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"Developed countries are not even offering crumbs from the table and are blocking all progress," lamented one campaigner.
As the clock ticks down toward this November's COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, the Bonn Climate Change Conference in Germany ended in a stalemate Thursday as nations were unable to agree on the size and scope of loss and damage financing and other issues.
This week's talks in Bonn yielded no significant progress on climate financing as the industrialized nations that are most responsible for the planetary emergency continued to try and shirk what Global South countries say is their responsibility to compensate those who suffer most but have emitted the least greenhouse gases.
"Developing countries need trillions in new public finance for adaptation, loss and damage, and for a just transition away from fossil fuels. But developed countries are not even offering crumbs from the table and are blocking all progress," said Friends of the Earth climate justice and energy campaigner Sara Shaw.
Loss and damage refers to funding meant to compensate developing nations for the destruction caused by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis the world's poor played little role in creating.
"They want developing countries to accept loans which will further fuel debt, and are pushing already discredited carbon market finance schemes, which causes grave harm in the Global South," Shaw added. "This is a disaster."
Crux of #SB60 #climate finance discussions in Bonn highlighted in my take at the recent @CANIntl press conference.
Thank you @LossandDamage for capturing it.@fossiltreaty #ClimateJustice #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/ynVV2R4g5N
— Harjeet Singh (@harjeet11) June 11, 2024
Referring to the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said Thursday that the Bonn stalemate is "undermining the momentum needed to ensure strong outcomes at COP29, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November."
"Discussions on climate finance lacked the urgency required for one of the most critical decisions to be finalized at COP29," WWF said of the Bonn conference. "A new funding goal for the period 2025 to 2035 is set to be agreed, in line with the terms of the Paris agreement."
"But developed countries have not yet given clear indication what they are considering contributing to developing countries for climate action, nor where the money will come from," the group added. "Concurrently, calls for urgently needed funding for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage remain unfulfilled."
Greenpeace International climate politics expert Tracy Carty said in a statement Thursday that "rich developed countries talked at length about what they can't commit to and who else should pay, but failed to assure developing nations on their intent to significantly scale up financial support."
"Damning silence on what finance might be offered is stymying efforts to raise ambition and is a dereliction of duty to people battling climate-fueled storms, fires, and droughts," Carty added.
"Rich countries most responsible for this crisis must pay up for a fair fossil fuel phaseout and climate damages, without worsening unjust debts."
Developing nations have said they need around $400 billion annually for a loss and damage fund that they could tap to rebuild communities, restore crucial wildlife habitats, or relocate people displaced by the climate emergency. The United States has committed to a paltry $17.5 million for the global loss and damage fund. Developed nations have pledged approximately $661 million for loss and damage funding to date, according to the U.N. Development Program.
Laurie van der Burg, international public finance lead at Oil Change International, asserted that "the rich countries most responsible for this crisis must pay up for a fair fossil fuel phaseout and climate damages, without worsening unjust debts."
"We know they have more than enough money," van der Burg added. "It's just going to the wrong things."
The draft offers "the fossil fuel industry a lifeline with dangerous distractions, like carbon capture and storage, and other abatement technologies," said one campaigner.
With a week left until the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference wraps up with a long-awaited "Global Stocktake" that will measure countries' progress towards the objectives of the Paris climate agreement, a draft of the document released Tuesday revealed a strong push to include a major loophole for the biggest fossil fuel producers—in the form of language that would allow so-called "abated" emissions.
More than 100 countries reportedly support a clause in the Global Stocktake that would call for "accelerating efforts toward phasing out unabated fossil fuels"—emissions that are not "captured" through technological fixes like carbon capture and storage (CCS) before they reach the atmosphere. That option in the text also calls on countries to "rapidly" reduce unabated fossil fuels "so as to achieve net zero CO2 in energy systems by or around mid-century."
The Biden administration, among other wealthy governments, has backed an expansion of CCS, offering $1.2 billion in grants for two projects this year. Analysts warn the technology would actually increase energy consumption by 20%, ultimately increasing the carbon emissions that CCS proponents claim are "abated" by the technology, as well as worsening environmental injustice by ramping up smog, benzene, and formaldehyde emissions in fenceline communities.
Other options in the draft text include a call for "an orderly and just phaseout of fossil fuels," which more than 25 countries support, according to BusinessGreen, and no mention at all of a phaseout.
Another paragraph in the draft included an agreement that countries will rapidly phase out "unabated coal power this decade" and ban the building of new coal power plants, and a second option would omit any mention of phasing out coal.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager for Oil Change International, acknowledged that just "three years ago, it would have been unimaginable to see governments consider an inclusion of fossil fuel phaseout in any [Conference of the Parties] agreement," which organizers and governments in the Global South have aggressively campaigned for in recent years.
