The United Nations Climate Change Conference began in Egypt with a warning that our earth is “sending a despotic signal.” Climate change is a global crisis that does not discriminate among races adhere to borders, and separate the rich from the poor. It affects everyone and global solidarity is needed to tackle it with shared responsibilities, resources, and technologies. Therefore, climate solidarity is no longer a matter of contribution or compensation rather it has become a sheer commitment to humanity and civilization. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish. It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact,” the UN Secretary-General told over 100 world leaders reunited for the first official plenary of the UN Climate Change Conference.
However, when at no other point in human history has a more urgent cause than tackling climate change, why it is taking so many years to materialize climate commitment? Besides, World Government agreed in 2015 during a UN summit in France to try to limit the average global average temperature increase to 1.6 c, a deal dubbed the Paris Climate Agreement that was seen as a breakthrough in international climate action. The commitment has still not been met, generating mistrust and reluctance among some developing nations to accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions. In the absence of vigorous action, rousing speeches, and uplifting words on climate change are merely hollow talk.
Global climate solidarity is at stake due to the global financial and geopolitical crisis. Inflationary pressures, and food and fuel problems have impacted all countries, and developed countries to abandon their climate commitments. They are now revising their previous climate commitments. The practice of Climate Solidarity has remained a further illusive reality. Against such a backdrop, immediate action is a crying need for pressing concerns including mitigation, adaptation, funding, and climate justice for loss and harm.
Decades of Broken Promises Haunt in the Cop 27
Climate change has exacerbated floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, and storms, affecting millions of people in 2022 alone. According to a report published in 2021 by the International Institution for Environment and Development (IIED), the 46 least-developed countries vulnerable to the impacts of climate change received less than 3 percent of the funds they need to adapt to climate change. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, wealthy nations promised to jointly mobilize USD 100 billion per year by 2020 for poor countries to pursue climate action. At COP21 in Paris, the yearly commitment target of USD 100 billion was extended until 2025. Last year, during cop 26, the countries committed to releasing the funds as early as possible to fund the adaptation measures in the least developed countries Unfortunately, that goal has yet to be met.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), developed nations gave and mobilized USD 83.3 billion in climate funding in 2020. This grant was allocated 58% for mitigation, 34% for adaptation, and 7% for cross-cutting initiatives. Consequently, the least developed and developing nations are concerned about how wealthy countries can reach the USD 100 billion objective and how climate money would be managed beyond 2025. Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh asserted that “I’m calling for today is action — action to fulfill the promises made at COP26 to assist nations like mine in facing the harshest realities of a warming planet”. This year in Cop 27, many developing countries have pledged the establishment of a ‘loss and damage fund that could disperse cash to countries struggling to recover from disasters. However, amid cascading risks and overlapping crises, multilateralism is facing a challenge due to geopolitical situations, spiraling food, and energy prices, and a growing public finance and public debt crisis in many countries already struggling to contend with the devastating impacts of the pandemic, all of which demand urgent attention. So, when climate change demands collective action at the global level, to keep the planet stable, the countries have an all-time low in terms of their ability to collectively act together. Therefore, climate solidarity remains just as rhetoric for the most vulnerable countries of the world.
Who is Accountable?
World climate forums are tasked with greening the global economy and helping the poor and climate-vulnerable nations, who have barely contributed to the problem. Climate-vulnerable countries are victims of emissions by developed nations as the countries have yet to reach a level of industrialization significant enough to impact climate change. Politicians in strong nations are jockeying to transfer responsibility and dodge culpability for the catastrophic devastation that is now engulfing humanity. The European Union and the United Kingdom are together responsible for 29 percent. And along with the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Japan, the Global North as a group is collectively responsible for no less than 92 percent. Meanwhile, the Global South – the entire continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America – is responsible for only 8 percent of excess emissions. The average per capita consumption of power in Europe is 1.6 MWh, whereas, in Bangladesh, it is only 323 kWh. Sadly, the impacts of climate breakdown fall disproportionately on the countries of the Global South, which suffer the vast majority of climate change-induced damages and mortality within their borders, and where extreme weather is already causing crop failure, food insecurity, and mass displacement. The reactions of the developed world are confined to condoling tweets and minimal aid packages.
However, the climate crisis is not bound by borders and the whole world has to face its atrocities. Earlier, there was a possibility to combat climate change collectively but the geopolitical crisis and collapse of the global financial order have overshadowed climate action, making the developed countries more reluctant to fulfill their commitment towards mother earth. The Conference of the parties, therefore, isn’t incumbent to implement but raises a false beacon of hope among the victims. However, developed nations must keep in their mind that apparently the developing world may face the worst repercussions regarding climate change but the developed world can’t avert the atrocities in the long run.
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Planet vs. Plastics” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.
As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook, which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.
Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.
Felix Richter is a Data Journalist
This article was first published in the Statista.com.
Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
Edward Armstrong is a postdoctoral research fellow, University of Helsinki
A new draft text on global stocktake has been published at the UN climate summit, COP28 UAE, on Wednesday morning. While the draft text does not contain the words “phase out”, it includes reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The text published by the UN’s climate body calls on parties to accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions worldwide with a focus on reducing methane emissions by 2030. “We all want to get the most ambitious outcome possible,” Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 Director-General, said on Tuesday.
The text, published early Wednesday, does not specifically refer to oil, but mentions the need to ‘phase-down’ coal. It says that it recognises the need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to global efforts.
Among those efforts it recognises the need to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by the same date. It also recognises the need to accelerate the phase-down of coal and accelerate towards net zero energy systems, utilising zero or low carbon fuels by mid century.
While the document does not mention oil or combustion engines, it does recognises the need for accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles. It also recognises the need to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
Finance specifics
On the subject of finance, the document said developed countries should continue to take the lead in mobilising climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.
Such mobilisation of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts, the text said. It may provide small comfort to campaigners from developing countries who implored Parties to begin the phase out of fossil fuels and provide vastly improved access to funding for renewables.
The document highlights the persistent gap and challenges in technology development and transfer and the uneven pace of adoption of climate technologies around the world.
It further urges Parties to address these barriers and strengthen cooperative action, including with non-Party stakeholders, particularly with the private sector, to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing technologies, the fostering of innovation and the development and transfer of new technologies.
It also emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by many developing country Parties in accessing climate finance and encourages further efforts, including by the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, to simplify access to such finance, in particular for those developing country Parties that have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States.
