DeBriefed 25 October 2024: COP16 kicks off; ‘Quantum leap’ needed for 1.5C; Where countries stand on reversing nature loss

Carbon Brief Staff

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

§ This week

COP16 kicks off

HOLA CALI: The largest ever UN biodiversity summit, COP16, is officially underway in Cali, Colombia. At the talks, countries will grapple with how to put the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – often described as the “Paris Agreement for nature” – into action, alongside debates on finance for developing countries and how to best share the benefits from genetic information.

TRACKING NEGOTIATIONS: Carbon Brief has produced an interactive grid of where each party stands on the key negotiating issues and a live tracker of the texts under negotiation. On Tuesday, Carbon Brief’s team of five journalists on the ground in Cali held an online webinar on the key issues up for discussion at the summit. A recording is available.

§ Around the world

  • CLIMATE PLANS: The UK must decide “how far and how fast” to cut emissions amid preparations to release a new national climate pledge at the COP29 climate summit in November, the Guardian reported. Carbon Brief understands that the US, Brazil and UAE are planning to do the same, three months before the deadline. 
  • LOBBYING: An “influential” group of 30 oil and gas producers drafted “detailed plans” for “dismantling” key US climate rules after the upcoming presidential election, the Washington Post reported. Members of the group were “aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump”, the newspaper noted. 
  • CUBA CHAOS: At least six people were killed as Hurricane Oscar brought heavy rainfall to Cuba, according to the New York Times. 
  • ENERGY BOOST: South-east Asia must accelerate clean-energy investments to $190bn by 2035 – around five times current levels – to meet climate goals, according to a new International Energy Agency (IEA) report covered by Reuters. 

§ 3,071

The number of “square brackets” remaining in negotiating documents at COP16, as of Thursday night, according to Carbon Brief’s COP16 text tracker. (Square brackets denote areas of disagreement in UN texts. They must all be resolved before countries can reach consensus.)

§ Latest climate research

  • The extreme floods that hit Sudan in August were made nearly 20% more intense by human-driven climate change, according to a new World Weather Attribution analysis.
  • Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a 1% increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was associated with a 6.3% jump in malaria cases the following month.
  • Over the past 30 years, polar bears have been increasingly exposed to a range of pathogens, due in part to the loss of sea ice habitat and rapid warming in the Arctic, a new PLOS One study said.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

Image (note)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain far off track to meet global climate goals, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2024 emissions gap report covered by Carbon Brief. The chart above, based on a figure from the report, shows how emissions will change by 2035 under current policy and under current national climate plans, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs). The chart compares this with the emissions reductions needed by 2035 to put the world on track with a scenario where global temperatures are kept to 1.5C (red) or 2C (pale red).

§ Spotlight

Where countries stand on reversing nature loss

This week, Carbon Brief reports on how countries plan to get back on track after the majority of them missed a deadline to release new nature pledges ahead of COP16.

In a cold and snowy Montreal in the depths of December 2022, countries agreed to the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), often referred to as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

The GBF is a list of four goals and 23 targets that collectively aim to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and to put Earth “in harmony with nature” by 2050.

At the Montreal talks, countries pledged to release new national plans to lay out how they plan to implement the goals and targets within their borders.

These plans are known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans, or “NBSAPs”.

Under the GBF and its underlying documents, countries agreed to submit new NBSAPs by the COP16 biodiversity summit, which is currently taking place in Cali, Colombia.

Carbon Brief analysis shows that just 30 countries and the EU met the deadline to submit an updated NBSAP ahead of COP16.

Since then, a further five countries have published new NBSAPs, including COP16 host Colombia. 

That leaves 162 parties that are yet to submit updated NBSAPs.

Image - Countries that had submitted updated NBSAPs by 14 October (green). Data source: UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Map by Joe Goodman for Carbon Brief - Countries that had submitted updated NBSAPs by 14 October (green). (note)

Countries that were unable to meet the deadline to submit NBSAPs ahead of COP16 were requested to instead submit national targets. These submissions simply list biodiversity targets that countries will aim for – without an accompanying plan for how they will be achieved.

As of 25 October, 113 parties had submitted national targets.

Next steps

One of the major tasks for negotiators in Cali will be to decide how to move forward after the majority of countries failed to produce new NBSAPs ahead of the talks.

On Thursday, a draft decision submitted for review by COP16 president and Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad laid out the next steps for countries when it comes to NBSAPs.

The text still contains some brackets, meaning countries will need to negotiate the finer details before it can be officially adopted.

The draft “urges” countries that have not yet done so to release new NBSAPs “as soon as possible”. (In UN language terms, “urges” is stronger than “invites” or “encourages”, but not as strong as “requests” or “instructs”.)

Eyebrows may be raised at the failure to include a specific timeframe for when laggard countries should submit new NBSAPs. 

One NGO observer told Carbon Brief that they had hoped to see the language say “as soon as possible, but no later than the end of 2025”, adding:

“Generally having a clear deadline is good to keep countries to account. ‘As soon as possible’ is commonly understood as ‘really really soon’ and we can only hope that parties see it that way too.”

The text also “requests” the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a major multilateral environmental fund, “provide[s] timely support to all eligible parties, aligned with national circumstances and needs, upon request, to enable them to” release new NBSAPs.

It comes after developing countries said that a lack of timely funding from the GEF had prevented them from being able to produce new biodiversity plans on time.

§ Watch, read, listen

‘BLENDED’ FINANCE: Writing in Le Monde ahead of COP29, Mette Frederiksen and Mia Mottley, the prime ministers of Denmark and Barbados, respectively, argued in favour of scaling up state-backed “blended” finance instruments to channel private investment for climate action.

COP16 OUTSIDER: Vox examined why the US is the only country in the world, other than the Vatican, to refuse to join the UN biodiversity convention.

PANTANAL JAGUARS: A podcast by the Brazilian Report covered how extreme fires in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands are affecting jaguars, “the biome’s most emblematic species”.

§ Coming up

§ Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected].
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