Category Archives: Cop26

Beef, soy and palm oil products linked to deforestation still imported into UK

Posted on by

Campaigners accuse government of failing to stick to promises made at Cop26 climate summit in 2021

Beef, soy and palm oil products driving deforestation are still being imported into the UK, despite government promises this practice would end, data has revealed.

Campaigners have criticised the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for failing to put practices in place to stop the import of goods from areas with high deforestation rates. This is despite the government having promised at the Cop26 climate conference in 2021 to implement the rules.

Continue reading...

Alok Sharma backs bid to lift ban on onshore windfarms in England

Posted on by

Tory MP becomes latest member of party to get behind push to drop moratorium imposed in 2014

The president of the Cop26 climate summit Alok Sharma has become the latest Conservative party MP to support lifting the ban on new onshore windfarms.

Sharma has joined his former boss Boris Johnson, who nominated him for a peerage, in backing an amendment to government legislation in an attempt to drop the moratorium on onshore wind.

Continue reading...

UK joins calls for World Bank reform to focus funding on climate crisis

Posted on by

Alok Sharma’s intervention puts pressure on Trump-appointed Bank chief who faces calls to resign

The UK has joined calls for sweeping reforms to the World Bank, to focus much-needed funding on the climate crisis, saying that its current structures are not working.

The intervention from Alok Sharma, the current president of the UN climate talks, heaps further pressure on beleaguered World Bank chief, David Malpass. He has faced calls to resign over an apparently climate-dismissing stance, and the Bank’s perceived failures to deliver climate finance.

Continue reading...

Young people demand climate justice in run-up to Cop27 UN talks

Posted on by

Activists from global south demand recompense for damage from countries most responsible for crisis

Young people from some of the countries most affected by climate breakdown have warned they are not victims but a force to be reckoned with in the run-up to a UN climate conference in Egypt.

Led by climate groups across Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of activists from countries that are the least responsible for the crisis but are experiencing the worst impacts have gathered in Tunisia to prepare for what they say will be a collective fight for justice for their countries and communities, which they will take to Cop27 next month.

Continue reading...

What does the US-China row mean for climate change?

Posted on by

Analysis: breakdown of cooperation between world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters over Taiwan could spell disaster for global warming targets

China’s decision to halt cooperation with the US over the climate crisis has provoked alarm, with seasoned climate diplomats urging a swift resumption of talks to help stave off worsening global heating.

On Friday, Beijing announced a series of measures aimed at retaliating against the US for the “egregious provocation” of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, visiting Taiwan. China, which considers Taiwan its territory and has launched large-scale military exercises near the island, said it will stop working with the US on climate change, along with other key issues.

Continue reading...

Beekeepers and communists: how environmentalists started a global conversation

Posted on by

The world’s longest serving environment correspondent explains the origins of a slow and continuing journey

It all began with Högertrafikomläggningen, Swedish for “the right-hand traffic reorganisation”.

On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured.

Continue reading...

‘Relentless’ destruction of rainforest continuing despite Cop26 pledge

Posted on by

Tropics lost 11.1m hectares of tree cover in 2021, including forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss, finds World Resources Institute

Pristine rainforests were once again destroyed at a relentless rate in 2021, according to new figures, prompting concerns governments will not meet a Cop26 deal to halt and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade.

From the Brazilian Amazon to the Congo basin, the tropics lost 11.1m hectares of tree cover last year, including 3.75m ha of primary forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss.

Continue reading...

‘Lawless logging’ in DRC raises concerns over $500m forests deal signed by Boris Johnson

Posted on by

Critics say cash from UK, Norway, France and Germany could be wasted as damning report reveals illegalities, corruption and environmental crimes

Environmental groups have raised concerns about a $500m (£380m) forest protection deal signed by Boris Johnson at Cop26, after a damning report into the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s “lawless” logging sector.

