BONUS: Was the latest COP summit just a cop-out?

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Episode Summary

This year's COP27 in Egypt gave hope to some, finally a summit on climate change on the African continent, home to dozens of countries that face the dangers of rising sea levels, as well as desertification and droughts due to the destabilizing effects of global warming. But delegates had little to cheer about after the global meeting concluded - the creation of a fund for loss and damage for poorer nations was one small win, but nothing was agreed on for the phasing out of fossil fuels or emissions that made any meaningful difference since the last pledges made at COP26 in Glasgow. The EU's Green Chief summed up the conference saying "The world will not thank us when they hear only excuses tomorrow." In this special episode of One Decision, as the world fails to act, we go to two nations ravaged by the effects of climate change - the Pacific Island Nation of Kiribati and Pakistan.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: You're listening to a special episode of One Decision. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. The Egyptian presidency desperately tried to persuade world leaders to agree on a draft proposal tackling climate change last week, having taken the baton from the previous hosts of the summit in Glasgow in 2021. COP 27, much like its predecessor COP 26, failed to inspire the sense of urgency sought by campaigners and activists around the world that we are moving too slowly to tackle the climate crisis. The United Nations took it one step further, saying last month that it was already too late. 1.5 degrees is dead, read headlines around the world. What that means is that global pledges to cut emissions at a rate that would mean the earth warming no more than 1.5 degrees. So is it a death knell or do we still have some hope? It depends on where in the world you ask that question. Today, we're visiting two nations who both are facing growing, and in one case, existential threats from the rising climate crisis wreaking havoc on our global weather systems. We spoke recently to ambassador Tebororo Tito, the former president of Kiribati. You may have heard of the tiny Pacific island nation. They made headlines in recent years appealing to the global community. If rising sea levels continue, their nation may be the first climate change casualty as their home is set to sink completely beneath sea levels by the next century. Some of their islands are already lost to the rising ocean waters.

INTERVIEW: AMBASSADOR TEBORORO TITO

Tito: What is happening on the ground? Let me say, you know, the coastlines are being destroyed. The, you know, like the breadfruit, the taro, the many things that the plants that we depend on, they're dying because they cannot withstand high salinity. Right? But when the sea is penetrating the island, inundating the island because, you know, that that we are not protecting the coast, once you don't protect them, the sea gets into the ground and then start, you know, affecting everything in the ground. And other plants die, then there's kind of a drought in itself because people will not have enough to eat or not enough crops to to to sell, right, for economic gains.

Mcfarlane: Tito paints a nightmarish picture. His fellow citizens fighting a drought surrounded by water, the land they live on growing smaller and smaller with every passing year. Kiribati is a strong symbol of the existential threat of climate change. As ambassador to the UN, he takes his nation's fight to the international stage every year, but he is frustrated that so little has been done.

Tito: So this is the problem as I see it. We can continue to talk and talk, and even now I'm talking about it. Yeah. And there will be more and more conferences, more reports, more collection, data collection, more analysis, more offices set up. Yeah. But there's and there will be money for those things, but not to go down so and do the project that I'm talking.

Mcfarlane: On that note, you're here in New York for the UN General Assembly. You're here to talk to representatives and to wave the flag for Kiribati and to lobby for change. What is it that you are asking for? Because really what you need is for the waters to stop rising, and that can only happen if global efforts to combat climate change, stop global warming, so what is at the top of your agenda?

Tito: Yeah, that's one side of it, the way you have to tell the world, stop burning more fossil fuels, stop, right, stop putting out more carbon dioxide and gas into the carbon, the CO2, the carbon into the atmosphere, stop putting more carbon gas. Let's reverse the carbon cycle, but even to ask countries to cut down on the the emission. Even that, I I don't see much seriousness in that. Okay. You have people saying, oh, we'll do this. We'll do this. But if you look, you know, really deep into it, they are not serious enough. But it's good in the talking. They look serious, but deep inside, they're not.

