Hope for climate action seems to be the biggest casualty as COP30 starts. The last year has seen multilateralism pushed back, with a withering of the global rule-based order.
Climate denialism has received an unwelcome boost, as the biggest carbon polluter unapologetically walked away from climate talks. Meanwhile, the prolonged Ukraine war has forced many climate-protection countries to turn back toward polluting coal for energy security.
All this is happening while reaching the ambitious 1.5 C warming goal, agreed at Paris ten years back, is starting to look almost impossible. This weakening of political commitment has occurred at a time when the reality of a changing climate has engulfed the world, with chaotic hurricanes, rapidly melting glaciers, uncontrollable forest fires and disastrous floods. This widening and suicidal divide between climate politics and reality is fast eroding hope for a safer future.
COP30 is taking place in this backdrop of doom and gloom on the global stage. Yet there is no choice but to revive this hope for humanity. There, however, remain some silver linings around this darkening cloud which need to be optimistically built upon.
The last decade, following the Paris COP15, has seen an unprecedented shift towards cleaner energy, with more than $10 trillion fueling a new global economy based on a green energy transition towards renewables, primarily solar and wind, as well as a rapidly rising shift towards electric mobility.
Pakistan’s record-breaking solar boom is a case in point, with more than 17GW being installed, both on and off grid, at a breakneck speed. This has clearly demonstrated that, with sustained political will, a decoupling of global growth from emissions growth is not only possible but also technically and financially achievable.
Regarding adaptation, despite ongoing financing challenges, a recent OECD-UNDP report highlights that following a climate-resilient pathway could lead to a drastic reduction in future global damages caused by climate change. This reduction could increase benefits to the global GDP by up to 13 per cent by 2050. The past year also saw a historic ICJ ruling, which gave strong legal credence to calls for climate justice and reparations. Thus, while these repeated COPs may be failing to meet agreed goals, they are at least setting the signposts in the right direction. The annual political gathering is clearly influencing positive global shifts towards a greener economy and shaping a sustainable path for the future.
Belem remains a COP with low expectations, but it has some very important issues on the negotiating table. The Global Goal on Adaptation needs to be thrashed out with an agreeable list of indicators, which started with a long submission list of 10000, which have already been narrowed down to 100. This list needs to be further refined by the negotiators to define a goal that is effective, verifiable and achievable through financial instruments such as the Adaptation Fund and the Loss and Damage Fund. Both of these, in turn, require an urgent injection of promised funding to become more than the paper ‘placebo’ funds they are presently.
More importantly, the pledged $300 billion/year funding goal (NCQG), agreed at Baku last year, needs to be delivered while the pathway for the future $1.3 trillion financial goal is worked out with consensus. The stocktaking of the NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) will also take place in Belem to reshape future collective climate action. All these are working issues that, painstakingly, need to be negotiated to maintain momentum and keep hope alive.
Pakistan remains, unwillingly, on the front lines of climate vulnerability and is continuously pounded by climate-triggered impacts in the form of droughts, floods, heat waves, forest fires, as well as cloud-bursting monsoons. It has to forcibly survive in a state of continuous climate chaos. This victimhood, unfortunately, neither offers any sympathy nor associated funding in an unforgiving world, but the moral case for climate justice still needs to be presented and advocated.
One of the lowest greenhouse gas emitters, yet bearing one of the highest climate damages, Pakistan is certainly not part of the problem but has always vowed to be part of the global solution. Our vision for action, outlined in the NDC, is based on shifts towards clean energy, with a 60 per cent target for 2030, as well as a reliance on nature-based solutions, such as the Billion Tree Tsunami, the Living Indus and Recharge Pakistan initiatives. All of these provide credible and verifiable advocacy for the green infrastructure development that the world desperately needs.
Belem also provides the platform to voice the growing existential concern of ‘climate weaponisation’ that Pakistan now faces from a belligerent neighbour fuming in defeat. The floods of this year, while exposing the internal flood plain management failures, also witnessed the warring threat of a ‘water bomb’ being exercised and unleashed on Pakistan. The established early warning protocols, enshrined under the Indus Waters Treaty, got unilaterally trashed while the upper riparian water releases were timed to maximise, rather than minimise, downstream damages and destruction.
A case of already intense climate impacts getting augmented with malicious intent and manipulative resource control. A timely demand to unbiasedly investigate and arrest this weaponisation needs to be made at COP30, as it threatens dangerous insecurity for not only this volatile region but the whole world.
Carving out a beacon of hope amidst the stark realities stated above will remain the overarching challenge at Belem.
The writer is a former minister of climate change. He tweets/posts @aminattock and can be reached at: [email protected]
