Every year, world leaders gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise. The most famous of these so-called Conferences of Parties, or COPs, resulted in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which marked the first time the world’s countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. That treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to the most climate-vulnerable countries, and establishing a carbon market.

This year’s COP, which commences in Dubai on Thursday, is all about determining whether that agreement succeeds or fails. For the first time since the Paris accords, the negotiators assembled at COP28 over the next two weeks will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals. 

While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. In the coming weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to. (In past years, negotiations have been saved by shifting a single comma.)

With more than 70,000 participants expected — not just national negotiators but also academics, activists, and civil society representatives — this year’s meeting promises to be particularly contentious. The conference is being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and is being presided over by the CEO of the country’s oil company, Sultan al-Jaber. Recent media reports suggesting that he has been using the COP28 presidency to push oil and gas deals have further stoked fears that he may not be a neutral arbiter to oversee the proceedings. Against that backdrop, countries will be negotiating the precise language that signals the world’s transition away from fossil fuels. 

Countries are also expected to decide whether they can commit to tripling renewable energy use and doubling energy efficiency, measures that al-Jaber is pushing and are widely seen as a barometer of a successful COP. But a number of other major issues loom over the conference. Here are the big-ticket items to watch as negotiations get underway.

– Naveena Sadasivam

Will world leaders commit to a phaseout of fossil fuels?

In 2015, the international community agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But it wasn’t until 2021, at the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, that a U.N. climate deal explicitly referenced fossil fuels — the biggest contributor to climate change — for the first time. In that conference’s final decision text, which sums up the outcomes of COP discussions, diplomats agreed to pursue a “phasedown of unabated coal power” and a “phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” Last year at COP27, diplomats repeated the same commitment, leaving this language mostly untouched.

At both negotiations, governments fiercely debated whether to agree to a phaseout or a phasedown of coal — a subtle difference with major policy implications. Some countries, including small island nations, advocated for a full “phaseout,” which refers to a complete displacement of coal with renewables. Oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia and coal-reliant economies like India instead pushed for a “phasedown,” which would dramatically reduce coal use but stop short of eliminating it entirely. Efforts to limit all fossil fuels — and not just coal — have also failed in the last two years.

These debates will likely continue at COP28, according to climate policy experts. A State Department official told reporters in November that whether it’s “phasedown,” “phaseout,” or a completely different phrase altogether, the final decision of the conference will likely have some reference to the transition away from fossil fuels. In a recent joint statement, the United States and China agreed to develop renewables to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil, and gas generation,” offering another potential wording option.

Adding to the complexity is disagreement over the use of the word “unabated.” Abated fossil fuels refers to coal, oil, and gas projects that use carbon capture technology, which the International Energy Agency recently characterized as “expensive and unproven at scale.” Wealthy nations including the U.S. and those in the European Union have called for a “phase out of unabated fossil fuels” — wording that Barbados, Finland, the Marshall Islands, and others have argued would leave the door open for “abated” fossil fuels. Those countries have instead called for a plain “phase out of fossil fuels.”

– Akielly Hu

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Will developing countries be paid reparations for the loss and damage wrought by climate change?

At COP27 last year, against the backdrop of devastating floods that left one-third of Pakistan underwater, countries united behind a landmark climate reparations fund. While it was a triumph decades in the making, negotiators ultimately did little more than agree to set up a fund to pay for the “loss and damage” suffered by the world’s most vulnerable countries, who have emitted relatively little carbon but are poised to suffer outsized climate impacts. This year, countries are gearing up to figure out the nitty-gritty details of putting the fund into action. 

“Loss and damage is the main event at COP, to be honest,” said Avinash Persaud, a climate envoy from Barbados.

Some of the key questions surrounding the fund began to get settled at a meeting of negotiators in Abu Dhabi earlier this month. The negotiators recommended that the World Bank host the fund and that countries that have polluted the most historically, such as the U.S., U.K., and European Union nations, be the primary donors to the fund. 