Mcfarlane: Running out of time, the Kiribatis have done something extraordinary and problematic. They have a plan B. Half the nation's population, around 110,000 people, will eventually be forced to evacuate off the main island of Tarawa by 2050 because of the rising waters. A few years ago, back in 2014, the Kiribati government purchased eight square miles on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu for around $9,000,000. The idea being that people would still have somewhere to call home if all hope fails.

Tito: Okay. I call that plan B when we have to move. Right? Of course, they want to sell it. They put in the market. They want to sell it for $3,000,000. But then when our former president bought it, he bought it for 9,000,000, say, I need it quickly. I I want this. Okay? So when it was sold to Kiribati, it was not sovereign land. It's still a land under the Fiji government sovereignty. And so there's a to me, there's it's not really a matter of buying land and saying this is for Kiribati people. Because to move people there, you can imagine if it doesn't belong to the government of Kiribati and belongs to another government. Kiribati and Fiji are trying to negotiate the issue of sovereignty.

Mcfarlane: Kiribati might own the rights to inhabit Plan B Island and do with it what they will, but it is sovereign territory belonging to the nation of Fiji. It's an important issue. Sovereignty and nationhood is inextricably tied to the land of its citizens. Your identity as a citizen of a place is obviously derived from that physical place itself. Just ask any Kurds, or Palestinians, or Israelis. Kiribati's Plan B Island, while providing their citizens shelter, could eventually mean the end of Kiribati as a people, as an identity.

Tito: I don't have the answer, but I I raised it to many of these international lawyers. And I said, what are you doing there? We need to think. Maybe another meeting, more meetings of the UN, especially the legal brains of the United Nations, those who are now in the, you know, International Law Commission. These are the legal brains of the world, the best of them. They come together and talk, keep talking, and then produce another law to accommodate a problem that hasn't happened yet. And so this is a problem. And I put it to them, they say we don't have the answer.

Mcfarlane: This is a difficult and a truly awful thing to consider, but talk to us about how that feels for you on an emotional level. The consideration that your homeland may, in one day, in the not too distant future, cease to be? And what does that mean for nationhood? What is nationhood when it is not tied to a physical place?

Tito: Yes. It is a sad issue to come to think. If it's gonna happen, yes. Be very sad for the people of Kiribati if they have no no land, no country. It's all water. Now, of course, there's a big conversation about that. The Pacific countries have already initiated, you know, discussions on that. I think the International Law Commission is looking at that. The maritime boundary is an issue because they will shrink them and eventually they keep on shrinking. Our islands slowly, you know, shrink and eventually they disappear. Right? If the islands just happen to to sink below water, then there will be no more land. And then there will be no country. Right? So that is a hypothetical question which is now being addressed by the International Law Commission, especially. I think they've been tasked to do that. And we are all now submitting maritime boundaries to the UN, and we will agree that as a Pacific region that this is the way to go. Our maritime boundaries should not be allowed to shrink as a result of the sea level rise caused by climate. I mean, I think we would agree on that.

Mcfarlane: Part of Kiribati's struggle may be down to the fact that it's a contender for mañana politics. Their existential threat is quantified by models predicting future levels of the rising sea. For many world leaders, their in-trays are already stuffed full of problems for today, competing for attention and funding. Poverty levels, struggling public services, health facilities, rising crime. It's difficult to allocate meaningful action and money to an invisible foe many, many political terms in the future. Worrying then is the fact that there are actually many signs of the climate crisis affecting lives today. Scientists described the summer heat crisis in Europe this year as the continent's worst drought in 500 years. Harvests plunged, and the empty rivers caused havoc for the energy sector, already battered from the Ukraine Russia war. Hydroelectric power dropped by a significant 20%, according to a report from the Global Drought Observatory. But climate change doesn't just make everything warmer. It wreaks havoc on weather systems. And this year, not many places were as visibly devastated as Pakistan, which was brutalized by once in a generation flooding. We spoke to Javed Ali Khan, the UN's Habitat Program Director for Pakistan.

