Analysis | All eyes on COP26
Can the conference produce a plan to cut emissions — and tackle food security, migration, geopolitics in the Arctic, and much more?
Over the weekend, world leaders, diplomats, and activists began to gather in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), with an ambitious agenda. The conference seeks to lay out a plan to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century in order to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to agree on a framework for helping local communities adapt to climate change and protect vulnerable natural habitats. The conference also hopes to formalize commitments from wealthy countries to mobilize financial support for developing economies and to establish accountability measures to ensure all parties keep their commitments.
The latest alarming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this August declared a “code red for humanity” and warned that world leaders would need to take immediate, drastic action to mitigate the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. Countries will need to go far beyond their commitments in the Paris Agreement in order to prevent irreversible and lasting damage to the planet. All eyes are now on COP26, as climate advocates look for signs that such immediate action is on the horizon. However, to be successful, talks will need to go beyond the topic of emissions and carbon neutrality to address the ways in which climate change is already dramatically impacting human existence, from food insecurity, to geopolitics in the Arctic, to migration. In its last three episodes, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy’s Diplomatic Immunity Podcast posed questions about some of these core issues to thought leaders in climate security — issues that have animated our New Global Commons research over the last five years.
Peace through Food, with Bibi La Luz Gonzalez and Johanna Mendelson Forman
The earliest IPCC reports on climate change in the 1990s only addressed food insecurity tangentially, but failed to draw a direct line between climate change and hunger, according to Johanna Mendelson Forman, a distinguished fellow with the Stimson Center’s Food Security Program. The most recent IPCC report, however, made a direct connection between climate change, food insecurity and conflict. Acknowledging this causal link will go a long way towards spurring action by getting everyone on the same page, Mendelson Forman said. At the same time, she cautioned that “recognition isn’t [a] solution.”
[Read ISD’s latest working group report, Peace Through Food: Ending the Hunger-Instability Nexus]
“As long as I’ve been working in conflict countries […], we’ve always known that the places where we would see the most conflict are the places where the temperatures were rising and where people were not being able to work in agriculture, because they were being pushed into urban areas,” Mendelson Forman said. “Climate change has a lot of implications on food because people are driven out of the countryside to cities, so there’s not enough food production, and there’s the problem of getting food to market.”
Going forward, there’s simply no separating these issues anymore: the nexus between food security, climate change, and conflict is real and growing stronger. “Food and climate are all intertwined,” said Bibi La Luz Gonzalez, the director of the Guatemalan anti-hunger NGO Eat Better Wa’ik. “We need to see the global picture, we need to see the entire picture that touches food in this way.” The way forward requires an integrated approach that merges food security with climate sustainability and human rights, La Luz said.
It’s Raining at Summit Greenland: The Geopolitics of the Arctic with Sherri Goodman and Jeremy Mathis
This week’s climate policy discussions at COP26 must also take into account the arctic and the outsized impact of climate change there. “The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet,” said Jeremy Mathis, adjunct professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs at Georgetown University. “There has been a record loss of sea ice and snow cover. Temperature records are being shattered year after year. […] It’s incredible.”
These dizzying changes are having a detrimental impact on Arctic residents, almost all indigenous peoples who have lived on those lands for millennia. At the same time, the effects of climate change in the arctic are already spilling southward. As ISD’s Director of Programs and Research, Kelly McFarland, pointed out: “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.” McFarland explored the links between geopolitical competition and climate change in the Arctic in a 2018 ISD report, “The New Arctic: Navigating the Realities, Possibilities, and Problems.”
“There’s supposed to be a significant temperature gradient between the Arctic and the rest of the world,” Mathis explained. “As the Arctic warms and becomes more similar in temperature to the rest of the world, it destabilizes the weather patterns that we’re all used to.” The destruction that local populations are experiencing should serve as a warning to the rest of us, Mathis argued. “The Arctic is sort of our looking glass into the future,” he said.
In addition to the environmental impact of climate change, diplomats must also keep in mind its geopolitical ramifications, as melting sea ice and permafrost redraw the world map inside the arctic circle, said Sherri Goodman, senior fellow at the Wilson Center. “As the sea ice retreat[s], the temperatures [warm], and the permafrost collaps[es] across the arctic, that has led countries in the arctic, in particular Russia, to see opportunities for economic reward in the region,” said Goodman, who previously served as a senior environmental security advisor at the Department of Defense.“Putin has set especially aggressive goals about transportation and shipping across the northern sea route.” Russia has also increased military aggression in the arctic region, just as China has announced plans to expand its global infrastructure development program, the Belt and Road, to the arctic in the near future.
New forums are urgently needed to advance diplomacy and build confidence amongst world powers competing for supremacy in the arctic, Goodman said. The Arctic Council has been useful in promoting collaboration on scientific exploration, environmental conservation, and search and rescue missions for over two decades, but it is simply not sufficient to address the growing geostrategic competition in such a rapidly-changing region.
COP26, Climate Change and Migration, with Beth Ferris
Just as there has been a growing awareness of the link between climate change and food insecurity, policymakers now better understand the link between climate change and displacement — even though climate change experts have been trying to call attention to this for years, said Elizabeth Ferris, research professor at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown. Ferris also contributed to ISD’s 2016/7 working group on this subject.
“Since the very first IPCC report […] there’s been a recognition that increased migration due to climate change is going to be one of the major consequences and impacts of global warming on our planet,” Ferris said. “We see governments just beginning to take it seriously — not nearly seriously enoughI might say — but at least there’s growing awareness of it.”
Part of this awareness undoubtedly comes from the increase in rapid-onset natural disasters in frequency, intensity, and visibility. “People are beginning to realize that this is going to be the new normal,” Ferris said. “We’ll be living with heat waves and wildfires and ever stronger storm surges.” It’s also significant that these disasters are occurring all over the world, in high-income and low-income countries alike. “This isn’t just happening in the Global South. It’s happening in Germany and the United States,” Ferris pointed out. “Here in the U.S. we have displacement not just from wildfires but from […]slow-onset sea level rise and global warming. […] Communities are already relocating. This isn’t something that’s going to happen way in the future. It’s something that’s happening now.”
While a growing recognition of the relationship between climate change and migration is important, Ferris said, policymakers are still a long way from finding policy approaches to address the problem. Many of these policy challenges stem from the ambiguous definition of “climate migration.”
“We still haven’t figured out what to call people who move at least in part because of climate change,” Ferris said. “The fact is that most migration is multicausal: people leave because of their economic situation, family relationships, personal tolerance of risk… It’s difficult to say somebody is a climate migrant.” Those choosing to migrate because of climate change don’t fit into the current, widely-accepted convention on refugees, which requires displaced people to establish a well-founded fear of persecution on the part of a government, militia, or other group. However, they also don’t fit the common definition of economic migrants, whose choices to migrate are fully voluntary and economically-motivated.
Establishing a common definition for climate migration — or environmental migration, as Ferris suggested it be called — is a necessary first step toward establishing policy solutions. “Just [last] week, the Biden administration released a report acknowledging that this phenomenon is real, that we have to do something about it, and change our policies,” Ferris said. “But how do you develop policies when it’s hard to distinguish the population you’re talking about?” Establishing common terms and objectives with regards to climate-related migration should also be on the COP26 agenda.
Because food insecurity, Arctic management, and migration are all so closely tied to climate change, any meaningful climate change policy must provide tools and frameworks for addressing these relationships head on. COP26 may be the last best hope.
Emily Crane Linn is a research assistant for the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She is in her second year of her Global Human Development master’s degree at Georgetown, with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies. Emily is also one of ISD’s inaugural McHenry Fellows.
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