Making Sense of The Climate Summit This Week—And What to Look For in the News Coverage
Most of us agree by now that the world needs to undertake a huge collective effort to fight climate change, so that our kids can still live normal lives in 2050 and beyond. We urgently need a course-correction, because at the moment (based on the pledges that everyone made in the 2015 Paris Agreement), it turns out that we are on track to raise the earth’s average temperature by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. Yet scientists say we need to stay under 1.5 degrees if we want to survive on the planet. So that’s quite a gap, and it can only be closed if every country does a lot more than they were planning to do back in 2015 at the time of the Paris Agreement. In this week’s Summit, you will hear this being politely referred to as “raising climate ambition”, something that all countries will be asked to do.
it turns out that we are on track to raise the earth’s average temperature by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. Yet scientists say we need to stay under 1.5 degrees if we want to survive on the planet.
You might also frequently hear the term NDCs (nationally determined contributions). Back in 2015, all the countries that signed up to the Paris Agreement, offered up their NDCs. These were their home-grown (hence “Nationally Determined”) commitments to undertake mitigation (i.e emission reduction) and adaptation (i.e protective, or loss avoidance) actions.
Some countries were creative and actually put forward two sets of NDCs in Paris: one set that they could afford to undertake on their own, within their own budgets and government expenditures, and a tougher set of NDC actions if they received external funding to help them do more.
Today we know that very few countries are on track even to meet their NDCs of 2015.
So, this Leaders’ Summit is key. We need a collective gear-shift in terms of our “increased ambition” if we want to get close to 1.5 degrees warming. No small sub-set of countries can do the full set of actions that it will take to bring down global warming. Hearing from a lot of international leaders during the livestreamed Summit could be an opportunity to understand whether it is really likely to happen or not (and remember that such meetings are normally never open to the public).
Since you will have a rare chance to hear unfiltered statements, the important thing will be to keep track of how many leaders talk about exactly what they will do by 2025 and 2030, and what concrete policies and laws they are enacting to transform their economies and make it happen. Even better if they also talk about how exactly they are financing it. These are near term milestones and they mean that serious action is already underway—good news!
The less-prepared ones will say something like “we are planning for net zero by 2050 but I can’t give any milestones, because we haven’t figured out exactly how we will get there. Just trust us. Our intentions are good! We want to be among the good guys!” Let’s hope there are more of the former than the latter, especially among the big polluters.
It’s important to remember that, even as their leaders speak at the Summit, highly industrialized countries and middle-income developing countries still spew out a lot of daily greenhouse gases. This is because the majority of the world’s electricity, transportation and industry is still operating on fossil fuels, just like before. The difference is that now we ALSO have a measurable percentage of our electricity additionally being generated from solar and wind, but over three- quarters of it is still coming from burning coal or natural gas. Electric cars are still only a tiny percentage of all cars on the road, and iron and steel and cement and heavy industry are still operating as before, while new technologies are still in the laboratory research phase. So, the revolution is just beginning. The purpose of high-visibility Summits like this one, is to give the change a little push to speed it up.
So, the revolution is just beginning.
You can expect to hear this from the hosts: “We are in the Last Decade for Decisive Action”. That’s because 2030 is an important milestone year when we know whether we will be able to save our planet or not. If everyone’s emissions have not “peaked” by 2030 at the latest, meaning that Greenhouse gases start to go down year on year after that, then we are unlikely to make it to a global warming limit of 1.5 degrees by mid-century, or 2050. So that’s where “last decade” comes from.
Then see if you can spot three broad groups among the participating countries. You get to decide who belongs in which group:
- the rich, industrialized countries who have been burning fossil fuels for over 150 years;
- the “middle income countries” (MICs) who got a late start, but built a lot of coal-fired power and steel plants starting from the 1970s and 80s, so they have been burning fossil fuels for about 40-50 years (many MICs were previously ruled by colonial powers, and could not industrialize earlier); and
- the “low-income countries” (LICs) and “Small Island Developing States” (SIDS), who have had no part in the legacy of global GHG emissions. That is because even today they have, and use, very little electricity.