Johnson signed the letter of intent on behalf of the Central African Forest Initiative (Cafi) for a 10-year agreement which includes objectives to protect high-value forests and peatlands. Of the £200m committed to protecting the Congo basin by the UK at Cop26, £32m was given to Cafi from the aid budget.

Continue reading...

Tory peer attended Cop26 summit for Russia, UN list shows

Posted on by

Former energy minister Greg Barker went to climate talks as part of Russian Federation party

A Conservative peer attended Cop26 in Glasgow as part of Russia’s group of participants at the UN climate summit, the Guardian can reveal.

Greg Barker, a former energy minister when David Cameron was prime minister, attended the talks as part of the party of the Russian Federation, according to a list published by the UN.

Continue reading...

How satellites may hold the key to the methane crisis

Posted on by

A new generation of detectors will be many times better at tracking discharges of the dangerous greenhouse gas

Last month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported that it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said.

Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, says Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a methane researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis . For example, the instrument led to the discovery of huge methane leaks in Turkmenistan that researchers were not aware of before, she says.

Continue reading...

Agribusiness giants tried to thwart EU deforestation plan after Cop26 pledge

Posted on by

Firms sought to weaken draft EU law banning food imports linked to deforestation eight days after vowing to accelerate action

Five of the world’s biggest agribusiness firms sought to weaken a draft EU law banning food imports linked to deforestation, eight days after pledging to accelerate their forest protection efforts at Cop26, documents seen by the Guardian show.

Forest protection hopes had been raised when the CEOs of 10 food companies with a combined revenue of nearly $500bn (£373bn) vowed to “accelerate sector-wide action” towards eliminating commodity-driven deforestation as the climate summit began on 2 November.

Continue reading...

Only 6% of G20 pandemic recovery spending ‘green’, analysis finds

Posted on by

Review of G20 fiscal stimulus spending counters many countries’ pledges to ‘build back better’

Only about 6% of pandemic recovery spending has been “green”, an analysis of the $14tn that G20 countries have poured into economic stimulus.

Additionally, about 3% of the record amounts governments around the world have spent to rescue the global economy from the Covid-19 pandemic has been spent on activities that will increase carbon emissions, such as subsidies to coal, and will do little to reduce greenhouse gases or shift the world to a low-carbon footing.

Continue reading...

‘We’ll get it done. Come hell, high water or Covid’: Can 2022 be a super year for nature?

Posted on by

Biodiversity talks in Kunming are likely to be delayed again, but the world urgently needs a Paris-style agreement for nature

It was supposed to be a “super year for nature”: 2020 was going to be “a major opportunity to bring nature back from the brink”. But then the coronavirus pandemic set in and long-held plans to tackle the environmental crisis, kickstarted at Davos in January, where the financial elite underscored the risks of global heating and biodiversity loss to human civilisation, never happened. The biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, Cop15 in Kunming, China, where world leaders were expected to strike a deal to halt and reverse the destruction of ecosystems by reaching a Paris-style agreement for nature was postponed until 2021. The Cop26 climate summit was also postponed for a year.

As we enter 2022, there has still not been a super year for nature. Substantive negotiations for the biodiversity Cop15 meeting in China, the little sister to the climate convention, are likely to be delayed a fourth time as a result of the Omicron variant. Preparatory talks planned for January 2022 in Geneva have been pushed back – again – until March in a process that is feeling increasingly cursed, despite the best efforts of organisers.

Continue reading...

Barbados can be a beacon for the region – if it avoids some of its neighbours’ mistakes | Kenneth Mohammed

Posted on by

The Caribbean’s newest republic must avoid the corruption that has hampered Trinidad and Tobago and use its presidency to ensure good governance

The charismatic prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, elevated her country’s status in the world with her stinging speech at Cop26 in Glasgow last month. This speech resonated throughout the West Indies, a region that has largely been devoid of a strong leader to give these vulnerable small island developing states (SIDS) a voice in the climate crisis debate. The survival of SIDS such as Barbados depends on the finance to invest in measures to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C, which was the Paris agreement’s main objective.

