Three days later than planned, the third, final part of the IPCC reports was finally completed on Sunday evening. This time it was about scenarios to prevent climate change. Rarely did those last stretches take so long.
The negotiations were a logistical nightmare: with thirty authors and four hundred delegates from about one hundred and ninety countries from almost all time zones of the world, they reached an agreement by video link on the summary of a complicated scientific report.
It had already been decided in advance to allow ten days for it, while in the past the job was usually completed within a week. There were three daily sessions of two to three hours. For the European participants, these took place in the morning from about five o’clock, in the afternoon or until late in the evening. And then they were lucky in Europe, because one of the chairmen of the negotiations, who had to be present at most of the sessions, was based in London.
Far into injury time
Still, it wasn’t just the complicated logistics that pushed the negotiations so far into stoppage time. Gert-Jan Nabuurs, professor at Wageningen University and one of the authors of the chapter on land use (agriculture, deforestation and reforestation), noticed that the tension and stress were great among all participants. Much bigger than in 2007, when Nabuurs was also involved in the preparation of an IPCC report.
“Countries are well aware that something has to be done,” Nabuurs said in a telephone conversation, before rushing to The Hague on Monday afternoon for a press conference. “The consequences are now greater than fifteen years ago, there is a lot at stake. Everyone knows that the policy is going to hurt more and more.”
Also read the analysis of the report: IPCC: Emissions must be reduced immediately to limit warming to 1.5°C
That explains why the negotiations on both other reports did not require additional time. They were about the ‘hard’ science: the foundations of climate science and the consequences of global warming. The third report is about what we can do about it, and therefore about measures with major economic consequences.
Nabuurs does not want to go too deeply into the negotiations. They take place behind closed doors – or in this case in a closed video system – so that participants can speak freely. Critics sometimes accuse the IPCC of turning science into a kind of political negotiation. But science itself is not up for discussion in these sessions. The underlying report, many hundreds of pages, is finished, the conversations are only about the summary with policy conclusions. “Sentence by sentence, and sometimes even word for word, the text is read,” says Nabuurs, who says that there was a considerable delay from day one.
Most of the discussion takes place between developing countries and developed countries. “We are seeing a rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries,” says Nabuurs. “In richer countries, emissions level off or decrease slightly. Developing countries therefore fear that they will be blamed for the rising emissions. While these are partly caused by rich countries that have moved their polluting industries to low-wage countries.”
According to Nabuurs, there is a lot of old pain between poor and rich countries. This also has to do with the way in which the annual climate conferences are conducted. Industrialized countries have promised a lot of money to developing countries to finance their climate policies, but they do not keep those promises.
Elmar Kriegler, of the German Climate Institute in Potsdam and also one of the authors, confirms this. “The costs of climate protection are economically absolutely feasible if you look at the global scale and across generations. But those costs differ greatly per region,” he says in a press release from the institute. This means that climate policy can become very expensive for CO2-intensive developing countries, while efficient industrialized countries such as Germany and the Netherlands will emerge as ‘winners’. They can phase out fossil fuels relatively easily. “A fair distribution, not only within individual countries, but also internationally, is therefore crucial,” said Kriegler.
especially about money
In recent days, there has been a lot of negotiation about money. Rich countries demanded restraint in the conclusions of the report. According to the AP news agency, Saudi Arabia also played a role in its own way. The country wanted to include in the text that fossil fuels will be needed for a long time to come – to lift the least developed countries out of poverty.
But often the negotiations were not about the big numbers, but about the subtle consequences of a single sentence. If climate scientists conclude that planting forests helps to reduce CO2 reduction, this can be translated in the summary as: ‘forest expansion contributes to the prevention of climate change’. For a developing country with many small farms, that sounds risky. Such a country requires an adaptation: ‘forest expansion could contribute to the prevention of climate change, provided it does not endanger the food supply’. This can be talked about for a long time.
“Anything that can contribute to an increase in food prices is seen as a risk by many countries,” says Nabuurs. It’s not that crazy, he thinks, in a world where about two billion people have just enough to eat. “Small price increases can have major consequences.”
Nabuurs is unable to say whether the fact that the meetings were held by video had an influence on the content of the conversations. But it was definitely different than usual. “We as scientists had a kind of check system next to the video image in which we could support each other in a discussion. Normally you sit in a room with the scientists. Now it often felt like you were defending something alone against one hundred and ninety countries.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of April 5, 2022
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