In many LICs, particularly on the African continent, only about a third of the population actually has an electricity connection to the grid. Today, in 2021, fully 600 million Africans are still waiting for first-time access to modern electricity. Worldwide, a staggering 880 million people still have to walk and pay someone to charge a mobile phone. They have no lights, fans, fridges, air conditioning etc. They live in the dark after sunset, or burn kerosene lamps with unhealthy fumes and fire hazards in order to see, or do homework, or complete their chores. Almost three quarters of the world’s so-called “electricity access deficit” (600 million out of 880 million) is in sub-Saharan Africa. Coal or solar for them? How should they get that first-time electricity? And what about industrializing their economies? (which doesn’t work on solar). Maybe it will not be addressed at this Summit, but be on the lookout for answers to these climate justice questions during the year.
The average annual per capita electricity use in sub-Saharan Africa is 300 kWh. In the United States it is 12,000 kWh; in India it is 1,100 kWh; in the UK it is 5,500 kWh and in China it is 4,000 kWh. India aims to raise its figure to the global average annual per capita electricity use which is 5,000 kWh, so almost five-fold. This is needed for India to move from a US$2.7 trillion economy today, to a US$ 5 trillion economy in the coming years, a stated goal of the government.
The question of whether this can be done in India and other similar countries, either with all clean electricity or part clean and part dirty electricity, is a big sticking point. India is working on huge solar and wind targets, and has grown these sectors at a record pace, essentially installing 40GW each of large scale solar and wind, and another 6GW of rooftop solar, all from a very low base as recently as 2017. So, India has impeccable credentials in terms of a massive investment in renewable energy, and has even announced a national target of 450 GW of renewables by 2030. But these are mature technologies.
For India, another sticking point is the “business model” that developed countries have in mind for cutting edge clean technologies, that are yet to be brought to market, but are often being developed in government-funded labs in their home countries. Will they be freely shared with developing countries when they are ready to hit the market, or will the inventors of the latest clean technologies seek a commercial rate of return and make high profits while introducing them to the global market?
The perspective of India and many other developing countries in climate negotiations seems to be that they will not spend high-interest, borrowed money to fuel the commercial profits on other countries’ clean technologies, while abandoning their own available and under-utilized (dirty) energy technologies in order to solve a global problem they did not contribute to. We are likely to hear some version of this argument in the statement from India during this calendar year of summits, unless there is early clarification on clean technology transfer plans.
What about the Low-Income Countries and Small Island Developing States? What are they thinking? The key point to keep in mind for this Summit is that LICs and SIDs played no part in overshooting our planetary carbon budget. Therefore, there is no question of asking them to reduce existing emissions; however, on the mitigation front, they are faced with a tall order: they are being told to use only emissions-free electricity to grow their economy or connect their un-electrified populations to the grid for the first time. This is unprecedented—it has simply never been done anywhere. No one has industrialized an economy, or brought prosperity and opportunity to their people on clean electricity alone. Not that it cannot be done—we simply do not know, because it has not happened before... So much for mitigation. The LICs and SIDS will undoubtedly want answers on how (and how fast) they will be supported to achieve economic growth on clean electricity alone.
Not that it cannot be done—we simply do not know, because it has not happened before... So much for mitigation.
It’s a safe bet that most of the airtime of the two-day Summit will be taken up in discussions and squabbles between the rich countries and the MICs, about the need for MICs to do more to reduce emissions and spell out concrete “low carbon pathways” to net zero. Countries that are reluctant to commit to a net zero time-table will be pushed and prodded. All of that is a given, and it happens at every Climate Summit. The MICs will then say they want to see what the rich countries are doing first, in terms of owning up to the responsibility for having created the problem in the first place. And they will want clarity on technology and finance. So far, so predictable.
There is, however, a HUGE opportunity that should not be missed. That is on NATURAL CAPITAL and ADAPTATION, and providing support to SIDS and LICs in these areas. That would be something new and valuable! I believe that it is extremely important, we need to keep our eyes peeled to see who takes leadership on that.
Bottom line: if this Summit is going to be a resounding success, it ALSO has to start a conversation that will eventually result in tangible benefits for low-carbon growth in low-income countries, and Small island developing states. If you are interested in knowing more, do have a look at my Gup Shup next week, when I will try to explain why the upcoming series of climate meetings needs to make time for both Adaptation and Natural Capital in order to avoid partial solutions!
Till next time, Mohua