The recommendations did not please all parties, particularly developing nations who cited the World Bank’s history as a U.S.-aligned, bureaucratic institution that often favors loans over direct grants. A loan system defeats the purpose of a loss and damage fund, said Kishan Kumarsingh, head of multilateral environmental agreements for Trinidad and Tobago. 

“It should not be loans against which you have to pay interest because then you’re paying for your own loss and damage,” said Kumarsingh. 

Over the next two weeks, COP negotiators will decide whether to adopt the recommendations from the Abu Dhabi meeting. A U.S. State Department official indicated on a call with reporters earlier this month that this was likely. Negotiators are also likely to hash out which country will host the fund and take steps toward appointing a board. Other key points include when the fund will begin paying out, as well as how vulnerable countries will be prioritized for funding. Developed nations led by the United States are also looking to rope in high-emitting developing nations, like China, to contribute to the fund.

The success of the fund depends on how much money it’s able to raise. The global cost of loss and damage is expected to exceed $300 billion a year, and representatives for developing nations have called on wealthy nations to provide a minimum of $100 billion annually by 2030. The European Union has already pledged to make a “substantial” contribution. All eyes are on the U.S. to see if it’ll pony up.

– Siri Chilukuri

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Will a global carbon market save the Paris Agreement — or sink it?

For years, private companies have been using carbon markets to make progress toward their emissions reduction goals. When it’s too difficult to reduce their own climate pollution, they can buy credits equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide “removal” generated by activities like tree-planting — carbon that allegedly, if not for the credit, would have accumulated in the atmosphere.

Now, the United Nations is trying to create its own carbon market under the Paris Agreement, to help countries reach their individual emissions reduction targets. The stakes are high: According to one estimate, allowing countries to trade carbon credits could allow them to slash 50 percent more emissions at no additional cost. But at the same time, experts are wary of replicating the private markets’ many, many flaws — including insufficient rules and oversight to ensure that sequestered carbon doesn’t escape back into the atmosphere. Some observers have described the private sector’s carbon markets as “riddled with fraud.”

To craft a better system for U.N. member states, a group of experts has been working since 2021 on recommendations for the kinds of projects that should be allowed to generate carbon credits, and how their emissions reductions should be counted. The group finalized its recommendations on November 17, less than two weeks before COP28. Among them: a definition for removals; requirements for these removals to be monitored for “reversals,” in which they release their locked-up carbon; and what to do in case of a reversal.

Now, these proposals will be discussed by a small body of negotiators at COP28 and, if all goes according to plan, presented for approval by the larger group of countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement. There’s significant pressure for countries to at least reach a compromise; if not, the expert group will likely have to wait until COP29 to submit revised recommendations.

Even under the smoothest of circumstances, however, there are still other issues to be resolved before the U.N. carbon market becomes fully functional. Notably, countries need a registry capable of tracking carbon credits as they’re generated and traded. This may not materialize until 2024. Isa Mulder, a policy expert for the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, said it’s “unlikely” that any credits will be issued before 2025. 

Mulder also criticized the expert group’s recommendations for leaving too much up to “further guidance,” meaning it’s unclear whether they’ll adequately address some of the problems that have plagued existing carbon markets.

Pedro Martins Barata, associate vice president of carbon markets and private sector decarbonization for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said there won’t be a single moment — a “ribbon cutting,” as he put it — that brings the new carbon market to life, neither during COP28 nor afterward. Rather, COP28 negotiators will “get as far as possible,” he said — far enough, he hopes, for worthy carbon credit project developers to get the ball rolling.

– Joseph Winters

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Will negotiators link fossil fuel use to growing public health risks?

COP28 features an official “health day” — a first in the conference’s history — aimed at supporting “the mainstreaming of health in the climate agenda” by bringing together officials from a number of countries, including Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Kenya, and Egypt, to talk about the health consequences of a warming planet. The World Health Organization and the Wellcome Trust, the international philanthropic organization, are the main organizers of the event. 

The fact that health is appearing on the COP agenda at all is evidence that times have changed. According to Kristie L. Ebi, a climate researcher at the University of Washington who has attended every COP since 1997, a colleague told her that every person researching climate and health back then could fit in a phone booth.

