#COP28 Day 11: Climate finance and removals update
And our new Climate Change Minister Simon Watt speaks at COP28
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has announced $7 trillion dollars (US) of finance is flowing in climate, biodiversity, and land degradation. But that’s the amount that’s feeding crises rather than solving them. For comparison, only about $200 billion appears to have been invested in nature-based solutions last year.
That’s a factor of about a 140 times between the flows of finance that are negative versus positive for nature and climate. But the balance is shifting, particularly in private finance.
Politics in the United States continues to limit global progress
Despite this public finance remains a challenge, and that’s one of the big reasons why the US is having trouble supporting loss and damage, as well as adaptation programmes. In fact, the main agency the Biden administration has set up for flows of climate finance remains hidden and is designed primarily for funds from the private sector. That’s because the US Congress is unlikely to approve request for public funding.
Unfortunately, many other nations are less likely to proactively announce funds to support other nations when the US remains a skint penny pincher. This is important because it stalls long-run solutions.
Climate finance needs to be resolved to maintain a sense of progress between the haves and have nots of economic development since the industrial revolution. Fairness, justice and equity matter in general, and recognition can help somewhat in the absence of full funding.
But what matters even more is direction of travel. There is some progress on reversing the 140 times differential between funding that bad for the earth and that which is good. Small and significant steps like the tripling of renewal energy will create finance flows that can grow, and that will matter in filling the implementation gap.
Simon Watts spoke at COP28
New Zealand’s new Minister of Climate Change, Simon Watts, spoke in a session of climate change and environment ministers. You can watch the ~3 minutes speech below, and it seems to me he said relatively little except for confirming policy to meet the NDC of a 50% reduction in gross emissions by 2030 (likely to require offsets) and targeting a doubling of renewable energy.
In case you’re counting only 15 of the 66 national representatives in the session were women.
What about carbon dioxide removals (CDR)?
In case you missed it, the implementation gap and a lot of other signals make it clear that it isn’t the end of a liveable world that we’re now going past 1.5°C and likely to go through 2.0°C.
Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) make ‘abatement’ possible – coming back some way after overshooting as long as emission decline soon. But this gets more difficult the longer high emissions continue to overshoot. I don’t see a lot of mystery in this, but also have always observed that politicians and industry are tempted to kick the can down the road beyond their terms and business plans. Almost all CDR currently occurring is from land use, and mainly biomass (with some soil carbon). A main technical session on removals has occurred at COP28 and may be worth a look if you need to dig deeper by listening to the scientific and technical experts. The video includes an opening explainer presentation by Oliver Geden who has been the perennial expert on removals and overshoot for some years.
Part of the reason this matters is that New Zealand’s 2030 NDC still relies on removals, likely purchased overseas. There could be more demand than removals available to purchase.
BREAKING:
A surprise resolution to the problem of who will host of next year’s COP: Azerbaijan! (Guardian report)