The ultimate goal for the Global Stocktake, however, said Ioualalen, is "an agreement to immediately decline fossil fuel production and use... as well as a full, fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout."
The draft released on Wednesday goes in the opposite direction, he said, giving "the fossil fuel industry a lifeline with dangerous distractions, like carbon capture and storage, and other abatement technologies."
"We urge parties to hold a strong line against these failed technologies and refuse any language that allows fossil fuel companies to justify continued oil and gas extraction," said Ioualalen.
Pivoting to technologies like carbon capture and storage instead of focusing on sharply dialing down all carbon emissions, he added, would "blow us well past 1.5°C [in planetary heating], and lead to catastrophic climate consequences."
As author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in a column earlier this week, countries that are embracing technologies like CCS are playing into the hands of fossil fuel giants.
"It's abundantly clear that coal, oil, and gas are breaking the climate system; it's also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil, and gas reserves don't care," wrote McKibben. "In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to 'abate' the damage of their product."
Scientists have warned that eight years after the Paris climate agreement was finalized with a goal of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C—or as far below 2°C as possible—the world is currently on track to warm by 3°C this century.
Global carbon emissions have continued to rise in recent years as countries including the U.S. and the U.K. have approved major fossil fuel projects despite warnings from energy and climate experts that oil, gas, and coal extraction have no place on a pathway to 1.5°C.
The final Global Stocktake, said Shirley Matheson, the World Wildlife Fund's global nationally-determined contribution enhancement coordinator, must force governments to "face up to the consequences of their collective inaction, and commit to strengthen climate ambition and action in line with limiting global warming to 1.5°C."
Matheson called the current draft "bloated" and expressed hope that countries in attendance at the conference (COP28) will adopt a Global Stocktake with the best options included in the draft.
"Good language on phasing out fossil fuels is included as an option, and new text options have been added that call for stronger ambition in the national climate plans, and a new collective goal for 60% emissions cuts by 2035," she said. "These signals are essential to create the conditions for more ambitious commitments and more international cooperation to achieve them."
"Time is running out for negotiators to agree on a draft text with clear political options for ministers later in the week," she added. "Countries must work together to achieve science-aligned guidance and ways forward for a dramatic course correction of climate action. This will give us the best chance of securing a livable planet."
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, a record number of fossil fuel industry lobbyists are also attending COP28, leaving campaigners concerned that the final agreements out of the summit will include significant loopholes for the industry.
“Global leaders have to deliver a full package," said Ioualalen. "We will not accept weak outcomes only on coal or renewables, and without addressing the primary driver of the climate crisis, fossil fuels."
"Despite heroic efforts... we could still lose these extraordinary butterflies by not taking bolder action," warned one conservationist.
Wildlife conservationists sounded the alarm Wednesday as an annual count of monarch butterflies revealed a sharp decline in the number of the iconic insects hibernating in Mexican forests, stoking renewed fears of their extinction.
The annual survey—led by Mexico's National Commission of Natural Protected Areas and the Mexican branch of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF)—showed a 22% drop in the hibernating monarch population amid accelerating habitat loss driven primarily by deforestation.
"Despite heroic efforts to save monarchs by planting milkweed, we could still lose these extraordinary butterflies by not taking bolder action," Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a statement.
"Monarchs were once incredibly common," she added. "Now they're the face of the extinction crisis as U.S. populations crash amid habitat loss and the climate meltdown."
Renowned for its epic annual migrations from the northern U.S. and southern Canada to Florida, California, and Mexico, monarchs have suffered a precipitous plunge in population in North America this century.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the number of eastern monarchs fell from around 384 million in 1996 to 60 million in 2019, and in the West their numbers declined from 1.2 million in 1997 to fewer than 30,000 last year.
As CBD noted:
At the end of summer, eastern monarchs migrate from the northern United States and southern Canada to high-elevation fir forests in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the population size by measuring the area of trees turned orange by the clustering butterflies...The eastern population has been perilously low since 2008.
Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature formally listed the monarch butterfly as endangered, citing critical threats posed by the climate emergency, deforestation, pesticides, and logging.
(Graphic: Center for Biological Diversity)
In the United States, the Trump administration in 2020 placed monarchs on the wait list for consideration for Endangered Species Act protection. FWS has until next year to make a final listing determination.
"It is not just about conserving a species, it's also about conserving a unique migratory phenomenon in nature," said WWF Mexico general director Jorge Rickards. "Monarchs contribute to healthy and diverse terrestrial ecosystems across North America as they carry pollen from one plant to another."
"With 80% of agricultural food production depending on pollinators like monarchs, when people help the species, we are also helping ourselves," he added.