COP30: The world's climate future hinges on this meeting

0:00A special episode this week. On 10th November, the latest UN climate conference kicks off in Brazil. It's COP30, 10 years after the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, where countries agreed to try and keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And if not that, then no higher than 2 degrees. It was abundantly clear that those pledges were not going to be enough. We're on track for 2.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century. Yes, we are basically at 1.5 degrees of warming now. And various troubling climate tipping points are starting to loom. The world is a very different place politically, financially, climactically than it was at the Paris Agreement.

0:36And then, of course, the biggest elephant in the room is Trump and the way that global geopolitics has changed over the past year. Add to this, it feels like the public discourse around climate change has never felt so polarised. Polarised, yeah. Politicised and poisoned. Yeah. There's a widespread sense of sort of doubt over this COP. Do I think we're really going to get very far on this COP? Well, I'm pretty doubtful. Like, the bar couldn't get much lower. But it's still very important indeed. And that's what we're getting into this week. Welcome to the World, the Universe and Us from New Scientist.

1:08I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr Penny Sarche. And we're joined today by two special guests. Simon Evans is a climate journalist and the deputy editor of the website Carbon Brief, which is doing a lot of coverage around COP30 and we'll hear more about that later. And Rupert Reid is a climate philosopher, activist and the director of the Climate Majority Project. And Rupert, you've just put out a report about the need for adaptation to the climate crisis. We need to talk about adaptation. We'll get into that too. welcome both of you. Thank you. Thanks great to be here. Simon let's start with you.

1:38There does seem to be a sense of doom around this COP doesn't there? Why is that? I mean I guess there's the controversy of it being held in the Amazon amongst other things. Yeah I wouldn't really put that on my sort of top 10 list of reasons but I mean I guess you gave a great intro earlier but one thing that you didn't mention is that as part of the Paris Agreement there's this so-called ratchet mechanism where coming into COP, all of the countries in the world basically put out pledges in what were called nationally determined contributions towards cutting emissions. And heading into the summit that year, which I remember quite well, it was abundantly clear that those collectively, those pledges were not going to be enough to meet the moment.

2:23And so they built into the Paris Agreement a five-yearly ratchet mechanism whereby every five years, countries have to come back with new pledges that are meant to be more ambitious. So we're, as you said, we're 10 years into the Paris Agreement. And so now is the moment where countries are supposed to have been putting forward a new set of more ambitious pledges. A number of countries have done that, quite a few have done that. But something like, I forget the exact numbers, a significant number of countries have yet to do so. So I think something like maybe two thirds of global emissions are now covered by new pledges out to 2035, including people like China, like the EU's just about getting their pledge together.

3:07So we're heading into this COP with a bunch of new pledges. And in many other ways, in the 10 years since Paris, we've seen huge progress. So, you know, at that time in 2015, we look like we're heading for three and a half or four degrees of warming this century. As you said, Rowan, it's now looking more like 2.5. But there's great disappointment with the new pledges that have come out ahead of the COP30 in Brazil. As the head of the UN Environment Programme put it this week, that's barely moved the needle. So it's basically taken about 0.3 degrees off projected warming this century. And then, of course, the biggest elephant in the room is Trump and the way that global geopolitics has changed over the past year.

3:55And that's obviously putting a huge cloud over everything. Yeah, well, I was going to ask about that because the US government isn't sending anyone to Brazil, are they? But lots of officials at state level are. And Gavin Newsom, California is the fourth largest economy in the world now. So California are going to be there in force. I mean, they're there to say we're still doing things, even if the administration isn't. Is there any silver lining we can get from that? Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, the US is a big and important country, but it's, you know, it is just one country. And, you know, it's the second biggest emitter.

4:31But again, it's, you know, the US is not the world. I think what was really interesting already in Baku at COP29 last year was the extent to which almost every other country in the world was like basically sort of shrugging and saying, yeah, we're kind of getting on with it. Now, of course, over the past year, we've seen quite a lot of wobbles. You know, we've seen the shattering of the climate consensus in the UK. And we're seeing in many countries, populist right-wing leaders or, you know, kind of political parties saying they no longer want to stop climate change getting worse because they don't want to hit net zero.

5:09But nevertheless, you know, Investment in clean energy is at record levels. In many ways, although expectations are quite low from COP30, any sort of outcome that looks like upholding the multilateral process, that in a way is a win against the backdrop of what Trump's been doing, bullying countries out of signing a deal on global shipping emissions, for example. If they manage to avoid that kind of situation in Brazil, then that will undoubtedly be seen as a success. Simon, can you tell us a bit about what Carbon Brief is doing to cover COP? Because you're doing loads, aren't you? Yeah, yeah.

