The world is skidding even further off course in limiting climate change. Now, negotiators are meeting to hammer out the arcane, complicated details of the world’s best effort to get back on track. For the 25th time. And it will shape the future of global action on climate change.
The twenty-fifth session of the Conference of the Parties, a.k.a. COP25, is an annual meeting of all the parties almost every country in the world concerning the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UNFCCC hashed out the Paris agreement in 2015 and its goal is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.
At COP25, negotiators are aiming to cement the rules by which countries will individually and collectively curb greenhouse gas emissions. This year, the meeting is in Madrid, Spain, and it comes at a time when global greenhouse gas emissions are at a record high and climate change activists are angrier than ever about the lack of action.
Many world leaders, however, are distracted. The COP25 venue was moved from Santiago, Chile, to Madrid after protests rocked the Chilean city in October, sending diplomats and activists scrambling. The meeting was moved to Santiago after the original host, Brazil, backed out when a new right-wing government took power last year.
Meanwhile, France is facing a general strike; the United Kingdom is having a general election this week; Bolivia, home to 7 percent of the Amazon rainforest, a major reservoir of carbon, saw its previous government ousted in a military coup. The Brazilian Amazon, which accounts for 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest’s area, saw its highest rate of deforestation in a decade this year. Widespread protests are also underway in Lebanon and Iraq.
China, the world’s largest emitter, is dealing with ongoing protests in Hong Kong. And the United States, the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, is backing out of the Paris agreement altogether.
For all its flaws that it isn’t binding, that countries set their own goals, that there’s no enforcement the Paris agreement remains the best international framework to fight climate change. And yet its goals of limiting warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, with a more ambitious target of limiting warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, are slipping further out of reach. Scientists warned last year that the world may have as little as 10 years to stay on course to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius goalposts. And some of the critical details of the Paris accord remain unresolved.
Today, the world is set to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels than is consistent with a 1.5-degree pathway, said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the start of the meeting last week. But the scientific community is also telling us that the roadmap to stay below 1.5 degrees is still within reach.
That’s made COP25 a high-stakes negotiation to place the world on track to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change. But thorny disputes about the rules of the Paris agreement that derailed previous meetings will have to be resolved in Madrid or else the accord risks falling apart.
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