INTERVIEW: JAVED ALI KHAN, UN-HABITAT

Khan: So it pulled away the bridges. It pulled away anything that came on the way, a constructed road or bridges, very huge structures, even multistory buildings collapsed in the wink of an eye, you can say. Because I think I don't know if you have witnessed some of the pictures or the photographs or videos, short clips that did capture such incidents. So what is happening that the standing crops and cultivable areas are very badly impacted, and 60% of Pakistan's population's livelihood depend on agriculture. So in fact, in multiple ways, it has destroyed the livelihood and the support system which people had stored it for them, their own consumption or for marketing or whatsoever. So everything got lost. So the emergency response is now what is happening that it is also creating waterborne diseases because the stagnant pool of water is creating communicable diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, and many children particularly are dying because of the widely spreading waterborne diseases and the drinking water is also not available, safe drinking water.

Mcfarlane: Pakistan's southwestern borders lie on the coast, as does one of its most popular cities, Karachi. While the government works towards rebuilding the tens of millions of dollars worth of damage from the summer's flooding, there is another threat looming on the horizon, one that faces other coastal cities across the world, the same threat that could be existential to the nation of Kiribati.

Khan: So sea level rise is really a serious phenomenon, and it is impacting the coastal cities and the coastal villages. So, there has been realization of the challenges, but you can imagine from the other side that we have limited capacity, we have limited resources, because you know Pakistan just contributes less than 1% of the GHG emission, but Pakistan has always ranked from the top five or 10 countries. Mostly it remains into one to five threat level by the global ranking skills.

Mcfarlane: The inequality of some of the world's most climate vulnerable countries being among the smallest carbon emitters was among the subjects of the recent COP 27 in Egypt. Previous funding models split the world between rich or developed nations, and poor or developing nations. But this year in Egypt, developed nations have argued that now, some of those developing countries like India and China are among the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and should not be beneficiaries to the extent that they were under the models dating back to the nineties. While much of the international community squabbles over who should and shouldn't pay what's known as climate reparations, Khan argues it shouldn't be a system of penalties and punishments doled out among the nations, but that they all needed incentives to step up the fight against climate change. Was there too much talk and not enough action? I asked him.

Khan: No. I think I am always very positive and very hopeful. And I have seen things changing as well. Because in Pakistan, my own agency, UN-Habitat, has signed an agreement. There was a World Urban Forum, the eleventh World Urban Forum in Poland. I was also there. So what happened that we got signed an MOU with the Ministry of Climate Change and the Korean government. So, what will happen under that agreement is that Korea will reduce their global emission targets in Pakistan and they will claim carbon credit. So, what is happening is that it provides a win win situation that developed countries invest in developing countries to reduce their global emission because at the country level or on the land, the borderlines exist, but in the atmosphere there is no borderline. So, we need to promote these kinds of instruments, these kinds of propositions which helps both ways. Because now I have learned through my experience that there has to be a win win situation. It is not one winner and one loser. So it has to be a kind of a partnership which really helps to claim credit or to claim pride, them as well and us as well because it is a global phenomenon and cannot be addressed in isolation. It has to be a wider platform, a wider mechanism by which all wins and nobody loses.

ANALYSIS

Mcfarlane: Leaders and negotiators working into the night and well after deadline over the weekend finally managed to wrangle an agreement on a fund for developing nations damaged by climate change. But it was an anticlimax, and many were disheartened that even after the UN's devastating judgment on the effort to contain warming to 1.5, it was not enough to stir more meaningful action. The secretary general had this grim assessment.

Guterres: Let's be clear. Our planet is still in the emergency room. We need to drastically reduce emissions now, and this is an issue this COP did not address. A fund for loss and damage is essential,

Mcfarlane: but it's not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map or turns an entire African country to desert. Next year's summit is due to be held in the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf nation that risks losing around 6% of its coastal territory to rising seawaters. And like its other oil rich neighbors, it also stands to lose from its main source of income, the exploration and exporting of fossil fuels, if more of its customers slowly shift to renewables. Whether nations will be able to diversify and wean themselves off fuels that are choking the environment and warming the atmosphere, only time will tell, but it is time that many say we are already out of. This has been a special episode of One Decision. If you enjoyed this conversation, why not subscribe to us? We drop new episodes every Thursday. Thank you for listening and see you next time.