This weekly round-up brings you key climate news from the past seven days, including climate experts’ reactions to Donald Trump’s election victory and a disappointing end to the UN biodiversity summit.
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1. ‘Deeply Troubling’: Climate Experts Weigh in on Trump Election Victory
The world is reacting to Donald Trump’s presidential election victory on Wednesday, with analysts and commentators weighing in on what a second Trump presidency will mean for the fight against climate change in and outside the US.
In a statement, the Green Party of Northern Ireland described the election’s outcome as “deeply troubling,” hinting at the “chaos and damage” of the last Trump presidency to climate action globally. Meanwhile, the Center for International Environmental Law said Trump’s victory will have “profound impacts” on environmental protection, climate action and human rights.
Dan Lashof, US Director at World Resources Institute, said in a statement on Wednesday that “[t]here is no denying that another Trump presidency will stall national efforts to tackle the climate crisis and protect the environment.”
A Carbon Brief analysis published in March found that a second Trump election win could add 4 billion tonnes to US emissions by 2030, the equivalent of the annual emissions of the EU and Japan combined.
“One can only hope that Donald Trump will put conspiracy theories to the side and take the decisive action to address the climate crisis that the American people deserve,” Lashof added.
The country would also miss on its emissions reduction pledge by a “wide margin,” according to Carbon Brief, with emissions set to fall just 28% from 2005 levels by the decade’s end. Under the Paris Agreement, the US is committed to achieve a 50-52% reduction by then.
“We are poised to enter a much darker and much scarier time, whose consequences we will have be living with the consequences of that for the rest of our lives, even just from a climate perspective,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leader of the progressive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives known as “the Squad.”
“I wish I could say that we can undo all the damage that we are poised to endure but there are some things we will not recover from. We will not recover from blowing past 1.5 degrees centigrade, or 2 degrees centigrade of warming. And we will live with the consequences of that for the rest of our lives,” Ocasio-Cortez, who on Tuesday won reelection representing the Bronx in New York, said.
2. ‘Not Ambitious Enough’: COP16 Delegates Disappointed at Lack of Finance Deal Despite Breakthroughs on Genetic Data and Indigenous Representation
The UN biodiversity summit, COP16, was meant to advance progress on nature conservation. Instead, it has left many disappointed and several key issues unresolved.
In Cali, these same governments were supposed to “convert words into actions” and deliver on their nature conservation pledges. These included a goal of restoring and protecting at least 30% of the Earth’s terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas by 2030, better known as the 30X30 target.
But key issues of COP16 such as funding and monitoring of progress were left unanswered as the final plenary session came to an end in the early hours of Saturday, instead of Friday evening as originally scheduled. By then, more than half of countries representatives had already left the summit.
Delegates agreed to set up a global fund to collect economic resources from the use of digitalized genetic sequences and to ensure their fair and equitable distribution based on criteria such as conservation needs and biodiversity richness in the countries. They also agreed to establish a subsidiary body that will include Indigenous Peoples in future decision-making processes on nature conservation. The deal, described by many as a “watershed moment,” builds on a growing movement to recognize the role of Indigenous peoples in protecting land and helping combat climate change.
But a promise countries made in 2022 to raise $200 billion a year by 2030, including $20 billion to be given by rich countries to developing nations, to fund nature protection, did not materialize. COP16 also failed to achieve one of its main goals: establish how progress on this decade’s 30×30 target would be monitored. A draft agreement may have been ready but countries ran out of time to discuss the most pressing and divisive topics, the Guardian reported.
3. 2024 ‘Virtually Certain’ to Be Hottest in History, Marking ‘New Milestone’ in Temperature Records
New data published by the EU earth observation agency Copernicus on Thursday shows that October was yet another abnormally warm month worldwide, the second-hottest on record and the 15th in a 16-month period for which the global-average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
For 2024 not to beat the record-breaking temperature of 2023, the average temperature anomaly for the rest of the year “would have to drop to almost zero to not be the warmest year,” Copernicus concluded.
“After 10 months of 2024 it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels according to the ERA5 dataset,” said Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Burgess called on countries gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week for the UN climate summit COP29 to “raise ambition” in light of the “new milestone in global temperature records.”
A UN report published ahead of the major summit indicated that current pledges put the world on track for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1C over the course of this century. It further warned that cuts of 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035 are needed to get on track for 1.5C of warming.
4. Second US Withdrawal From Paris Agreement Would Undermine Global Efforts to Halt Climate Change, UN Chief Says
The UN Secretary-General has warned of the potential repercussions of a Trump presidency on international climate targets and policies amid the possibility of a second US exit from the Paris accord.
Just months after taking office in 2017, former US president Donald Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, a move that only took effect three years later owing to UN regulations.The Paris deal was drafted in 2015 to strengthen the global response to the growing threat of climate change. It set out a framework for limiting global warming to below 1.5C or “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Beyond this limit, experts warn that critical tipping points will be breached, leading to devastating and potentially irreversible consequences for several vital Earth systems that sustain a hospitable planet.
In June, a Trump campaign spokesperson told Politico that Trump would yank the US out of the Paris deal for the second time if he wins the presidency again in November.“
The Paris agreement can survive, but people sometimes can lose important organs or lose the legs and survive. But we don’t want a crippled Paris agreement. We want a real Paris agreement,” António Guterres, the UN chief, said. “It’s very important that the United States remain in the Paris Agreement, and more than remain in the Paris agreement, that the United States adopts the kind of policies that are necessary to make the 1.5 degrees still a realistic objective.”
5. Drought Conditions Affecting All US States Except Alaska and Kentucky, Greatest Number on Record
Little over 45% of the country and some 54% of the land in the lower 48 states are in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM), which updates its data every Thursday. This represents an 81% rise since the week prior (16-22 October) and a 71.8% rise compared to September.
The number of people affected grew by 153.5% from September, reaching 150.3 million people countrywide.
“The U.S. saw a huge expansion of drought for the fourth week in a row. Conditions worsened in every state from the Plains to the East. Drought is present in every U.S. state except Alaska and Kentucky,” the latest bulletin read. It added that this was “the greatest number of states in drought in U.S. Drought Monitor history.”
