COP27: protection of the Amazon, key issue at climate change conference

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27), being held in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, entered its second week of talks. The first drafts of the final agreement are already circulating among the representatives of the participating delegations and, at the same time, expectations are growing regarding the decisions, mainly political, to be reached in the coming days.

For Latin America, the announcements to protect the Amazon have gained relevance in this COP27. “We are going to put an end to the degradation process that our tropical forests are undergoing”, said the president-elect of Brazil, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, during the Charter of the Amazon event in which he participated on Wednesday, November 16. Lula da Silva will also participate in the International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change.

The Brazilian president announced the creation of a ministry of indigenous peoples in Brazil and proposed that COP30, in 2025, be held in a state – Amazonas or Pará – in the Brazilian Amazon. “It is important that it be in the Amazon. It is important that the people who defend the Amazon, the people who defend the climate, know what the region is like up close.”

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Lula da Silva’s announcements at COP27, on the position Brazil will take to confront climate change and protect the Amazon, have added to the prominence that the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela have had in this conference.

One day after COP27 began, on November 7, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, gave an energetic speech in which he stated that “overcoming the climate crisis implies stopping the consumption of oil and coal, and this stop consuming implies a profound transformation of the economy”. The Colombian president presented a decalogue in which he announced, among other things, a fund of 200 million dollars per year, for 20 years, to protect the Amazon rainforest located in Colombian territory.

Petro also shared a panel with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who referred to the responsibility “we South Americans have to stop the destruction of the Amazon and initiate a coordinated, efficient, conscious and active recovery process”.

Topics such as the responsibility of industrialized countries to assume the losses and damages to the most vulnerable nations; the reduction of fossil fuel consumption; the need to stop the deforestation of forests and, in particular, of the Amazon; and the financing to face climate change have been present during the first week of the conference being held in Egypt.

“We are on a road to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” said the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Antonio Guterres, in his opening speech at COP27. With a tone of extreme concern and, at times, even indignation, Guterres called for a “historic pact” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve the goal established in the Paris Agreement of not exceeding 2 degrees Celsius of temperature increase and, preferably, maintaining the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, although the latest global reports point to the fact that we are on our way to surpassing that figure.

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One such report was released on Friday, November 11 by the Global Carbon Project, amidst the anticipation of U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech at COP27. The document revealed that carbon emissions have not been reduced this 2022, on the contrary, according to this study, CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions from fossil fuels are expected to increase by 1% this year compared to 2021. According to this report, by 2022 the global figure will be 36.6 billion tons of CO2.

The Amazon in the climate debate

An important issue for South American countries, and for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is the Amazon, an ecosystem that is also essential as a global climate regulator. “It is the largest carbon sink on the planet,” adds Alicia Guzman, co-director of Stand.earth’s Amazon Program.

Guzman explains that the conversation on the Amazon has been emerging as a key issue in this COP27. “What we are experiencing at the Amazon level, and on the part of governments, is precisely a work that has been constant during the last two years,” says Guzman and mentions the 80 to 25 Initiative -protection of 80% of the Amazon by 2025- approved in September 2021, which has been positioning itself thanks to the participation of indigenous peoples and some governments.

Although she mentions that there is still no regional pact to address this ecosystem, Guzman hopes that the attendance of Brazil’s president-elect, Lula da Silva, at COP27 will mark a change in the talks on the Amazon ecosystem, which includes nine South American countries: “It is expected that Brazil will once again occupy that position of leadership in the climate conversation, since any announcement Brazil makes for the Amazon has preponderance for the entire region”.

Brazil’s former environment minister, Marina Silva, present at COP27, has said that the fight against deforestation will be “a strategic priority” in Lula da Silva’s new government.

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The Amazon Viva Report, presented on November 8 at the COP by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), warns of the urgency of halting threats to the integrity of the Amazon in order to protect 80% of the rainforest by 2025 (80×25).

The report points out that without urgent action, the Amazon could reach a point of no return, which would directly affect the livelihoods of the 47 million people living in this ecosystem, as well as the 511 groups of indigenous peoples and 10% of the planet’s biodiversity.

The report also warns that if the Amazon is lost, it will be impossible to meet the goal of not exceeding 1.5°C in the coming decades. “The Amazon rainforest stores between 367 and 733 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 in its vegetation and soils. At the same time, the carbon stored for centuries in the Amazon is also being released at an accelerated rate due to deforestation, fires and unsustainable productive activities,” the document states.

“Science is saying that if something is not done, the Amazon is going to become a desert,” insisted Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, of the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA), during an event open to the public at COP27.

The indigenous leader also complained about the non-fulfillment of the commitments signed in Glasgow, in 2021, which offered technical and financial support for the Amazon and called for a change in the attitude of the governments to confront the deforestation of the Amazon biome.

Liability for loss and damage

“This COP is particularly important because I believe that new issues are being put on the table, issues that were in a general discussion, but that had not become part of the negotiations,” says Ana Carolina González, Director of Programs at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). “One of them is the issue of loss, damage and reparation, which has to do with the impact that climate change is currently having on less developed countries,” she adds.

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The issue of loss and damage has gained relevance in this COP27 and has been incorporated into the official agenda, after intense negotiations in the days prior to the start of the conference.

What is being sought, explains González, is to guarantee effective compensation for the least developed countries which, at the same time, are the least responsible for the existence of these damages because they are the ones that pollute the least. “The role of the global south, of the developing countries, has been absent in these conversations. And for Latin America this is undoubtedly significant, especially given the major impacts of climate change and the environmental disasters we are seeing in the continent.

