Back in 1992, more than 150 countries signed a new treaty established by the
United Nations. The treaty created a multinational task force that would
support the global response to the threat of climate change. Every year,
delegations from countries signed up to this convention gather for the
Conference of the Parties, more commonly known as COP.
So what happens at COP and does it really play a key role in the
global fight against climate change?
Nice wellies. You like the wellies? I put them on
especially for you. Not quite so sure about yours.
We don’t normally put wellies on in the countryside until at least October.
Well, these are like my city wellies. Yeah it shows.
You’ve got the dog as well so you’re a proper country bumpkin.
Well don’t tell everyone. What are we here to talk about,
why did you want to go on a walk with me? Well, we’re going to talk about COP, and
I thought it would nice be out in nature considering it’s an important
factor in everything to do with COP. Well, a very warm welcome to the
Ashdown forest. Shall we crack on? Yes.
It's the Squawk Box show with Karen Tso and myself
Steve Sedgwick and these are your headlines.
CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick anchors Squawk Box Europe. He’s also covered energy
for the last 20 years reporting from both OPEC meetings with the world’s
biggest oil producers, to critical climate conferences such as COP21.
I wanted to ask him about the goings-on within COP and its
effectiveness in achieving the world’s climate objectives.
For those of us who haven’t been to COP, what’s it like?
Stunningly intense. Heads of state in and out. Presidents, prime ministers.
You’ve got enormous entourages, a lot of people that are actually doing the
negotiations. You've got action advocates as well, the protesters
outside. You've got a security operation which is absolutely enormous.
The head of the negotiations in Paris once said to me and this is Christiana
Figueres, she said to me it as akin to herding cats. You've got basically all
walks of society all talking about one issue. This isn't like a G meeting where
you have a plethora of global issues. This is one issue, it’s all about
climate change and affects all parts of society.
A year after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change came into force, the first COP meeting was held in Berlin,
Germany in March 1995. Since then, climate change has gone from a
fringe issue to a global priority.
Certain COPs have achieved landmark agreements. COP 3 in 1997 saw the
adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, which legally binds developed country parties
to emission reduction targets. And in 2015 at COP 21, the Paris Agreement
was born, arguably the most significant moment in COP’s history.
Today the UNFCCC has near-universal membership. The 197 parties (196
countries plus the European Union) under the convention are treaty bound
to ‘avoid dangerous climate change’ and find
ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.
What was the first COP you reported from?
Well, here’s the thing. I've been to dozens of energy meetings over
the last decade but CNBC has actually only attended two COP
meetings in the last 12 years. Now the first was seen as a very
unsatisfactory outcome. That was the COP 15 that Geoff Cutmore went
to in Denmark. It just didn’t work. You had antagonism between emerging
countries and the United States. There was nothing binding about
it but I went to the COP21 in Paris where a lot of the ills of
the previous meetings were addressed and actually it was
a very successful meeting because at the end of it you had the Paris
Agreement which was absolutely a seminal moment.
Every country signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement has agreed
to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees
above pre-industrial levels, with an aim for 1.5 degrees. To deliver
on these targets, signatories need to make money available in order to
adapt to the impact of climate change.
The Paris Agreement was far more binding than almost anything we’d
seen beforehand as well. You had this commitment to get to net zero
at some stage this century, but everyone was going to go about it
in their own way. There was going to be a mechanism where everyone
checks up on how they were progressing every five years.
That was supposed to be Glasgow 2020, but the pandemic put paid
to that and that’s why this meeting, the Glasgow COP26 is absolutely pivotal.
191 Parties out of the 197 have ratified the Paris Agreement.
However, although the agreement is legally binding, the commitments
that countries have made to cut their emissions are not. These are known as
Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, and serve to only ‘embody’
each country’s efforts to reduce their emissions.
The UNFCCC’s aim is to ratchet up individual commitments and therefore
the world’s climate commitments over time.
The problem is the scientists have looked at what is being committed
to and what needs to be done and there is a disparity there as well.
Many scientists say that actually to get to 1.5 degree C a whole host of
commitments is needed from these parties.
That’s even if they do what they said they were
going to do back in Paris in 2015.
So if the Paris Agreement is the best thing to come out of COP’s more than
25-year history and it’s still unable to limit
global warming, then how effective really is COP?
Well for a start Tom, it was always seen as a starting point as well.
It wasn’t the be all and end all. This is where we start from in really
getting serious about climate change, but let me give you a good example.
One of the most important countries in the world, the United States,
the president pulled them out of the Paris Agreement, but in the
meantime the U.S. carried on. The federal states carried on, the
corporations carried on, so the process was going on, regardless
of who was the incumbent at the White House and I think that shows
the worth of the Paris Agreement and despite the rankle we’re seeing
on geo-political stages, the Chinese, the United States, all the other big
emitters they’re still moving towards plans and
hopefully better plans at COP26.
But as each country has its own socio and economic characteristics,
I imagine some countries are a little bit more ambitious, shall
we say, with their climate change goals?
I think the ambitions there but it’s just the reality of what’s
going on in the emerging world compared to the developed world.
The developed world has the finance to do this. It has already
industrialised. Whereas a lot of the emerging nations, India being
the great case in point, it was in 2015, it will be in 2021, It
doesn’t have the same socio-economic position as you say, it doesn’t have
the same wealth, it’s not at the same stage of industrialisation.
So it’s very important for the western nations to appreciate
that actually these other nations to come along the same journey, to
make those same commitments needs a hell of a lot of finance.
As hosts of COP26, the U.K. takes a leading diplomatic role in
encouraging countries to commit to more ambitious 2030 emissions
reductions targets that align with reaching net
zero by the middle of the century.
Alongside these emission reduction targets, the UN hopes that COP26
will commit countries to: accelerate the phase out
of coal, curtail deforestation, speed up the switch to electric
vehicles and encourage investment in renewables.
Countries at the same time will need to adapt to protect communities
and natural habitats, mobilize at least $100 billion in climate finance
from developed countries per year and work together to, amongst other things,
finalize the Paris Rulebook which makes the Paris Agreement operational.
A report released before the COP26 summit said that only one country —
The Gambia — is on course to meet the 1.5 degree Celsius target, while
momentum has stalled for other countries such as Singapore and Russia.
Each signatory has their own targets for
ending their contribution to climate change.
Here in the U.K., the government’s independent adviser on global
warming, has said the country needs plant around 100 million trees a
year to achieve its net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050.
Many scientists are saying that actually now is the last chance saloon. We have
to really move in the next five, certainly the next ten years to
avert the worst impacts of climate change and to
try and keep the change to below 1.5 degrees centigrade.
And there is another crisis as well which is the global pandemic. Many
countries see the recovery from the pandemic and averting climate change
and the worst parts of that climate change actually as the same strategy.
A lot of investment in digitisation, a lot of investment in renewables
as well. It's a unique opportunity for the world to get together and
actually have a cohesive plan rather than dribs and drabs left right and
centre for what many people think is the greatest and
existential crisis of our time.
It turns out that getting 20,000 or so people to meet at COP to
discuss saving the planet can also harm the planet. According to the
Polish environment ministry a UN summit emits about 60,000 tonnes
of CO2 – roughly the same emitted by 7000 homes in a year. Unsurprisingly
aviation makes up more than 80% of those emissions.
But COP says it will offset the damage by
planting enough trees to soak up those emitted gases.