November, 26 2014, 10:15am EDT
UN Climate Talks Heading in Wrong Direction
LIMA, Peru
Less than a week before 195 nations gather in Lima to discuss how to address the climate crisis [1] Friends of the Earth International activists are warning that the United Nations talks are heading in the wrong direction.
Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator said:
"Looking at the texts that our governments are negotiating in Lima, the climate deal that they plan to reach next year in Paris could turn out to be, at best, an empty shell. They must reverse their course of action urgently. Around the world people and communities are already paying the price of the climate crisis with their livelihoods and lives."
"Some observers are very excited about the November US-China deal, but the reality is that all major climate polluters, especially the developed countries, with the US at the helm, are still doing way too little to address the climate crisis. All signs point to the fact that our governments are mostly focusing on false solutions to the climate crisis. False solutions such as carbon trading and offsetting must be stopped," she added.
There are real solutions to the climate crisis. They include steep reductions in carbon emissions, stopping dirty energy and deforestation, building sustainable, community-based energy solutions, and transforming our food systems.
The UN is the most democratic space to address the climate crisis. The UN climate talks are supposed to be making progress on implementing the agreement that world governments made in 1992 to stop man-made and dangerous climate change.
The current UN agreement recognises that rich countries have done the most to cause climate change and should take the lead in solving it, as well as provide funds to poorer countries as repayment of their climate debt.
Any future climate agreement with emissions reduction targets must be comprehensive, binding, and reflect a fair share approach to the 'carbon budget' (the limited quantity of carbon pollution that can still be released while avoiding dangerous climate change). [2]
Jagoda Munic, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International, said:
"The world's richest, developed countries are most responsible for climate change. They emitted the biggest share of the greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today, way more than their fair share. They must urgently make the deepest emission cuts and provide most money if countries are to fairly share the responsibility of preventing catastrophic climate change."
Friends of the Earth International campaigners will observe the UN talks in Lima and participate in the alternative Peoples Summit.
They will join environmental defenders and social movements from Peru and worldwide at the World March in defense of Mother Earth in Lima on December 10th, Human Rights Day.
Friends of the Earth International is the world's largest grassroots environmental network, uniting 74 national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on every continent. With over 2 million members and supporters around the world, FOEI campaigns on today's most urgent environmental and social issues.
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"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were."
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"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," PIK scientist and first author Maximilian Kotz said in a statement. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labor productivity, or infrastructure."
However, Wenz told the paper that the paper's projected reduction was likely a "lower bound" because the study still doesn't include climate impacts such as heatwaves, tropical storms, sea-level rise, and harms to human health.
Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
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Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
Levermann said the paper presented society with a clear choice:
It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
McKibben, meanwhile, argued that the findings should persuade major companies to embrace climate action for self-interested reasons. He noted that most corporate emissions come from how company money is invested by banks, particularly in the continued exploitation of fossil fuel resources.
"If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century's end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress," McKibben wrote.
"These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did," he continued. "Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work."
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