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presented in March 2022, warns about the effects of climate change in Latin America: rising sea levels, coastal erosion, ocean acidification and extreme droughts. The high temperatures recorded in the Amazon in recent years can be attributed to climate change, says the report.

“The countries that have historically caused climate change should pay for the impacts, that is, England, the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, the large economies associated with expansionism and colonialism should pay much more than they are contributing,” says Carlos Tornel, a researcher at the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom, who specializes in the process of transition, justice and energy sovereignty. In this way, Tornel refers to what is known in English as “lost and damage”.

How effective have the discussions on climate change at the COPs held since 1995, and even since the Rio de Janeiro Summit in 1992, been over time? asks Tornel. If we look at the evidence,” he says, “we have already attended 27 COPs and throughout that time emissions have increased by more or less 65%.

Tornel mentions that originally the COPs were thought of as a process of democratic negotiation between countries, representatives of civil society and groups vulnerable to the effects of climate change; however, the Mexican researcher mentions that “the space has become an agenda that mainly benefits companies and the large polluting countries, that is to say, those of the northern hemisphere. Historically, since those 27 conferences, they have refused to deal with the issues that most affect those who are less responsible for the problem, but also more vulnerable, that is, the global south”.

“The issue of adaptation to climate change, loss and damage, and vulnerability are issues that directly concern Latin America in a year of many impacts,” says Laura Arciniegas, director of Global Stocktaking of the Paris Agreement of the organization Transforma.

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Greater support from developed countries to the developing world to address the impacts of climate change is one of the points that has created many expectations at the conference.

On this issue, the G77 -a group of 77 developing countries established in 1964- and China called on the richest nations to contribute financial resources to create a fund to address the losses and damages caused by climate change.

For its part, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), under the presidency of Argentina, presented a joint position paper at the climate conference showing a certain cohesion of the countries of the continent for the negotiations. “Historically, Latin America has been a very fragmented region,” says Antonio Hill, Energy Transition advisor at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), although he stresses that “now there is a certain harmony among some governments in the region, such as Argentina and Chile. We are all interested in having a united voice so that they can collaborate and work strategically in the face of international negotiations”, adds the expert.

he path to an energy transition?

Another of the key issues being discussed at COP27 is the progressive elimination of all fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – and the transition to renewable energies. A debate that this year has as its backdrop the energy crisis, as a consequence of the war between Russia and Ukraine, and a planet in which the effects of climate change are becoming increasingly evident.

“The energy transition has been on the radar for some time now and the time has come to step on the gas,” says Antonio Hill of NRGI. “The industrialized countries are the ones that have least fulfilled their promises: the United States, as the biggest contributor to emissions, but there are also countries like Canada, Japan, Australia and the European Union. They all have a debt to the rest of the world and a responsibility to act,” he adds.

In this sense, Hill clarifies that in the case of Latin America the contribution in the reduction of emissions from fossil fuels is minimal compared to industrialized countries, since energy generation in Latin American countries comes, to a large extent, from renewable energy based on hydroelectric plants. However, Hill explains, the economic dependence of some countries in the continent on the exploitation of these raw materials must be taken into account. The case of Mexico, in relation to oil, and Colombia, with coal, are two examples of this dependence.

For this reason, Hill highlights the announcement made by the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, to propose a roadmap for the issue of fossil fuels. “The climate crisis can only be overcome if we stop consuming hydrocarbons. It is time to devalue the hydrocarbon economy with defined dates for its end and value the branches of the decarbonized economy. The solution is a world without oil and coal,” Petro said in his speech.

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The Mexican government also announced a new commitment to increase from 22% to 35% in the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. During a presentation at COP27, Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón spoke of a US$48 million investment in GHG reduction and clean energy generation. An announcement he made together with the U.S. presidential special envoy for climate, John Kerry.

“I believe that on energy transition issues there is much that we can contribute as a region in terms of a global agenda, because in Latin America you have an important block of countries dependent on oil revenues such as Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico, even Brazil, then, we must define which are the routes to ensure that these countries can reduce dependence on these fossil fuels in a given period of time,” says Ana Carolina González of NRGI.

In this sense, González considers that the countries that have polluted the most should be the first to stop producing fossil fuels but, at the same time, Latin American nations “should not wait for the others to go first, but start planning their own energy transition and this process of diversification of the export production matrix”.

For his part, Carlos Tornel, of Durham University, points out that “the most important thing [for climate change] is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. It’s as simple as that”, but to achieve this, the researcher says, it is necessary to “de-globalize economies and make them local” and “deploy renewable energy such as wind and solar on a scale that is in the interests of most people”.

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As talks continue this week at COP27 on reducing the use of fossil fuels and transitioning to clean energy, an analysis by Global Witness, in partnership with Corporate Accountability and Corporate Europe Observatory, identified that there are at least 636 oil industry lobbyists at the conference, up from 503 in Glasgow at COP26 in 2021.

This second week of COP27 is expected to be intense with the arrival of new political actors, a series of negotiations to be finalized, as well as discrepancies in the talks and climate goals of the countries. A week that is expected to come to an end with concrete agreements by Friday, November 18.

Source: https://es.mongabay.com/2022/11/proteccion-a-la-amazonia-tema-protagonico-en-la-cop27