That “was not as much of an exaggeration as it should have been,” Ebi said. But it’s different now, both on the international stage and in the research community. “It seems like everybody is getting into climate and health at the moment,” Ebi added. “We need the transformation, we need the attention.”

Like many other facets of the climate crisis, however, health still isn’t being treated with the urgency it deserves. A massive report published in mid-November said climate change is putting the health of billions of people around the world at risk. Weaning the globe off of its reliance on fossil fuels is the only real course of treatment for this diagnosis. Nevertheless, a draft of an official declaration on climate and health written by COP President al-Jaber, which is set to be signed by national ministers of health at COP28’s health day, doesn’t mention fossil fuels a single time.

Millions of health workers endorsed an open letter to al-Jaber in early November demanding negotiators commit to phasing out fossil fuels and exclude fossil fuel representatives from climate and health negotiations. They have done neither, and health researchers attending the conference this year say they are concerned that the day of health sidesteps meaningful action on the subject. 

“The sad thing is that time is running out,” said Ramon Lorenzo Luis Guinto, director of the planetary and global health program at St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine in the Philippines. He fears that negotiations in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates will serve up lukewarm takeaways that don’t include enforceable limits or actionable targets on fossil fuel use and production. “I think we in the health sector must not be naive that we are being used to make a potentially disastrous COP look good,” Guinto said.  

– Zoya Teirstein

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here are the 4 issues to watch at COP28 on Nov 29, 2023.

Humans eat a stunning amount of meat every year — some 800 billion pounds of it, enough flesh to fill roughly 28 million dump trucks. Our carnivorous cravings, particularly in industrialized, beef-guzzling countries like the United States, are one reason the planet is warming as fast as it is. Raising animals consumes a lot of land that would otherwise soak up carbon. Cows, sheep, and goats spew heat-trapping methane. And to grow the corn, soy, and other plants that those animals eat, farmers spray fertilizer that emits nitrous oxide, another potent planet-warming gas. 

For all those reasons, and many more, activists and scientists have called for people to eat less meat or abstain altogether. At last year’s United Nations climate conference in Egypt, activists chanted slogans like “Let’s be vegan, let’s be free.” At this year’s conference, which starts November 30, world leaders are expected to talk about ways to shift diets toward plant-based foods as a way to lower animal agriculture’s climate pollution, the source of 15 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.  

Cutting out meat can be an effective tool: The average vegan diet is linked to about one-quarter the greenhouse gas emissions of a meat-intensive one, according to a paper published in Nature in July. 

But what would happen if everyone actually stopped eating meat tomorrow?

“It would have huge consequences — a lot of them probably not anticipated,” said Keith Wiebe, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. 

Such a quick shift probably wouldn’t cause the sort of turmoil that would come if the planet immediately ditched fossil fuels. But still, the upshot could be tumultuous, upending economies, leaving people jobless, and threatening food security in places that don’t have many nutritious alternatives. 

Livestock accounts for about 40 percent of agricultural production in rich countries and 20 percent in low-income countries, and it’s vital — economically and nutritionally — to the lives of 1.3 billion people across the world, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. One-third of the protein and nearly one-fifth of the calories that people eat around the world come from animals. 

Researchers say the economic damage caused by the sudden disappearance of meat would fall disproportionately on low-income countries with agrarian economies, like Niger or Kenya, where farming and raising livestock are critical sources of income. Niger’s livestock industry makes up about 13 percent of the country’s gross domestic product; in the U.S., the entire agricultural system accounts for only around 5 percent. 

It’s tough to predict exactly what the economic shock would look like on a global level. There has been “relatively little” research on how phasing out meat would affect employment around the world, Wiebe said. “It’s an issue that deserves a lot more attention.” 

Millions of people would lose jobs, but demand for other sources of calories and protein might rise and offset some of those losses. Some workers might be drawn into agriculture to grow more crops like legumes. That shift in labor, some researchers hypothesize, could slow economic growth by pulling people out of more profitable industries. 

