Bonn Blues
The world’s leaders are gearing up for the most important international collaboration in history. But they’re working toward the wrong goal.
The 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn missed the mark.
There. Someone said it.
In the conference’s wake, most commenters have focused on the details of the Parties’ decisions. But focusing on the details obscures the fact that global leaders are sort of, well, getting it all wrong.
Here’s why:
- The Parties to the UNFCC are working toward the wrong goal.
- They are not working toward that goal quickly or well.
- They are unlikely to meet it, because it’s the wrong kind of goal.
1. The Parties to the UNFCC are working toward the wrong goal.
Under 2015’s Paris Agreement, 171 countries committed to one central goal: to keep global temperature rise below 2ºC, and as close as possible to 1.5ºC, in this century.
2ºC isn’t good enough.
At 2ºC, sea levels still rise by 4.7 meters.
Shanghai looks like this:
Miami looks like this.
Between 20 and 30 percent of the world’s land becomes desert.
What does this mean, exactly?
It means that 130 million people around the world lose their homes. It means droughts. Famines. Migration crises. Violent conflicts over land and resources.
Is a +2ºC world a world we want to live in? It isn’t for me.
2. The Parties are not working toward that goal quickly or well.
Here’s what happened in Bonn, according to the UN:
“At the November UN Climate Change Conference COP23 in Bonn, Germany, countries took important steps to rapidly implement the Paris Climate Change Agreement and non-Party stakeholders made some major action announcements in support of the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.”
One of these steps was to:
“Confirm its firm determination to oversee and accelerate the completion of the work programme under the Paris Agreement by its twenty-fourth session (December 2018)”
… and thereby kick the difficult decisions to next year.
Another major announcement that received a lot of positive attention concerned Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDCs), the emissions-cutting commitments that each country has to make. The Parties released “preliminary material in preparation for the first iteration of the informal note” on how NDCs should be organized, delivered, and updated.
The preliminary material for the first draft of an informal note is 179 pages long.
To be fair, this year’s conference was expected to be a mostly administrative session. Few observers believed the delegates would make any groundbreaking decisions.
My criticism isn’t that our leaders failed to meet expectations. My criticism is that expectations were so low to begin with.
3. The Parties are unlikely to meet the 2ºC goal, because it’s the wrong kind of goal.
Imagine you have a very high fever. You go to the hospital, and the doctors look you over and decide, “All right, well, clearly our goal is to get this fever down.”
So they prescribe a cold-water bath to cool you off, a course of anti-inflammatories to calm your body’s fever response, and plenty of fluids. The fever subsides.
Meanwhile, inside of you there’s a very tenacious and destructive virus. And the virus keeps on reproducing.
Soon enough, your body stops responding to the cold-water baths and the medication. It keeps fighting that virus, and your temperature keeps rising.
Under these conditions, somewhere in the future there’s a breaking point. When you reach your maximum internal temperature, the heat kills the cells in your body. Your body shuts down.
When those 171 countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, they effectively committed to managing the fever.
The agreement requires countries to reduce new carbon emissions by a certain proportion of a baseline level to meet the 2ºC goal. (Canada, for instance, has committed to reducing emissions by 30 percent of its 2005 level.)
Back in 2010, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the world needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 18–32 gigatons a year before 2050, to meet the 2ºC goal.
Now — just 7 years later — that figure is 21–35 gigatons a year. And it keeps growing.
At present emissions levels, we will likely reach the breaking point — the point where +2ºC is guaranteed — by 2037.
The commitments that countries made two years ago aren’t sufficient. The head of the UN Environment Agency, Erik Solheim, said as much when he indicated in November that current pledges “cover no more than a third of the emission reductions needed.”
But even more fundamentally, the 2ºC goal doesn’t address the underlying cause of emissions — a system of over-production and over-consumption that far exceeds human beings’ needs for comfortable survival.
The UN itself believes there is a 5% chance of keeping temperature rise below 2ºC. If we fail, climate change–related natural disasters will threaten 1.3 billion people and $158 trillion in assets.
So, we’re driving toward the wrong goal. We’re driving toward it slowly and ineffectively. And we’re unlikely ever to meet it.
In another world, those three statements might logically cancel each other out, and everything would turn out all right. But in the world we’ve got, Bonn-level inaction has consequences.
Ahead of the Bonn conference, Solheim offered a sober assessment: “We are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future.”
Despite this essay’s negative outlook, I still have a lot of optimism. The source of that optimism isn’t international institutions.
It’s people.
COP23 nodded to our power when the Parties agreed to create a “Talanoa dialogue” as part of the UNFCCC’s decision-making framework. The term refers to a traditional Fijian process of “inclusive, participatory, and transparent” decision-making.
Under the new rules, the body will take inputs from people who aren’t official representatives to COP meetings. (That means you and me.)
The UNFCCC will also set up a democratic online platform to receive comments, recommendations, and feedback.
If people use this resource, it can become a key platform for communicating the real climate change–related pain that many of us are already facing, and get our voices and perspectives into the decision-making process.
In that spirit, I want to use this essay to start a dialogue.
If you loved or hated what you just read, add a comment below. Or throw me a note:
corey [at] domiearth [dot] com
And if you’re already taking your own personal actions to limit climate change, let me know what you’re doing.
