Home ›› 09 Nov 2021 ›› Editorial
Imagine being a farmer, pastoralist or fisher in a low-income country. You’re likely already struggling to provide for your family. You have no insurance, no savings to speak of and no social safety only 1 in 5 people of the population in low-income countries is covered by social safety net programs, according to the World Bank.Your well-being may be linked directly to land and water. Your collateral is your boat, your livestock or your next harvest. And your children’s well-being is completely dependent on making a good harvest, selling healthy livestock or catch of the amount and quality of fish. It took the world a while to wake up to the devastation of climate change. In the 1990s, primary focus was on the melting of ice caps in and its effect on species like polar bears. There is no question that these deserve our ongoing attention. But in the early 2000s, a new field of climate-science research emerged. It explored the impact of extreme climate on the overall habitat such as floods, heatwaves, droughts and storms. Climate change, it became increasingly clear, is affecting not just landscapes – but world poverty.
In 2010, the United Nations declared that “climate change is inextricably linked to poverty and hunger “. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s poor living in rural areas count on natural resources such as forests, lakes and oceans for their livelihoods, the organization noted. And climate change is playing havoc with those resources. Here’s how climate change is impacting families and communities in some of the world’s poorest countries today:
n Prolonged droughts devastate food supplies and dry up water sources.
n Withered crops and starving animals destroy families’ livelihoods.
n Hurricanes, floods and landslides flatten or sweep away people’s homes.
n Strife can occur within communities, as families compete for available arable land.
n Families become separated, as relatives relocate to search for work.
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, is the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference It is being held in Glasgow , Scotland, United Kingdom, between 31 October and 12 November 2021, under the co-presidency of the United Kingdom and Italy. The conference is the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the and the third meeting of the parties to the Paris agreement . This conference is the first time that parties are expected to commit to enhanced ambition since COP21. Parties are required to carry out every five years, as outlined in the Paris agreement, a process colloquially known as the 'ratchet mechanism'. The venue for the conference is the SEC Center in Glasgow. Originally due to be held in November 2020 at the same venue, the event was postponed for twelve months because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries submitted pledges called nationally determined contribution , to limit their greenhouse emissions . Under the framework of the Paris Agreement, each country is expected to submit enhanced nationally determined contributions every five years, to ratchet up ambition to mitigate climate change. When the Paris Agreement was signed at the 2015 UN climate change, the conference of 2020 was set to be the first iteration of the ratchet mechanism. Even though the 2020 conference was postponed to 2021 due to pandemic, dozens of countries still had not updated their pledges by early October 2021.
In an interview shortly before the 2021 COP26 conference, climate-change activist Greta Thunberg, asked how optimistic she was that the conference could achieve anything, responded "Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say 'we'll do this and we'll do this, and we will put our forces together and achieve this', and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don't really have a big impact. We can have as many COPs as we want, but nothing real will come out of it. Queen Elizabeth II voiced similar concerns in a private conversation overheard via a hot mic, saying "It's really irritating when they talk, but they don't do." Glasgow has made preparations for the largest protests seen in Scotland since anti Iraq war March 2003 from extinction rebellion and others. Over two million people are expected to march in solidarity worldwide.
Various “extensions” to the UNFCCC treaty have been negotiated during these COPs to establish legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries, and to define an enforcement mechanism.
These include the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which defined emission limits for developed nations to be achieved by 2012; and the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, in which all countries of the world agreed to step up efforts to try and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, and boost climate action financing. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted on 11 December 1997. Owing to a complex ratification process, it entered into force on 16 February 2005. Currently, there are 192 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. In Doha, Qatar, on 8 December 2012, the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol was adopted for a second commitment period, starting in 2013 and lasting until 2020. However, the Doha Amendment has not yet entered into force; a total of 144 instruments of acceptance are required for entry into force of the amendment.
New commitments for Annex I Parties to the Kyoto Protocol who agreed to take on commitments in a second commitment period from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2020;
A revised list of GHG to be reported on by Parties in the second commitment period; and
Amendments to several articles of the Kyoto Protocol which specifically referenced issues pertaining to the first commitment period and which needed to be updated for the second commitment period.
The Agreement sets long-term goals to guide all nations substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 degrees;
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty. It entered into force on 4 November 2016. Today, 192 Parties (191 countries plus the European Union) have joined the Paris Agreement. The Agreement includes commitments from all countries to reduce their emissions and work together to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and calls on countries to strengthen their commitments over time. The Agreement provides a pathway for developed nations to assist developing nations in their climate mitigation and adaptation efforts while creating a framework for the transparent monitoring and reporting of countries’ climate goals.
So, here’s where COP26 gets interesting: during the conference, among other issues, delegates will be aiming to finalise the ‘Paris Rulebook’, or the rules needed to implement the Agreement. This time they will need to agree on common timeframes for the frequency of revision and monitoring of their climate commitments.
Basically, Paris set the destination, limiting warming well below two degrees, (ideally 1.5) but Glasgow, is the last chance to make it a reality. UN chief António Guterres bluntly calls it “climate catastrophe”, one that it is already being felt to a deadly degree in the most vulnerable parts of the world like sub-Saharan Africa and Small Island States, lashed by rising sea levels.
Bangladesh plans to present its “climate prosperity plan” aimed at mitigating the effects of global warming on economic development at the forthcoming UN climate talks in Glasgow, a Bangladeshi climate official says. The plan envisions boosting renewable energy, making agriculture more resistant to climate shocks and finding solutions in nature to challenges posed by global warming, such as restoring mangroves to protect coasts from cyclones.
With most of its 160 million people tightly packed into low-lying areas along the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is considered especially prone to flooding, extreme weather and the loss of farmland to rising ocean levels. Relying on its own resources and with support from the international community, Bangladesh could still make the Ganges River delta that dominates much of the country prosperous,
The writer is MD and CEO of Community Bank
