Nov 10, 2022
COP27: Opportunities and challenges for ecosystem protection
Lucas de Oliveira Paes focuses on the Amazon to show how negotiators can build stronger stewardship of critical ecosystems
The Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is often greeted with high hopes of achieving concrete steps to deal with our climate emergency. This year is no different. Among the many issues at stake is the necessity of creating the arrangements to protect the ecosystems crucial to mitigating climate change, as well as those most vulnerable to it. The Amazon, and rainforests in general, are such ecosystems whose preservation is critical to achieving climate goals. Upcoming political change in Brazil has raised new hope for more harmonious cooperation between global and local actors on the issue of Amazon conservation. The question remains, though: how can we make sure this results in strong foundations for sustainable stewardship of this ecosystems?
Sticks and carrots: how can COP promote change?
COPs address climate change in two main ways. First, by promoting global cooperation on climate change mitigation, mostly through pushing for reducing carbon emissions in order to brake the rise global temperature. Second, by fostering adaptation to climate change, as a means of protecting societies and nature from consequences that can no longer be reversed. At each COP, world leaders and members of global civil society meet in the hope of finding novel ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change — and the political will to implement known options. Throughout its 26 iterations, most progress has been achieved through two broad mechanisms of change: funds and pressure. The financing side has focused on creating incentives for actors to reduce emissions as well as making sure the distribution of burdensome costs reflects historical responsibilities. The pressure side has been the main tool available so far to improve the ambition of commitments and to ensure they are actually implemented. These mechanisms are at the core of the Paris Agreement which establishes funds and technology transfers to help all states to build the necessary capacities to address climate change. Yet it puts its hopes for raising ambitions for curbing carbon emissions on the mechanism of global pressure from states and civil society. These existing carrots and sticks have produced progress but we are still alarmingly short of being able to properly address the growing climate emergency.
Global engagements in ecosystem governance
One of the many issues pertaining to successful climate change mitigation is the protection of ecosystems, such as forests. Tropical forests play many crucial roles in global climate stabilization, since they capture carbon when alive and release carbon when torn down. Global cooperation has created incentives to avoid deforestation, such as the REDD+, but the same can’t be said about the global pressure ‘mechanism’. Having over 50% of the Amazon rainforest under its sovereignty, Brazil achieved record deforestation rates under President Jair Bolsonaro and global condemnation or pressure was not able to revert its policies. Now, at COP27, with the reelection of former president Lula da Silva, hopes are high for a new phase of global cooperation to protect not only the Amazon but tropical rainforests in general. Even if these aspirations are met, the historical and devastating effects of the Bolsonaro years raise the question of how to make sure such cooperation can foster sustainable stewardship in Brazil and elsewhere.
I argue that the politics of ecosystem governance are fundamentally structured around whether actors with a meaningful ability to affect the ecosystem stand to benefit in a manner that provides a political basis for sustained and effective stewardship. In Brazil and several other states, economic activities associated with ecosystem depletion (such as predatory logging and mining) are more likely to yield benefits that can be appropriated by specific groups and fuel political mobilization in defence of their short-term economic interests. These groups were a relevant force backing Bolsonaro’s troubling policies toward the Amazon and were also further empowered by them. By contrast, efforts at promoting effective stewardship of the Amazon ecosystem are yet to yield mobilizable economic resources through which to influence politics directly. Limited resources, coupled with the relatively dispersed range of actors that benefit from ecosystem stewardship, also raise coordination problems, demanding sponsors to channel resources from elsewhere to support environmental efforts politically. This conflict often produces a global/national cleavage, pitching local states, which are more likely to be targets of pressure from beneficiaries of policies with short-term concentrated gains, and the global actors organized to protect more diffuse environmental benefits.
This structure raises a challenge for global engagements around ecosystem preservation. States with sovereignty over globally relevant ecosystems, such as rainforests, can perceive external interest as a threat and have incentives to work together to defend sovereign rights and bargain the terms of their stewardship. My research on the Amazon has shown how regional cooperation has been instrumental for capping international commitment and limiting external influence in the region but also allowed for building forms of coordinated ecosystem protection. Yet it also shows how this bargained stewardship only lasted as long it was supported by a minimum of political will across all Amazon states. When Brazil’s environmental commitments policy went astray, joint defence of sovereignty prevailed over environmental commitments.
Opportunities and challenges for ecosystem stewardship during COP27
A key takeaway of this analysis is how the sustainability of stewardship demands consolidating coalitions in support of ecosystem preservation in the countries that have the sovereignty to ultimately govern these ecosystems. This entails not only recognizing that local states are the main beneficiaries of ecosystem-preserving services, such as climate stabilization, but also creating ways of producing other short-term concentrated benefits for those living with the ecosystem to engage in its preservation. In the case of the Amazon, reawakened political will may lead to relevant and bold commitments during the upcoming COP27, but it is important that any agreements help seed greater long term societal commitment to its protection.
Lucas de Oliveira Paes is a Senior Research Fellow in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and a post-doctoral researcher in the Lorax Project, funded by the European Research Council.
His article ‘The Amazon rainforest and the global–regional politics of ecosystem governance’ was published in the November 2022 Issue of International Affairs.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
