The COP24 meeting made progress in regulating the Paris agreement , but the "carbon markets" remained blocked.

The mobilization in favor of governments taking more drastic measures to combat climate change can make us forget that many countries are taking real steps to reduce greenhouse gases. Although international summits usually fall short of expectations, climate agreements are gradually making headway. Here are the results of the last such summit: a small step, to be sure, but a step forward.

Plenary session of COP24, held in December in Katowice (Poland) [COP24].

March 20, 2019

article / Sandra Redondo

The climate summit (also known as COP: Conference of the Parties) is a global lecture prepared by the United Nations Organization, where measures and actions related to climate policy are negotiated. The last one, dubbed COP24, took place from December 2 to 14, 2018, in the Polish city of Katowice. It was attended by nearly 3,000 delegates from 197 countries that are party to the United Nations framework Convention on Climate Change. Among them were politicians, representatives of non-governmental organizations, members of the academic community and the business sector.

The first COP took place in 1995, and since then these summits have led to the creation of the Kyotoprotocol (COP3, 1997) and the Parisagreement (COP21, 2015), among other mechanisms for international action. The main goal of the Katowice quotation was to find a way to implement the 2015 Paris agreement , i.e. to implement cuts in pollutant emissions to avoid an increase in global warming. COP24 was the last summit before 2020, when the Paris agreement will come into force.

The 2015 Paris agreement was signed by 194 countries with the goal of preventing polluting emissions, which cause the greenhouse effect, from increasing the planet's temperature by more than two Degrees above pre-industrial levels. The international community is asking everyone to make an effort to ensure that the temperature increase does not exceed 1.5 Degrees above these levels. The summit was intended to create a clear, concrete and common outline for all countries to follow in order to make the agreement a reality.

Challenges

One of the challenges in achieving this goal lies in establishing a balance that allows all nations to participate in this struggle, but taking into account the reality of each one of them: the different technological and financial capacities, as well as the circumstances of vulnerability and historical contamination. As countries with great differences among them participate, the difficulty of the task of reaching a consensus is understandable. This was one of the measures intended to implement the Paris agreement , in which governments pledged to help development countries to achieve greater and more permanent adaptation.

In the words of Patricia Espinosa, the UN's executive administrative assistant for Climate Change, in addition to measures to make the Paris agreement effective, it is important to "promote a cultural change in the ways our societies produce and consume in order to rethink our developmentmodels".

Wang Yi, China's Foreign Minister, said that his country reaffirms that only joint work among all countries will provide an effective solution in the fight against climate change.

At these summits, agreements must be accepted by all participating States, which can cause negotiations to drag on. This is what happened at COP24. Negotiations were scheduled to end on Friday, but dragged on until the final agreement was reached the following day. The final text, C all the countries in attendance, turned out to be less ambitious than expected, especially in reference letter greenhouse gas emission cuts.

Despite the declarations of willingness of some countries, certain tensions were inevitable in the negotiations, especially when it came to the assumption that more ambition is needed in this fight. On the one side, there was the conservative side, with countries such as the United States (which is one of the countries contributing the most CO2 per capita to global warming) or Saudi Arabia among others. On the other side were the European Union and other states, some of them island states, threatened by the rise in sea level, which will increase due to the rise in global temperature.

Another cause of delay was a last-minute demand by Turkey to improve financing conditions. With regard to financing, the final agreement recognizes the need to devote more resources to this fight, particularly to the reduction of greenhouse gases.

report of the International Panel on Change

In addition to the measures and cuts agreed at this summit, a declaration was to be made with the conclusions of the report by the Intergovernmental group on Climate Change (IPCC) experts, which would warn that the world does not have much time left to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

This report, which was one of the big battles of the summit, details what will happen if global temperature rises 1.5 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The temperature is currently one Degree above these levels. Despite the fact that it should have been considered of great importance by all countries, as it concerns facts that affect the world scale, there were countries such as Russia, Kuwait, the United States or Saudi Arabia, which tried to downplay its importance and raised doubts about the veracity of the report's conclusions, while other States defended the unquestionability of the conclusions. A common characteristic of these countries that opposed the report is that they are the world's major oil producers.

The report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presented at COP24, indicates that, if no change continues, between 2030 and 2050, these will be the consequences:

-Increase in flood risk from 100% (at 1.5°C) to 170% (at 2°C).

-If we exceed that 1.5°C, more than 400 million people living in cities will be exposed to extreme droughts by the end of the century.

-Arctic ice will decrease so much that there will be an ice-free summer at least once every 10 years.

-150 million deaths could be avoided by limiting this 1.5°C temperature rise.

-Nearly 50 million people could be affected by a rise in sea level by 2100 if the temperature increase exceeds 1.5°C.

-Corals would be one of the worst affected, as they would all be lost by 2100 if the 1.5°C rise is exceeded, due to the increase in ocean acidity. Reaching 1.5°C would result in the loss of 70% of them.

According to calculations also made by the IPCC, CO2 emissions will have to fall by 45% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 Degrees. In addition, "carbon neutrality" must be achieved by 2050, i.e. to begin to have negative emissions, i.e. to stop emitting more CO2 than is removed from the atmosphere. The longer it takes to implement these measures, the less time we will have before the negative consequences affect us all, and may even become irreversible. With each passing year, not only are greenhouse gas emissions not being reduced, but they are increasing. That is why now is the time to act.

As a conclusion of the IPCC report , it should be clear that in order to avoid an increase above 1.5 Degrees it was necessary to cut current emissions by 45%. However, due to the disagreement of several states with this report, and together with the fear of the failure of the summit, these cuts were omitted from the final agreement . This delay in taking drastic measures only reduces the time we have to save our planet, risking arriving too late to avoid the worst consequences.

result

At the Katowice meeting it was possible to reach consensus on the regulation of the Paris agreement measures, which is already a great achievement, but the agreement came at the cost of leaving aside the carbon markets, that is, the set of carbon trading mechanisms that allow countries that emit more greenhouse gases to buy emission rights from those countries that do comply with the objectives and emit gases below the established limit. This section blocked the negotiation of other issues for hours, as several countries that benefit from the current status, such as Brazil, opposed modifications. Finally, it was decided to postpone the negotiation until the convening of COP25 next year in Chile.

The common set of rules for all countries allows them to present their progress in the fight against climate change in the same way. We have to remember that the problem that arose after the Paris agreement was that each country decided to present the data on the pledges of cuts in a different way. For this reason, an agreement to unify rules and criteria in a common way is a major step forward. These transparency rules are particularly important, since they will allow the progress of the proposed targets to be analyzed at any given time, and this will make it possible to analyze the targets achieved and the need to take additional measures. For example, among the data required from all countries in their reports are the sectors included in their targets, gas emissions and the reference letter year against which the process will be measured.

Although some are disappointed because they expected more results than were obtained, the mere fact that an agreement was reached among all the participating countries must be considered a success.

We should bear in mind that some of the participating States that showed less interest and put less effort into the negotiations for this fight, and even raised obstacles in the negotiations, are very important countries in the international sphere, with great economic and political power. For this reason, we should consider that the agreement reached is a further step towards awareness of the fight against climate change. A small step, but a step forward.