FEATURES » DECEMBER 13, 2019
Furious activists protested,
but mandatory measures remained lacking as negotiations continue into the night
on Friday.
MADRID—With climate-related
disasters happening “at the rate of one a week,” according to the United
Nations, more than 150 civil society organizations around the world are using
the UN climate negotiations this week to stand with the Global South. They are
pushing for demands set out in an open letter to negotiators in November,
including a new global climate fund to aid poor countries in the midst of
climate catastrophes.
The organizations say it’s
about time for a rethink of climate financing as climate-related disasters like
extreme storms, droughts, floods and famines take a mounting economic toll on
poor countries. Worldwide costs are estimated to grow to between $300 and $700
billion a year by 2030. To cover the costs, poor countries must increasingly
borrow from development aid, which is “pushing them into a debt trap,” says
Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change with ActionAid International, one
of the 150-plus organizations that signed the letter.
The United States and other
wealthy countries made a pledge in 2010 to commit $100 billion annually to
assist poorer countries, but wealthier countries have consistently failed to
pay in. The new proposal calls for a comprehensive and mandatory new fund to
help poor countries recover that would make an additional $50 billion available
by 2022 and gradually increase the amount to $300 billion a year by 2030.
The money would come from the
wealthy countries that are responsible
for the vast majority of the emissions behind climate change. Additional
funds could be raised from taxes on air travel, fossil fuels and financial
transactions. The money would go directly to local organizations working in
frontline communities in the Global South to help with rebuilding, recovery and
resilience efforts.
However, with negotiations
still going on as nighttime fell in Madrid, all suggestion of additional mandatory
climate funds have met stiff resistance from wealthy countries. The 47 members
of the Least Developed Countries group pushed new “loss and damage” funding
commitments, using much of the language culled from the environmental groups’
proposal. But the rich countries that would have to foot the bill, including
the United States, Singh says, “would not even engage.”
Earlier in the week, Singh
expressed optimism about proposals for beefing up climate recovery funding
through something called The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage
associated with Climate Change Impacts, or WIM. But by late Thursday, a draft
of WIM circulating among negotiators included no mention of additional funding
but merely urged developed countries and others to “scale up” their financial
commitments. The reality, Singh said, is that a failure to mandate additional
funding would merely spread existing funds around more thinly, thus “exposing
more people to climate disasters.”
The lack of commitment to
countries in the Global South has prompted unprecedented protests this year,
both inside of the negotiating halls, led by youth and indigenous activists,
and outside on the streets, where an estimated 500,000 people marched with
Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg on Friday, December 6. On Thursday more
than 300 activists from around the globe protested just outside of the room
where climate talks were taking place. Banging on pots and pans in a version of
what is known in Latin America as a cacerolazo, they chanted slogans and
yelled “Shame!” until security guards rounded them up, snatching conference IDs
from around activists’ necks and herding them out of the building.
In response, UN officials
threatened to bar all international observers from the talks, saying the
protests were “illegal” under the UN’s code of conduct. After tense
negotiations, UN officials agreed to let some but not all of the
international observers back into the conference after extracting promises not
to carry out any more so-called “illegal protests.” The Fridays for Future
organization responded by calling an emergency climate strike this afternoon
worldwide.
Activists have denounced the
UN for allowing oil company executives to roam free while controlling the
access of activists. “The UN should be kicking polluters out of the talks, but
instead they are kicking people out,” says Sara Shaw, international program
coordinator for climate justice and energy at Friends of the Earth
International.
Oil companies and the U.S.
government have emerged as the biggest villains of this year’s conference.
Increasingly, companies are looking to profitable approaches like trading in
carbon offset projects. While wining and dining negotiators over drinks and
canapes, industry experts, corporate friendly environmental groups and
corporate executives have outlined an array of “market-based solutions” to the
climate crisis—despite warnings from scientific experts that it’s magical
thinking to assume the world can trade its way out of more than a fraction of
the necessary emissions reductions. This week’s industry proposals include
plans to launch broad new markets in “natural climate solutions” that will involve investing in
everything from mangrove preservation to sustainable farming and more.
Meanwhile, the Trump
administration, which is in the process of withdrawing from the UN Paris
climate agreement, has taken advantage of its waning negotiating power to push
for renewed assurances that the United States and other big polluters can’t be
held accountable for historic pollution. This “liability” issue—the same one
assailing the world's fossil fuel companies—have been among the most
contentious issues in past climate negotiations, which is what led to the “loss
and damage” provision being included to help poor countries, in the first
place. As negotiations continued Friday, U.S. delegates kept pushing for a
liability and compensation waiver included in the final WIM document, a move
that Taylor Billings of Corporate Accountability International referred to in
Buzzfeed as “an ass-covering maneuver.”
“With this waiver, the U.S. is
trying to torch critical elements of climate action on its way out of the Paris
Agreement—and create an escape hatch for polluting countries and potentially
corporations,” Billings told In These Times. “Across the negotiations,
it’s obvious that the U.S. is attempting to gut the Paris Agreement of any
promise and potential. That’s what they’ve always done in these talks.
Shamefully, it’s not just the U.S.—the EU, Australia and Canada are
helping the U.S. do its dirty work and cowering in Trump’s shadow when
questioned about it.”
“The U.S. is lighting the
house on fire as it's on its way out the door and Global North governments like
the EU, Australia and Canada are backing it every step of the way,” said
Billings’ colleague Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director of
Corporate Accountability, at an ActionAid press conference on the final day of
the climate talks Friday.
Speaking on the condition of
anonymity because they were not authorized to talk on the record, one person
involved in negotiations told In These Times that the United
States and other developed countries have been unwilling to discuss
additional funding beyond the existing commitments for climate adaptation and
resilience, in part because they don’t want to open the door to further
discussion about climate blame. It remains a thorny issue whether wealthy
industrialized countries should pay more to mitigate the impacts of climate
change since they are responsible for the bulk of fossil fuel emissions, dating
back to the bringing of the Industrial Revolution.
“The U.S. has been very clear
that it doesn’t want anything more beyond adaption funding, because if you
start talking about ‘loss and damage’ it gets into the issue of who is
responsible for the fossil fuel emissions that have created the climate crisis,”
the negotiator says.
“It is the U.S., EU,
Canada, Japan and Australia that are not allowing any progress,” concurs Singh.
With poor and rich countries
still far apart, there’s speculation that the negotiations may end without
agreement on key issues. Some of the less costly ideas outlined in the
open letter have found their way into the latest draft agreement. They include
language stipulating a new “expert group” by 2020 to help poor countries
grappling with climate damages and the creation of a “Santiago Network” for
technical assistance, but without additional funding, those measures are
expected to have limited effect.
Organizations that penned the
open letter, which included 350.org, Friends of the Earth International and WWF
International, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Indigenous
Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Project, say they are not giving
up and will continue to push a comprehensive new approach to climate finance
even after this year’s negotiation’s wrap up. The proposal by ActionAid and the
other 150-plus groups also backs a temporary interest-free moratorium on
foreign debt payments of poor countries in the throes of climate disasters. But
that idea didn’t even get discussed by negotiators this year.
Dylan Hamilton, a Fridays for
Future activist from Scotland, said in a press conference in Madrid today that
the UN process “has failed us again” and promising to bring an even bigger
fight next year at the 26th annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland, a half hour
from where Hamilton lives.
“Get ready,” she said. “We’re
going to be even bigger next year.”
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