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Dear reader,
Welcome to the first issue of Mint’s newsletter on the climate crisis: Climate Change And You. I am Bibek Bhattacharya, and I will be taking turns in writing this newsletter, every two weeks, alongside my colleague Sayantan Bera.
And what a week to begin! The annual United Nations COP global climate summit has begun in Baku, Azerbaijan (it will end on 22 November). But the spectre that haunts the COP29 banquet is Donald Trump, who has been elected the 47th president of the US. If you remember, as the 45th president, he had taken the US out of the Paris climate agreement of 2015. His reason? Climate change is a hoax.
Amid his chants of “drill baby drill” and his fondness for the fossil fuel economy, the shadow of another US withdrawal from global climate negotiations hangs over COP29. The fear is that this time, Trump might withdraw the US from the United Nations climate change framework entirely.
This would be really bad news for global climate change mitigation efforts. The US is the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG), and the biggest historical emitter. The Joe Biden administration wasn’t exactly covering itself in glory by dragging its feet on climate, especially finance, but the outgoing government was one that could be negotiated with. With Trump, all bets are off.
And yet, COP29 has to carry on and be a success, because some very important global negotiations on climate finance will need to be finalized this year. More on that below.
Going into COP29, the headline numbers for climate change are pretty grim. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2024 is almost certain to be the warmest year since records began in 1940. This has been backed by a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report released during the COP.
What’s more disturbing is that the calendar year may turn out to be over 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), with October marking the 15th straight month of global average temperatures staying above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. For the past few years, every year has been hotter than the last, and 2023 holds the current record.
This is hardly surprising though, because the main driver of this heat—industrial CO2 emissions in the atmosphere—is at an all-time high of 422 parts per million (PPM). This concentration of CO2—and the level of heating—isn’t something that human beings have ever experienced. To put it into perspective, the last time the world experienced similar atmospheric emissions was about 3 million years ago, when our simian ancestors were just beginning to stand up on two legs.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for the past 800,000 years, till around 1911, atmospheric CO2 levels had never exceeded 300PPM. Three million years ago, under similar conditions, global temperatures were about 2-3 degrees Celsius higher than now, and sea levels were 10-20m higher than today.
And as increased warming melts the Arctic permafrost, as well as huge chunks of Greenland and Antarctica glaciers, the sea is rising. Unesco’s State Of The Ocean Report from June found that global sea levels have been steadily rising at 3.4mm/year since 1993. While that might not seem like much, in certain parts of the world, including along the Indian coasts, sea level rise is way above the global average, at 5-10mm/year. As warming intensifies, this rate will only go up.
In fact, a 2019 study showed how, in a scenario of rising CO2 emissions, the rise in sea level will affect about 150 million people living in coastal regions by 2050. An estimated 36 million people living in India’s coastal areas would be affected by extreme flooding.
Big cities like Mumbai and Kolkata will be at high risk of such frequent and intense floods that they would be uninhabitable. US-based climate research organization Climate Central has an interactive map where you can see the amount of flooding that would sink a city like Mumbai, if we fail to check warming.
-In this piece, Sayantan looks at what is at stake at COP29. He writes that unless countries act now, global GDP may decline by 10% due to climate impacts, and India may lose 5.8% of working hours and 34 million jobs due to crippling heat by 2030.
-More on COP29. This story in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the difficulty of global efforts to move the world from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Baku is an ironic symbol of this: a city built on oil hosting the world’s climate conference.
-In this opinion piece, vie-chancellor of TERI University Leena Srivastava argues that India needs to devise a largely self-reliant national strategy to address climate mitigation, adaptation and protection of biodiversity.
During COP26 in Glasgow, PM Narendra Modi grabbed the headlines by announcing that India would become a net-zero emissions country by 2070. Since then, we have seen very little by way of policy prescriptions towards this objective. The only analysis had actually come out just before the announcement, from theCouncil on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), aDelhi-based climate policy organization.
And last week, CEEW led a multi-disciplinary effort comprising notable Indian climate scientists and policy experts to publish an interesting paper titled, India’s Pathway To Net Zero By 2070: Status, Challenges, And Way Forward.The paper’s analysis rightly takes a “whole economy” approach, touching on climate finance, the role of big cities, macro-economic impacts, power markets and more.
It concludes that such an ambitious target would require “multiple simultaneous and overlapping transitions” involving an unprecedented amount of collaboration between the central and state governments, and also include climate institutions, foreign bodies and every possible stakeholder.
The authors look at existing research to make the case that India’s energy transition from oil and gas to renewables will be an economic positive, and can add as much as 43 million green jobs in 2050.
As we’ve read above, over the past 15 months, the world’s average temperature has been over 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the pre-industrial era. However, this doesn’t mean that the global temperature has irreversibly warmed by this amount, since the current surge in heat has been accelerated by the warming El Nino weather phenomenon. However, scientists expect the planet to breach this crucial 1.5 degree threshold sometime this decade.
Why is it important? Going by the Paris agreement, the world’s nations agreed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times, by 2100. The more ambitious goal was to restrict it to a 1.5 degree rise by 2100. If we truly manage to cut fresh carbon emissions by nearly half by 2030 and reach net zero global emissions by 2050, then we can hope to stabilize warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Achieving this would mean that humanity would be marked safe from living through literal climate hell. Here’s how fine those margins are: If we overshoot 1.5 and get to 2 degrees Celsius of heating, the world would lose nearly all of its coral reefs. The Himalaya would be permanently denuded of snow and ice, and Himalayan rivers like the Ganga would first flood and then become seasonal. And that’s just some of the outcomes.
At 2 degrees or more of warming, planetary tipping points would be triggered—like the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves or a die-off of the Amazon rainforest—which would make the chances of human survival worse. At current levels of climate action, we are looking at a warming of about 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. So, when you hear mention of the “1.5 target”, this is what is at stake.
This is the annual amount of climate finance that was promised by the world’s richest nations to developing countries, back in 2009. This amount—to help countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to severe climate impacts—was supposed to have been available starting in 2020.
But wealthier countries dragged their feet, delivering just $83 billion in 2020 and $89.6 billion in 2021, according to available data. And whatever money has been delivered was distributed and used in a way that was deeply disappointing to developing nations.
This tardiness hasn’t endeared rich nations to the developing world. COP29 promises to resolve this failure, and also increase the quantum with the proposed New Collective Quantified Finance (NCQF).
If negotiations are successful, then developed countries and the private sector (as well as institutions like the World Bank) will now have to deliver $1-1.4 trillion a year in climate finance by 2035. Simply put, finance of this scale will increase the chances of countries like India in achieving net zero targets, while also adapting to climate impacts like heatwaves and cyclones. How the NCQF and the $100 billion promise are reconciled will measure COP29’s success.
With the US having elected a climate change denier in Donald Trump, this is a good time to read climate scientist and communicator Michael E. Mann’s brilliant 2021 book The New Climate War: The Fight To Take Back Our Planet. In it, Mann provides a masterclass of conversational, evidence-based evisceration of all kinds of climate denial, including the sneaky “doomism”, which suggests that we need to do nothing, or at best focus only on adapting to the new reality, because it’s too late prevent the climate crisis. It isn’t, there’s still a chance humanity wins this fight.
So, that’s it for the first edition of Climate Change And You dear reader. See you again in a fortnight, when Sayantan will be writing the newsletter.
