George Jacob-
George Jacob FRCGS is the President & CEO of San Francisco based Bay Ecotarium initiative to transform the Smithsonian Affiliated Aquarium of the Bay into a Living Climate Museum.
The Climate Summit held earlier this year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt posed more questions than answers to the calls for a viable approach towards reducing global warming, among others. Even as rhetoric ruled the roost, time-tried and tired echo chambers resonated with similar panels, same evocations, misplaced media moments, and righteous indignation from the elite to the exploited.
The key thrust of creating a $100 billion fund (proposed in 2009) to penalize high emission producing countries and compensate those affected (and least responsible) by it made some progress in principle, yet remained elusive on the mechanism of assessment and implementation with much of the negotiation deferred to COP28 scheduled in 2023 in the UAE. While much of the premise for global warming remains unchanged at 1.5 degrees celsius from COP 26 in Glasgow, there was a proposed request to establish NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) from participating nations in conjunction with global decarbonization.
Currently, it is estimated that less than 10 percent of climate funding reaches the communities most impacted by it. There continue to be disagreements on the definition of what are developing countries and developed countries, in addition to terms like “current high emitters” and “historically high emitters” used in various negotiations objected to largely by India and China.
Even as the US, UK, EU and China had opposed the creation of Glasgow COP26 Loss and Damage calculus, much of COP27 unity was fractured by the war in Ukraine- both with countries starved of gas subscribing to coal-based energy sources and the massive carbon emissions and pollutants leaked into the ocean and air with the sabotage of Nordstream pipeline and the massive 33 million ton carbon footprint of the military systems at play from rockets, missiles to artillery in addition to the undeclared quantum of sheer carbon emissions of weapon factories, supply chain, transportation and jet fuel. The timing of the event could not be any worse with the triene of G20 Summit, the US mid-term elections and the FIFA World Cup. With the Egyptian authorities restricting the protests, the media remained busy with other competing priorities on global geopolitics oscillating between elections, economic enterprise and entertainment.
The unspoken verdict was Quo vadis? Where do we go from here?
It has never been more evident that this format of UN sponsored layered bureaucratic approach is neither efficient nor nimble enough to engage with moving targets and variables to the magnitude we are facing in today’s fast-paced not-so-blue and not-so-circular economies. There are discourses and panel discussions affirming facts and re-affirming notions of consequences already stated ad nauseam on countless occasions since the Paris Accord at COP 21 in 2015.
It is therefore, time to re-think the approach to address climate change resilience. First and foremost, create a fund to educate civil societies to bring about awareness leading to informed engagement. This is the single biggest problem facing policy makers as their constituents fail to fully comprehend what the problem is, its complexity, its cascading impact, price of inaction and the ways to solve the greatest existential threat being faced by humanity. A global web of climatoriums, could be one of the ways to bridge this awareness gap.
Second, it is clear that at every COP summit, the negotiators run out of time leading to frenzied chaos at the eleventh hour and a political need to put out an ad-hoc feel-good statement. To prevent a repeat of this pattern, the negotiations for COP28 must commence now in regional blocks, leading to a wrap-up of the final global draft polishing finer points at the Summit. Third, the process of negotiations are itself riddled with ambiguity laced with assumptions hat create much confusion and frustration among participating nations relying often on translators and semantics. Fourth, Climate Justice and its impact on Africa and other parts of the world is not fully understood from the lens of reparations. Lastly, the carbon credits must explore a multi-barter system outside the current financial instruments at play.
Between the World Economic Forum and UNCOP, lies the parting of the proverbial Red Sea and perhaps a path to the promised land of the sustainable Blue Marble yonder.
[Photo Courtesy: Google Earth]
