Understand the climate jargon used in the UN climate conference discussions

by

The Climate Conference enters its second week with a series of open questions. To explain what is at stake, the Sheet elaborated a glossary with expressions and concepts that appear most in the debate.

COP – Acronym for Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate Convention, the COPs are annual meetings in which the signatory countries (195 plus the European Union) meet to discuss the joint confrontation of climate change. The event in Egypt is the 27th of its kind to be held.

Paris Agreement – It was the first major agreement signed by the 195 countries plus the European Union, in 2015, with the definition that everyone has to collaborate to solve the problem.

An earlier agreement, the Kyoto Protocol (signed in 1997), brought obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions only for rich countries. The Paris Agreement established that everyone has to do their part, within their own capabilities, in order to achieve a common objective of containing the rise in the planet’s temperature.

It is how this agreement will be put into practice that the COPs have since focused on. In 2021, in Glasgow, the “rule book” of the Paris Agreement was defined. For COP27, the watchword was the “implementation” of this book.

1.5ºC – The main decision of the Paris Agreement was to put a limit on the rise in temperature. The treaty sets the goal of “keeping the rise in global average temperature far below of 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels and strive to limit this temperature rise to 1.5°C”.

Island countries, island nations that are on the front lines of danger, at risk of disappearing with rising sea levels, have stomped their feet by 1.5ºC. The wording of the agreement with the two numbers was the possible consensus to meet them in some way.

Three years after the Paris Agreement, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published a report showing that this half a degree of warming will make a big difference. At 2ºC, the damage will be much more severe.

NDCs – To contain the increase in the planet’s temperature, the formula is well known: it is necessary to reduce emissions of gases that cause warming, the so-called greenhouse gases, such as CO2 (carbon dioxide) and methane. But instead of setting a generic target of how much that reduction should be, the Paris Agreement relies on so-called NDCs (National Determined Contributions).

In other words, each country put its own goal on the table, how much it can contribute to solving the problem.

In Paris, however, when doing the math, it was realized that everything that the countries were promising to cut was insufficient to reach the goal of containing the warming and it was decided that they should be updated every five years, always in the sense of becoming more ambitious.

New pledges were presented last year. But the most recent calculation, which considered current policies and new emission reduction targets, showed that the world is still on a path to warming by 2.8°C by the end of the century.

Mitigation, Adaptation and Means of Implementation – The Paris Agreement is basically structured around these three modes of action. Mitigation is essentially reducing the size of the problem by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The targets that each country put in their NDCs are basically mitigation measures. Brazil, for example, indicated in the Paris Agreement that it would reduce its emissions by 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030.

It so happens that these gases remain in the atmosphere for decades – even centuries, in the case of CO2. So much of what was emitted in the past is going to continue to warm the planet for a while, so a lot of climate change is already in place. They will happen.

Then comes the need to adapt to deal with the impacts that are already occurring or will soon occur.

To adapt is to make, for example, infrastructure more resistant to extreme rains and floods. But both to reduce emissions —by changing the energy matrix of countries to renewable sources— and to adapt, many countries need economic help, and that is where the means of implementation come in.

In the Paris Agreement, it was decided that rich countries would contribute US$ 100 billion a year from 2020, a value that has not yet been reached and is already considered insufficient.

A study commissioned by the COP presidency in Egypt estimated that developing and emerging countries — excluding China — will need more than $2 trillion a year to fund the fight against climate change. This value also considered the compensation for the so-called losses and damages.

Losses and damages – The problem is that the climate is already so unstable and there are so many impacts being caused, especially in the poorest countries, that in some cases it is no longer possible to adapt: ​​the damage is already done, and the losses are enormous. One situation that fits the phrase is the floods in Pakistan this year, which killed 1,700 people and displaced millions from their homes.

“If there is any doubt about loss and damage [causados pela crise climática], go to Pakistan. There are losses and damages there,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the opening of the COP in Egypt.

These cases, often in poor countries, have led to the inevitable question: who will pay for this? The expectation is that a fund for damages will be created. Right at the beginning of the COP in Egypt, the topic officially entered the agenda, which was considered a first step for this discussion to move forward.

Climate Justice – This is an expression that has gained strength in recent years and is particularly present at the COP. The idea comes from the fact that the impacts of climate change affect different social groups in different ways and intensity, and that mitigation and adaptation measures should prioritize vulnerable populations.

Although climate change is relatively democratic, as it affects the entire planet, it is the poorest, blacks and women who are most affected. Invariably, the places most affected are those that have contributed the least to causing global warming.

“To tackle climate change, we must simultaneously address the underlying injustice in our world and work to eradicate poverty, exclusion and inequality,” says Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, in her book “Climate Justice”. A slogan spread by Egypt’s COP is that “there is no climate justice without human rights”, following the arrest of activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

Article 6 – This is the article in the Paris Agreement that deals with the idea of ​​the carbon market, a mechanism that allows countries to cooperate with each other in the implementation of their NDCs, through the possibility that they trade their “mitigation results”.

Roughly speaking, the idea is that countries that reduce more emissions than those foreseen in their NDCs can sell these credits so that another country can also meet its targets.

Article 6.2 deals with this emissions trading between countries. 6.4 creates the Sustainable Development Mechanism, which provides for the trading of emissions by projects. It is still necessary to define some rules for the functioning of these mechanisms. The United States took a proposal to Egypt’s COP, but it was not well received.

Greenwashing – The expression in English that can be translated as “green washing” is often used to define actions taken by companies, governments and even NGOs that seem environmentally friendly, but in practice have little or no impact.

It is a kind of deceptive sustainable propaganda, with the intention of being responsible for the environment or the climate, but with no real result. Within the scope of the Climate COPs, there has been a flurry of promises by companies and governments to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.

To avoid this, a group was created with the mission of separating the wheat from the chaff. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, at the opening of the COP, defended “zero tolerance for greenwashing in neutralizing emissions” by releasing “a practical guide to ensuring credible and responsible net zero commitments”.

The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations

You May Also Like

Recommended for you