La Jornada: Growing Climate Injustice

Dr..

From 5 to 15 June The subsidiary bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) met in Bonn, in preparation for the 28th World Conference to be held next December in the United Arab Emirates. Although there were many points of tension, discussions from day one were polarized around the demand for countries in the Global South to put climate finance on the agenda (to which the Nordic countries should contribute the most) and the proposal from Europe, the US and others. High manufacturing to discuss a global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation program without financing being on the agenda.

When industrialized countries talk about mitigation – which in the language of climate change is understood as synonymous with reducing greenhouse gas emissions – they are in fact referring to continuing to emit the same or more emissions, but they are supposed to Compensate for its emissions net zero, with technologies such as carbon capture and storage, geoengineering and/or through carbon markets, all measures that do not reduce, and may even increase, gas emissions. The same countries also control patents for renewable technologies and in no way suggest a reduction in energy consumption or demand in the global North, although they require, in fact, that other countries do so.

It took more than two decades before the climate change agreement recognized the need to repair the losses and damages caused by climate change to countries that did not cause it, but there is no funding for this. The Nordic countries have not fulfilled even the timid commitment they made in Copenhagen in 2015 crowd $100 billion annually in inclusive climate financing. I confirm they used the verb crowd Because they have not committed to actual contributions, but instead it could be loans, private investments with which they get more profits, renaming development aid (which has been committed before) into climate finance, renaming disaster aid and even businesses that Generate more carbon like climate finance. .

It is dangerous because it is the countries of the South that have not caused climate change that suffer the most and need support for adaptation, prevention and repair of the effects in order to advance a socially just transition towards economies that do not generate more. carbon by covering the basic needs of their countries. A demand is not charity, but justice.

A study published this month in the Scientific Journal nature It is estimated that the industrialized countries will owe more than 170 trillion (million million) dollars in compensation for the damages caused to the countries of the south due to climate change until 2050. If the countries of the north reach that year what they call emissions net zero As many of them say, they would have occupied most of the available atmospheric space anyway so as not to cause a global increase in global temperature by more than 1.5 degrees, and to take over the space of other countries (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01130-8).

Added to this is that historically, the industrialized nations of the Global North have emitted more than 90 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Most of the remaining 10 percent is divided between two countries that extract large amounts of oil: the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The rest of the world has not exported anything and is not exporting anything. About 38 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases are emitted annually. The main historical and per capita emitter is the United States, with 4 percent of the world’s population using 25 percent of the energy. The current largest emitter by total volume is China, but it lags far behind in per capita emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that for a minimum of 1.5 degrees of warming, only a maximum of 480 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or equivalent emissions would be left.

The average temperature has risen 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels and this warming is causing the climate crisis we are experiencing. It may not seem like much, but every tenth of a degree of global increase means serious imbalances in the climate system, leading to the destruction of ecosystems and the increase of extreme weather events with massive human impacts, very uneven in the world due to the vulnerability of the poorest people.

Another study, in turn, analyzes model assumptions used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to calculate future emissions scenarios (Integrated Assessment Models, or IAM, for their acronym) and estimates how much we need to reduce until 2050. It found that these models are based on where the Nordic countries will continue to smoke. claiming far more than those of the South, though having a much smaller population, which reproduces and affirms the present world injustice (https://osf.io/p46ty).

The demand from countries of the South to discuss climate finance is more than fair, due to the large amount of accumulated social, environmental and climate debt, and because of the expected allocation of airspace called mitigation of the industrialized countries it follows.

* ETC group researcher