Today ends the climate summit in Madrid. Political leaders are still debating without having reached concrete agreements. But what exactly is being talked about at the summit? What do they have to agree on?
Well, despite the complexity and the multitude of meetings, debates and conferences that are taking place in various pavilions and halls in parallel, everything can be summed up in three specific points. Damage and loss, ambition plans and carbon market.
Regarding the Ambition Plans, each country had to present a plan before the beginning of the new decade indicating the commitments and goals assumed. These non-binding plans must show each country’s roadmap for reducing emissions. Amount of emissions to reduce established by themselves. They must indicate in the medium (2030) and long term (2050) how many emissions are to be reduced and explain how it will be done.
The totality of the measures at a global level must be such that they allow not to exceed the increase of 1.5ºC in global temperatures at the end of the century. For this to happen, on the one hand, the plans have to be truly ambitious, especially those of the most polluting ones. And, on the other hand, all countries have to present plans, the effort has to be global and the commitment multilateral. And despite the urgency of the situation, this is not happening.
In the first place, the plans are not being delivered on time, the delivery date was postponed to March 2020 and some time later until October 2020. Today still to pressure groups, precisely those most polluting , who want to push the delivery date back to 2023.
Second, not all countries are participating in the agreement. It is true that only, without counting Syria, because of its situation of civil war. Only one country does not plan to deliver the plan within the agreement. The problem is that this country is the country that has historically contributed the most to climate change and is one of the main emissions on a global scale today. If the US does not have an ambitious plan, not exceeding 1.5ºC will be impossible, especially considering the ambition of the rest of the countries, which today is far from compensating for this lack of commitment from the American country. It is difficult for them to demonstrate their own commitment, such as trying to compensate for the commitments of others.
Each country has been exposing throughout this week their plans, national strategies, innovative legislation and great successes in environmental conservation. They have also communicated the limitations they have and the main problems they face. But they are still far from presenting ambitious plans, and more than proposing concrete projects (no longer plans, programs and strategies) that really attack the root of the problem and that allow the ambitious objective of not exceeding 1.5ºC.
The European Union will present something more ambitious than what has been announced so far, or those were the promises of the President of the Commission. However, it will not do it on time, hiding behind wanting to present the best and most ambitious of plans. The old continent will be carbon neutral by 2050, or even sooner under this new plan. As has been communicated throughout COP25, Europe wants to be the most ambitious coalition. But despite the commitment, it is not yet exposed how these objectives will be met. And they don’t talk about the short term either, until now they have only focused on planning for the long term.
Perhaps the ambition is not so much to talk about future scenarios, which by the way have high uncertainty due to the characteristics of the topic to be dealt with. Perhaps the ambition should be given to the implementation of shock measures that really reverse the current situation of dependence on fossil combustion. Perhaps the most ambitious of plans is focusing its ambition on delaying that #TimeToActNow for the next decade. We hope we are wrong.