Mottley called on all leaders of developed countries to step up their efforts as she outlined a solution embodied in flexible development finance. First, create a loss and damage fund made up of 1% of revenues from fossil fuels (which she estimated would amount to about $70bn, or £50bn, a year), accessible only to countries that have suffered a climate disaster and loss of 5% of their economy.

Continue reading...

‘Taste this, it’s salty’: how rising seas are ruining the Gambia’s rice farmers

Posted on by

The farmers, mostly women, once grew enough but must now buy imported rice as the climate crisis edges them into poverty

In the sweltering heat of the late-morning west African sun, Aminata Jamba slashes at golden rice stalks with a sickle. “The rice is lovely,” she says, music playing in the background as her son, Sampa, silently harvests the grain. But even if the quality is high, the quantity is not.

While once Jamba could have expected to harvest enough rice to last the whole year, this year she reckons it will last three to four months. After that, she will have to look elsewhere for a way to feed her family and make enough money to live.

Continue reading...

Blowing the house down: life on the frontline of extreme weather in the Gambia

Posted on by

A storm took the roof off Binta Bah’s house before torrential rain destroyed her family’s belongings, as poverty combines with the climate crisis to wreak havoc on Africa’s smallest mainland country

The windstorm arrived in Jalambang late in the evening, when Binta Bah and her family were enjoying the evening cool outside. “But when we first heard the wind, the kids started to run and go in the house,” she says.

First they went in one room but the roof – a sheet of corrugated iron fixed only by a timbere pole – flew off. They ran into another but the roof soon went there too.

Continue reading...

Yes, Cop26 could have gone further – but it still brought us closer to a 1.5C world | James Shaw

Posted on by

The window to achieve that goal is vanishingly small, but it is there. Now we must seize this one last chance

Like many others, I would like to have seen a stronger outcome from Cop26. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that much was achieved – and the final outcome does get us much closer to where we need to be than where we were a few weeks ago.

For the first time countries agreed to take action on fossil fuels. Yes, it could have gone further – but let’s not forget that never before has there been a single word uttered on fossil fuels in any Cop agreement. So the agreed text is significant.

Continue reading...

Michael McCormack contradicts Barnaby Joyce on Nationals signing Cop26 pact

Posted on by

Ex-Nationals leader McCormack says any government agreement covers party, days after Joyce said ‘I did not sign it’

Former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack has contradicted Barnaby Joyce’s claim the Nationals did not sign off on the final communique of the Glasgow climate summit.

McCormack, the former Nationals leader, said any agreement the Australian government signs also covers the National party, and left open the option of the Morrison government proposing a higher emissions reduction target for 2035.

Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

Continue reading...

China urges developed countries to take the lead in cutting out coal

Posted on by

After dilution of Cop26 wording, China says developing nations cannot make green transition without support

As Cop26 drew to a close over the weekend, Chinese media highlighted Beijing’s contribution over the last fortnight in Glasgow. “The Chinese delegation took a constructive attitude, actively communicated and negotiated with all parties,” said CCTV’s main evening news bulletin on Sunday. “[It] provided China’s wisdom and China’s solution …”

But when China and India chose the last few hours of negotiations to push for the language on coal to be diluted from “phase out” to “phase down”, both countries came under nearly immediate fire from commentators. Cop president Alok Sharma later urged both countries to “explain themselves and what they did to the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world”.

Continue reading...

Palm oil land grabs ‘trashing’ environment and displacing people

Posted on by

Growing rush for land is destroying ecosystems and disrupting lives to satisfy global demand for goods, study warns

Businesses and governments must stop the growing rush of commodities-driven land grabbing, which is “trashing” the environment and displacing people, says new research.

Palm oil and cobalt were extreme risks for land grabs according to an analysis of 170 commodities by research firm Verisk Maplecroft published last week. It also warned that, alongside cobalt, other minerals used for “clean” technology, including silicon, zinc, copper, were high risk and undermined the sector’s label.

Continue reading...