Politics Plus

COP 26 Day 9 | ‘Climate change is sexist’

Euronews Green delivers a Special COP26 email to my mailbox every day during the two weeks it is running (01-12 November 2021). I’ll publish it in its entirety for those who are interested. This is the sixth in the series.

Today’s takeaway

On Gender Day, COP26 turned its focus to the disproportionate climate impacts suffered by women and girls across the world.

“Climate change is sexist,” a US government official put it on Tuesday. 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change are women and children, according to UNFCC.

“But women and girls are also leading efforts to tackle climate change in communities around the world,” said COP26 chairman Alok Sharma as he outlined pledges for gender-responsive climate finance.

The puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian girl known as Little Amal made the journey to Glasgow to “represent all girls who could not be here,” at COP26, said Samoan activist Brianna Fruean as she opened the Gender Day lead event with Amal.

Meanwhile, the hard work on the summit’s cover decision continued in negotiation rooms. The UK presidency said it will publish a first draft of the summit’s final decision overnight. New texts have been tabled on time frames, transparency, finance and adaptation so far.

“We still have a mountain to climb,” warned Sharma as the clock ticked to strike a deal that will help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

New forecasts released on Tuesday suggest the world is still far off that number. Think tank Climate Action Tracker said current climate policies put us on track to a scary 2.7 degrees Celsius warming – or 2.4 C if all governments met their 2030 targets.

If you weren’t able to follow along on Monday, here are five takeaways from Day 8.

At a glance

Five reasons climate change affects women more than men

Women and girls experience violence and a lack of access to education as a direct result of the climate crisis.

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What is land inequality and how does it threaten women?

Land inequality is directly threatening 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people including women, according to a recent report.
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COP26: Why has a speech by Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister gone viral?

Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe spoke to Euronews after a video of his speech at COP26 showing him standing knee-deep in seawater took the internet by storm.
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Social exclusive

COP 26 Day 3 | Who’s paying for it?

Euronews Green delivers a Special COP26 email to my mailbox every day during the two weeks it is running (01-12 November 2021). I’ll publish it in its entirety for those who are interested. This is the second in the series.

Today’s takeaway

With world leaders gone and their big speeches delivered, COP26 negotiators turned their focus to money on Tuesday.

Cash pledges from both governments and the private sector poured in as COP26 Finance Day wrapped up.

The UK presidency said that wealthy countries would deliver on their promise to provide $100 billion a year (€86 billion) to finance climate-related projects in the developing world, after failing to meet the initial 2020 target.

And in one of today’s most discussed announcements, the world’s largest financial players pledged a massive $130 trillion (​​€112 trillion) of private capital to decarbonise the economy, while the UK vowed to become “the world’s first net-zero aligned financial centre.”

But climate activists were calling for scrutiny of investors’ motives, warning that the same financial players who profited from fossil fuels were now posing as green champions.

If you weren’t able to follow along on Tuesday, here are the six key takeaways from day 2 of COP26.

At a glance

Don’t blame the climate crisis on India and China, campaigners urge

The Indian Prime Minister’s announcement that the country will reach net zero emissions by 2070 has been met with mixed reactions from COP-watchers. But environmental campaigners say it is “deeply unfair” to blame middle-income countries for the climate crisis.
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What is the ‘carbon budget’, the latest term coming out of COP26 talks?

“Carbon budgets” is one of the most-often mentioned terms at the COP26 talks in Glasgow, but many are wondering who set them and what role they play in fighting climate change.
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These countries are forcing banks to reveal their climate impact

New Zealand has introduced a new law that forces its financial institutions to disclose their climate impact. These other countries have already taken similar steps
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Social exclusive

It’s been over a year since I posted under this heading and I always edited the text I based the article upon to prevent Politics Plus from getting into copyright trouble. This time, however, I thought the full text was too important to cut down and to be honest I didn’t have the time to do all the editing either.

So I’ve copied the full editorial of Euronews’ The Briefing. As yet there’s no link for this article to Euronews, probably because it is still in the very early hours of the morning in Europe.

COP26 is not about saving the planet. It’s about saving civilisation 

By Euronews Brussels bureau

All eyes are on Glasgow.

World leaders are days away from descending upon the Scottish city to attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). As global temperatures quickly approach the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels, the window for opportunity to fight climate change is desperately closing.

For the next two weeks, negotiators will discuss how to transform our industries, energy systems, financial institutions, food chains, means of transport, urban areas and even societal structures. Do we still have time left to save the planet?

“The planet has been around for four and a half billion years. She was perfectly happy before we ever got here, and she will be perfectly happy if we’re idiots enough to pull the ejector seat and leave.”

These are the blunt words of Christiana Figueres, one of the main architects behind the 2015 Paris Agreement. The deal is today considered a monumental achievement but its rulebook still requires further fleshing out – one of the main objectives of COP26.

“This is truly not about saving the planet – it’s about saving something that is incredibly unique in the evolution of the planet,” Figureres told our colleagues from Euronews Green.

“A very, very short time period – 12,000 years – has allowed for the human species to flourish, and build the ‘civilisation’ that we have now,” she said. “If there’s anything that we want to rescue from that, then we have to be able to get back to a stable environment.”

After 15 years representing Costa Rica, Figueres was made the UN climate secretary in July 2010. Her appointment came in the wake of the failed Copenhagen Summit (COP15), where talks had fallen apart without any meaningful commitments. Figueres spent the next few years reviving negotiations, eventually paving the way for COP21 in 2015, when the legally-binding Paris Accord was adopted by 196 parties.

“[It] was not an agreement by consensus,” explains Figueres, “[it] was an agreement by unanimous decision, which has never happened before in the UN. It was the one agreement that was unanimous, and they all decided that they would go to net-zero by 2050.”

Activists have frequently criticised the Paris text for its alleged lack of ambition: its core goal is to keep global warming below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, in line with pre-industrial levels. Science today indicates the effects of 2°C will be already catastrophic.

“I think the Paris Agreement is still out there on the horizon as being incredibly ambitious because it [does] three things: It establishes the finish line, which is net-zero by 2050. It establishes the fact that there are very different starting points for each country, and each country will travel differently at a different speed. And then to establish the 2°C, with an aspirational 1.5°C. It’s actually quite futuristic!”

The upcoming COP26 is the next major diplomatic milestone in meeting the Paris goals and – as August’s IPCC report clearly laid out – we’re a long way off target. Having worked in diplomacy for many years, Figueres is closely familiar with the challenges that negotiators will face in Glasgow but still advises patience and positivity.

“It’s precisely because of reports like [the IPCC one]. Precisely because of the melting of the ice in Greenland. Precisely because of all the destruction that we have seen this summer that we have to stay stubborn and optimistic,” she says, expressing “anger” at her own generation’s idleness.

“Our inability and our stubbornness of not engaging in climate action in a timely fashion is what has brought us here today. No longer facing climate change, but facing a climate emergency – climate chaos!”

The situation has turned so critical, so frantic and urgent, that many of us are losing hope. Reading the news, one tends to believe our leaders will never have the courage to rise to the occasion and take the decisive action that is needed to curb emissions.

In an emotional moment of the interview, Figueres explained how much she can relate to that feeling of cynicism and hopelessness. In her view, there’s a bus coming towards our children, and we have no choice but to throw ourselves in front of it.

“We basically have two options. Either we can sit back and say ‘okay, well… you know we’re too late.’ Or we can say ‘oh my gosh, we’re totally running out of time and we have to stand up!’” she says.

“And in my book, we don’t have any other option.”