Still, the effects would vary across cultures, economies, and political systems, and they aren’t as clear-cut as, say, the amount of methane that would be saved if cows ceased to exist. “It depends on the species of livestock. It depends on the geographic location,” said Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist at the Pratt Institute, in New York City. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to talk in universal terms about addressing those kinds of things.” 

It’s easier to talk in broad terms about another challenge with getting rid of meat: nutrition. Eliminating livestock overnight would deprive many people of essential nutrients, especially in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,  where meat comprises a small but crucial sliver of the average person’s starch-heavy diet. Animal-based foods are high in vitamin B12, vitamin A, calcium, and iron. That’s why researchers say preserving access to meat, milk, and eggs is key to keeping people healthy in low- and middle-income countries right now, where nutritious plant-based options are harder to come by. 

And then there’s the issue of cultural damage. Taking away meat, according to Wilson Warren, a history professor at Western Michigan University, would do more than just deprive Americans of hot dogs and hamburgers and Italians of salami. 

“Historically, the way that most people understood animals was through farming and having close contact with their livestock,” said Warren, who’s also the author of Meat Makes People Powerful, a book about the global history of meat. “You get rid of that sort of close connection, [and] I envision people in some ways being even less environmentally in touch.” (Warren grapples with this idea in a self-published novel called Animeat’s End about a future world in which eating meat is a serious crime.) 

Many researchers agree that phasing out meat entirely, let alone immediately, isn’t an ideal solution to the climate crisis. It would be plenty, they say, to reduce consumption methodically and to focus on the countries that eat the most, particularly wealthy ones like the United States that have no shortage of alternatives.  

It might be easier for the average American, who eats about 220 pounds of red meat and poultry each year, to trade a daily hamburger for a bowl of lentils than for someone in rural sub-Saharan Africa, who eats 10 times less meat, to give up the occasional goat or beef stew for something less nutritious. Such a shift in beef-loving countries also might reduce heart disease and cancer linked to eating a lot of red and processed meat.   

Dutkiewicz suggested using guidelines established by the EAT-Lancet Commission, an international group of scientists who have designed a diet intended to give people the nutrients they need without destroying the planet. It consists of roughly 35 pounds of meat per year. Adopting that diet would require a drastic reduction of cows and chickens in countries like the United States, Australia, China, Brazil, and Argentina, and a slight increase in parts of Africa and South Asia. 

Gradually replacing meat with plants could have immense benefits for the planet. “It would be a huge net win for the environment,” Dutkiewicz said. By one estimate, a complete phaseout of meat over 15 years would cut as much as one-third of all methane emissions and two-thirds of all nitrous oxide emissions. Water use would fall drastically. Biodiversity loss would slow. Animal welfare advocates would be happy to see fewer animals packed into tight pens wallowing in their own poop awaiting slaughter. And there would be ample opportunity to rewild abandoned rangelands and pastures at a scale that would sequester a whole lot of carbon — as much as 550 gigatons, enough to give us a pretty good shot at keeping warming below catastrophic levels.

Given the complexities and pitfalls of a complete phaseout, researchers and advocates have pointed instead to a more modest goal: cutting meat production in half.  Replacing it with plant-based alternatives would lower agricultural emissions 31 percent by 2050, a recent study found. 

“It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach,” Raychel Santo, a food and climate researcher at the World Resources Institute, said in an email. 

The solution, in other words, lies somewhere between culling cows in Niger and gorging ourselves on factory-farmed flesh.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What would happen if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow? on Nov 29, 2023.

Diplomats, academics, and activists from around the globe will gather yet again this week to try to find common ground on a plan for combating climate change. This year’s COP, as the event is known, marks the 28th annual meeting of the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More than 70,000 people are expected to descend on Dubai for the occasion. 

In addition to marathon negotiations and heated discussions, the fortnight-long assembly will see all manner of marches, rallies, speakers, advocacy, and lobbying. But, aside from fanfare, it remains unclear how much COP28 will, or can, achieve. While there have been signs that the United States and China could deepen their decarbonization commitments, countries have struggled to decide how to compensate developing countries for climate-related losses. Meanwhile, global emissions and temperatures continue climbing at an alarming rate. 

