomes, but all of them are equally challenging for sure, in one way or the other.
In case global warming gets capped at Paris climate targets below 2 degree C nearly one-fifth of the entire Earth’s population will need to migrate away from the coasts because of their lands being inundated by rising waters. It is to note that 2 degree C is already seen as impossible at current rate of change in human ways.
That will take major cities including London, New York, Mumbai, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Shanghai, down right under it, just like Jakarta is sinking. Not a part of the world will stand tall when the climate crisis arrives.
In simple words, the research suggests the sea level to continue to rise by 25 meters spread across the next 2,000 years in the aforesaid scenario and continue to submerge those arrested lands for at least 10,000 years, which may even get to 50 meters if no curbs are made presently.
Nevertheless, what this chaos has done for good is to bring out those voices to the world forums, which till now remained largely unheard: the indigenous, the young climate activists, the independent climate reporters, concerned Climate Scientists etc., even small island nations barely considered to be influential anyways.
Island Nations are submerging but their voices are getting louder:
Vanuatu, as island country resting in the Pacific Ocean with barely 300,000 inhabitants across 83 islands and atolls is just not ready to find itself under water because of the other polluting nations, at least without a squeak.
Not relevant to its size, the country contributes lesser than 0.0018 percent to the global greenhouse gas emissions and is even capable of sinking more carbon that itself emits, being a “carbon-negative” country.
All these achievements on an ailing planet could not save this resolved country from being utterly vulnerable to various climate impacts.
The 2020 Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) Index assessing a country’s vulnerability to climate change impacts has ranked Vanuatu at 132 out of 182 countries. The water surrounding this island nation has been rising at a rate double the world’s average and will only accelerate.
Another Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu reiterated its climate anxiety and became the first country ever to call for a non-proliferation treaty for fossil fuels at any UN Climate Conferences.
Prime Minister Kausea Natano exclaimed: “We all know that the leading cause of climate crisis is fossil fuels. Tuvalu has joined Vanuatu and other nations in calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to steer our development model to pursue renewables and a just transition away from fossil fuels.”
Tuvalu consists of 9 islands, most of which are no higher than three meters (around 10 feet) with the rising sea waters already adding to the salt content of its soil and ground water making them all unusable. It can become completely uninhabitable, based on scientific studies, within a span of 50 to 100 years.
“The warming seas are starting to swallow our lands — inch by inch. But the world’s addiction to oil, gas and coal can’t sink our dreams under the waves,” he adds sadly.
The treaty is expected to include a limitation on the expansion of oil, gas, coal etc., help in phasing out the current fossil fuel production at a speed complaisant to 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise only and possibly arrange capital for a just transition to renewable energy.
This, in time, has already given hope to many: “We will look back on this in history as the moment of reckoning with overproduction that is locking in further emissions and holding us back from bending the curve.”
Extension of this hope has even spilled on to proving usefulness of UN Climate summits despite sheer criticism: “The success of the [UN climate summit in] Paris meeting, and of every future meeting, must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how they will lead ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.”