No cop outs at COP27, please
● COP27 begins in Egypt today and hopes are high that South Africa’s voice will be heard.
According to forestry, fisheries & environmental affairs minister Barbara Creecy, a key issue that needs addressing is developed countries maintaining commitments made thus far.
At a recent briefing, she also emphasised “just transition”, meaning South Africa must tackle climate justice in a way that leads to equal sharing of benefits and risks.
Creecy has thrown her weight behind a loss and damage fund, whereby developed nations (the biggest polluters) would create a purse to assist less developed countries that have not caused as much damage, but suffer the consequences of the crisis more acutely than their developed counterparts. There will also be keen interest in details about the $8.5bn (about R155bn) just energy transition investment plan approved by the cabinet in South Africa, and how it will be funded. This to become less reliant on coal and transition towards clean energy.
An online event organised by the Pulitzer Center this week highlighted how the catastrophe affects every aspect of life and how this needs to be considered during COP27, as solutions are urgent.
Journalists shared stories of what they had seen on the ground and the impact on people’s lives.
Time magazine’s senior international climate and environment correspondent Aryn Baker said a major problem as temperatures rise will be outdoor workers, specifically those in agriculture.
“To protect workers from heat, you need water, shade and rest. The human body is adaptable, but if you work in heat with no chance to recover, it is not possible,” Baker said.
Affording rest would mean “you’d have to triple your workforce, because if someone worked for 15 minutes and then recovered for 45”, productivity would drop.
According to Tim McDonnel, a climate crisis reporter in Cairo, Egypt, the loss and damage fund, something “the Egyptian presidency is pushing for”, should be high on the agenda.
As diplomats and world leaders head to the annual UN climate summit, there is renewed focus on the long-running dispute about who should pay for the devastation brought by rising temperatures.
Speeches and negotiations will call for wealthier polluters to take the blame for the damage suffered by low emitters.
Ambassador Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s chief climate negotiator, said last month: “There’s a high possibility it will be on the agenda, based on the outcomes of discussions and deliberations that happened in the past month or so.”
Also under the spotlight is climate migration. Commenting on this, London-based documentary photographer and writer Susan Schulman said even in the context of climate migration, people seldom cited it as the reason for their departure from home.
“How do you distinguish between insecurity and climate change, and how do you apportion migration to climate migration in a context of insecurity? People don’t speak about climate. That is not what is on their minds,” she said.
In her work she has seen this in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Chad: “Experts describe how climate is influencing membership of illegal military organisations.”
She found rural people who are vulnerable to the climate crisis and face a bleak future as their dependence on crops is threatened are drawn to joining illegal military organisations.
Steven Lawry, research director at the Center for International Forestry Research, said the idea of “stewardship” is growing and should be emphasised at COP27.
“A steward is the person in past times who would have looked after the home or the house. Today, as we think of it in terms of natural resources”, it needs to be emphasised that “our wellbeing as humans depends on the wellbeing of the environment. We look after the environment and it looks after us,” he said.
An international study released by the University of Melbourne this week, however, demonstrated how complicated stewardship can be.
The study is the first to calculate that countries collectively need 1.2-billion hectares of land to fulfil the promises laid out in their official climate plans for carbon-capture tactics such as tree planting. This would “gobble up land desperately needed for food production and nature protection”, according to the authors, led by Kate Dooley, who added that this could encroach on land belonging to indigenous people, “whose land rights are found to be critical to reducing climate change due to their stewardship of forests”.