COP27 — or the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — is here and Australia’s already being criticised on day one for not pulling its weight. And not just because our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decided not to show up.
Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley criticised wealthy nations for failing the developing world by not doing their fair share of the work, despite literally causing the problem in the first place.
She said on day one of COP27 industrialised nations had long achieved prosperity at the expense of the poor, who were being forced to pay again as victims of the climate crisis.
“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution,” Mottley said.
“Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.”
She said we were facing a crisis that would see one billion people become climate refugees in the next 30 years if we keep going at our current rate of inaction.
“We know that by 2050 the world’s 21 million climate refugees today will become 1 billion,” she said.
Where are they gonna go?
Mottley’s speech came after a new report revealed Australia, the US, UK and Canada have fallen billions of dollars short of their climate funding targets for developing nations and were the worst offenders for not doing their “fair share”.
The analysis by Carbon Brief published on Monday actually measured each country’s responsibility to fix the climate crisis by comparing its emissions with its share of international climate finance.
Wealthy countries previously pledged to contribute a total of $100 billion USD in climate funding to developing countries by 2020, but basically some of us simply haven’t.
Based on its emissions, the US owes about $40 billion of the $100 billion but it provided only $7.6 billion in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.
The second worst offender was Canada, closely followed by Australia. We each only gave about a third of what we owed, while the UK coughed up three-quarters of its target but still came up $1.4 billion short.
And it’s not like we can be forgiven because hey, everyone’s fucking up — almost half of the 24 countries who pledged funding actually went over and above their commitments. Japan supplied more than double what it had to — a surplus of $7.5 billion dollars.
The $100 billion pledge was intended to help vulnerable communities around the world adapt to the changing climate and help poorer nations cut emissions.
This is more urgent than ever after a UN report last week found that limiting global heating to a maximum temperature rise of 1.5C to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, which was the entire point of the Paris Agreement, was now pretty much impossible.
The report concluded that given the “woefully inadequate” progress made on emissions reductions in recent years, there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. This means that even if all countries meet their 2030 targets (which looks unlikely anyway) global temperatures will still likely rise to about 2.5C by the end of the century.
In other words, delayed or lack of action has in the most formal and official sense now doomed us all. Seriously people, this is it. The end of the road.
We’ll be following along with the COP27 over the next two weeks, so keep up to date with us.