That has left some to wonder: Have these annual gatherings outlived their usefulness?

To some, the yearly get-togethers continue to be a critical centerpiece for international climate action, and any tweaks they might need lie mostly around the edges. “They aren’t perfect,” said Tom Evans, a policy analyst for the nonprofit climate change think tank E3G. “[But] they are still important and useful.” While he sees room for improvements — such as greater continuity between COP summits and ensuring ministerial meetings are more substantive — he supports the overall format. “We need to try and find a way to kind of invigorate and revitalize without distracting from the negotiations, which are key.”

Others say the summits no longer sufficiently meet the moment. “The job in hand has changed over the years,” said Rachel Kyte, a climate diplomacy expert and dean emerita of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is among those who believe the annual COP needs to evolve. “Form should follow function,” she said. “And we are using an old form.” 

Durwood Zaelke, co-founder and former president of the Center for International Environmental Law, was more blunt. “You can’t say that an agreement that lets a problem grow into an emergency is doing a good job,” he said. “It’s not.”

Established in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international treaty that aims to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Some 198 countries have ratified the Convention, which has seen some significant wins. 

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol marked the first major breakthrough, and helped propel international action toward reducing emissions — though only some of the commitments are binding, and the United States is notably absent from the list signatories. The 2015 Paris Agreement laid out an even more robust roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with a target of holding global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and “pursuing efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). 

Although the path to that future is narrowing, it is still within reach, according to the International Energy Agency. But, some experts say, relying primarily on once-a-year COP meetings to get there may no longer be the best approach.

“Multilateral engagement is not the issue anymore,” Christiana Figueres said at a conference earlier this year. She was the executive secretary of the Convention when the Paris agreement was reached, and said that while important issues that need to be ironed out on the international level — especially for developing countries — the hardest work must now be done domestically. 

“We have to redesign the COPs…. Multilateral attention, frankly, is distracting governments from doing their homework at home,” she said. At another conference a month later, she added, “Honestly, I would prefer 90,000 people stay at home and do their job.”

Kyte agrees and thinks it’s time to take at least a step back from festival-like gatherings and toward more focused, year-round, work on the crisis at hand. “The UN has to find a way to break us into working groups to get things done,” she said. “And then work us back together into less of a jamboree and more of a somber working event.”

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The list of potential topics for working groups to tackle is long, from ensuring a just transition to reigning in the use of coal. But one area that Zaelke points to as a possible exemplar for a sectoral approach is reducing emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.

“Methane is the blow torch that’s pushing us from global warming to global boiling,” he said. “It’s the single biggest and fastest way to turn down the heat.”

To tackle the methane problem, Zaelke points to another international agreement as a model: the Montreal Protocol. Adopted in 1987, that treaty was aimed at regulating chemicals that deplete the atmosphere’s ozone layer, and it has been a resounding success. The pollutants have been almost completely phased out and the ozone layer is on track to recover by the middle of the century. The compact was expanded in 2016 to include another class of chemicals, hydrochlorofluorocarbons.

“It’s an under-appreciated treaty, and it’s an under-appreciated model,” said Zaelke, noting that it included legally binding measures that the Paris agreement does not. “You could easily come to the conclusion we need another sectoral agreement for methane.”

Zaelke could see this tactic applying to other sectors as well, such as shipping and agriculture. Some advocates — including at least eight governments and the World Health Organisation — have also called for a “Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty”, said Harjeet Singh, the global engagement director for the initiative. Like Zaelke, Kyte, and others, he envisions such sectoral pushes as running complementary to the main Convention process — a framework that, while flawed, he believes can continue to play an important role.

“The amount of time we spend negotiating each and every paragraph, line, comma, semicolon is just unimaginable and a colossal waste of time,” he said of the annual events. But he adds the forum is still crucial, in part because every country enjoys an equal amount of voting power, no matter its size or clout.

“I don’t see any other space which is as powerful as this to deliver climate justice,” he said. “We need more tools and more processes, but we cannot lose the space.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why some experts say COPs are ‘distracting’ and need fixing on Nov 28, 2023.