By André Ricardo Passos de Souza for Money Times
05/12/2023
The 28th United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference, COP28, began in Dubai on November 30.
The conference will last until December 12th and will be the stage for debates on various issues of great interest to the countries that make up the international community in relation to measures to contain global warming, which is now a consensus in the world scientific community.
The aim of this conference, unlike the last COP 27 held in Cairo, Egypt, is for the discussions to be effective and to generate practical measures to avoid damage of many trillions of dollars resulting from the increase in the average global temperature by the end of this century, estimated at around 1.5º C.
International Climate Governance
Going back in time to explain a little about how all this international climate governance works, we can see that from the 1970s onwards, the international community was constantly concerned about the climate problems that were already occurring and that needed the attention of the international community in a joint effort to tackle them.
The feasibility of measures to reduce the emission of so-called GHGs (Greenhouse Gases) began to take shape in Stockholm, Sweden. That’s when the first major international climate conference was held in 1972. We can also mention here, among others, some other famous conferences such as the so-called “Rio-92”, which culminated in the signing of the 1994 Framework Convention, as well as the one that resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
On that occasion, the international legal framework for the mechanism to reduce GHGs through the negotiation of so-called “carbon credits” was discussed and implemented. It was conceived as a “market” mechanism to stimulate the global reduction of GHG emissions and, to this day, it still lacks greater implementation, as we have discussed in this column.
The fact is that since then – and several COPs later – the international community is still discussing more efficient ways of implementing these measures and markets at a global level, and they have still proved insufficient to effectively combat the rise in the planet’s temperature and the climatic events that, strictly speaking, derive from this issue and are felt by the population of the globe as a whole in different ways.
Practical difficulties at the latest COPs
In addition to the already expected misalignment and plurality of interests of the countries participating in the last panels, the usual difficulties were compounded by the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all its implications and consequences at a global level, as well as the intensification of differences (and even tempers) in relation to the main international blocs in the face of important conflicts that have, in some way, come to shape world geopolitics in recent years after COP-26 and 27.
This is because, despite international efforts to create new credit paradigms, more objective criteria for allocating resources for the operation of the international carbon credit market, among other measures.
These efforts were somewhat undermined by an increasingly conflictual international context (bellicosely speaking), as well as the well-known lack of enforcement (and even a sense of urgency) so that practical measures could get off the ground internationally and even domestically in many of the participating countries.
Thus, we arrive at COP-28 with the feeling that we are facing even greater challenges, with less time to implement measures and work on consensus and, perhaps, with a balance and global governance in worse condition to try to make progress towards the practical and effective implementation of measures to reduce GHG emissions in time to avoid the increase in global average temperature that has already condensed.
What is important to achieve after COP28?
In order to achieve greater practical results in the discussions that will take place at COP28, we need to focus, in our humble opinion, on the few consensuses and the urgency of the practical measures that can be adopted, both at a global level and in the context of the various local (domestic) measures and some of the countries that are members of the international panels, such as Brazil, which will report on compliance with the targets set since the Paris Agreement (COP21 of 2015).
In this way, measures such as increasing funding for low-carbon agriculture in Brazil, programs to recover pastures, produce meat and green soybeans using ILPF (Integration of Crop and Livestock Forestry) techniques, effective implementation of the rural environmental registry for producers, etc. contribute decisively, and from an important player in decarbonization such as Brazil, to raising the level of action and seeking effective measures with scalability to reach a large part of the world’s food, fibre and renewable energy production.
To do this, of course, it would be important to finalize the procedures for Bill No. 1. 412/22, which regulates the carbon market in Brazil and whose issues we have already dealt with in our column published last October 4 here in this space.
On the other hand, talking about reducing the use of fossil fuels in the midst of a new oil shock and the effects of the wars in Ukraine and even the current conflict in the Middle East leads us to a scenario in which we may have to live with the widespread use of fossil fuels and work in close cooperation between the main countries on the panel in question to reduce impacts.
This is because such an international scenario once again leads us to invest in the market initiatives and international fiscal policy (and within the member states of the international community) created since Kyoto to offset GHG emissions through existing market mechanisms, especially carbon credits, bringing light once again to the issue of democratization and tropicalization of GHG reduction metrics to facilitate the adoption of these practices by countries that are able to quickly “deliver” to the world through their production chains, the much-needed and desired reductions in environmental impact sought in order to comply with international climate agreements.
We should therefore keep an eye on what will happen at COP28, as time is ticking away in the search for practical and effective solutions for achieving the targets set worldwide for reducing the negative impact of GHG emissions across the globe, without neglecting the homework that each country, such as Brazil, has to do in order to effectively implement the process of reducing GHG emissions in global chains more efficiently.
Disponível em: COP28: What are the main challenges and opportunities for agriculture and the world? – Money Times