5:49So the annual COP is sort of like our Gastonbury, if you like. It's the moment where we put out huge amounts of content. And, you know, I guess it's worth saying, you know, a lot of what we do is designed to help other people. We know from experience, I've been going to COP since COP21 in Paris, and it's just incredibly hard to keep track of. So we've got all sorts of content that's designed to help other people, whether it's journalists, negotiators, politicians. And this year, for the first time, we've launched what we're calling our COP30 Insider Pass. It's like a£5 paid all-access package, where basically you get to ride on our shoulder.

6:37as we go around the COP and get the insights as we're seeing them. One thing I saw on the agenda is called the Bellum Action Mechanism for a Just Transition. Bam! They could have made something better out of it. The idea is to recast. We've mentioned net zero. Doom and gloom about it, really. People don't want to push for it. And the way it's been hijacked and cast as something bad. And the idea of this Bellum Action Mechanism is to try to recast it. And I saw a finding that the British public think that getting to net zero by 2050 will cost 28 % of GDP, whereas the Climate Change Committee themselves, you know, in this independent think tank, say it will cost only 0.2 % of GDP.

7:25So the gulf in what the public think and what's reality is what we need to address, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it's quite depressing as someone that's been covering this topic for quite a while. to see the extent to which the political and the media discourse around this has really parted from reality in quite significant ways. You've highlighted one there. And we've got some newspapers in the UK that are just attaching literally anything that they think is even vaguely related to climate action and that they think can be portrayed in a sort of negative light as net zero. and particularly if they think they can attach it to Ed Miliband, who's obviously the Secretary of State for all of this, who newspaper editors, for reasons that are not entirely clear, absolutely hate him.

8:13They're constantly calling him an eco-loon, a zealot, a madman, really very personal attacks. So, yeah, I mean, that's just one example of the way the discourse has been going. I mean, I mentioned the progress we've made since Paris. It's quite discordant in many ways. People saying, you know, we need resets and we need to change course and all this. Well, actually, you know, we are making progress. You know, clean energy is much cheaper than it was a decade ago. In many places, it's the cheapest way to, you know, to get new energy supplies. As I mentioned, clean energy investment is now, you know, twice as big as fossil fuel investment.

8:50So that, you know, things have changed in big ways. And yet somehow everyone's depressed and holding their head in their hands. It doesn't quite add up. Yeah. Rupert, do you want to come in on this? To be honest, I think it sort of does add up. Let me start by accentuating the positive. Firstly, I'd like to just say that I think that Carbon Brief is doing a really grand job of reporting around this. As was said a moment ago, I was just checking out their explainer on adaptation before coming on this podcast is really very, very good. indeed. And with a more substantive point, I'll just disagree with something that Petty said in her intro.

9:27She said, climate politics, climate discourse has never felt so polarized. But we need to remember that a decade ago, as recently as a decade ago, climate denialism was still a sort of pseudo-respectable position in this country. Every time climate was featured on the BBC, you had a climate denialist up there to counterbalance Simon or me or a scientist or whoever it would be. So we have come on since then. Now, you might say in response to that, well, yeah, but the party leading in the polls now is sort of officially climate denialist, climate delayist. But it's worth noting that that position of Reform UK is unpopular, not just with the British public at large, but with their own voters.

10:09So I think that that's a marker of real progress. Having said that, there are some things which Simon said, which I don't really quite agree with. And I think the situation is incredibly grim and we need to be honest enough to face that. So one is that I am by no means confident that we're going to stay below 2.5 degrees of global overheating this century. The figures I've seen suggest that actually we may well be heading for well over three degrees. If one looks, for example, at what James Hansen and colleagues have been saying, which does seem to be being vindicated in real time to some significant extent by the data we're getting in, then things look very bad from that perspective, partly because it seems that climate sensitivity may have been underestimated and for a number of other reasons which we could potentially talk about.

11:00So I think we're headed into a very awful situation. Simon's saying that in response to that, given Trump's awful behaviour, just keeping the show on the road is a good thing. And I can understand why it might feel like that. But honestly, I don't think that's the perspective that many ordinary members of the public have. I think most ordinary members of the public have pretty much lost faith in the COP process. And I don't blame them. I mean, I've lost faith to a large extent in the COP process. I think that we're not getting anywhere. I think that the system was not constructed in a way that was really capable of genuinely succeeding.

11:43The parish agreement was an incredible diplomatic achievement to get basically every country in the world to agree on the direction we were going to take. But it was always a paper tiger. It never had any teeth, the whole process. There are no sanctions. If you were designing, as Simon Sharp, the great British climate diplomat, said, If you were designing a system to fail, you would design a system like the system we have. And in fact, I've argued in the past that I think there is reason to believe that the system was designed to fail. That there were people in the early stages of the creation of the UNFCCC and the IPCC, for that matter, who were like, well, we saw what happened with the Montreal Protocol.

12:24We don't want that to happen again because that resulted in real curbs on countries, real curbs on corporations, real penalties for noncompliance. So let's design a system that cannot be effective in the way the Montreal Protocol was effective. That might sound like a conspiracy theory. I was just going to say it sounds a bit conspiracy. Sometimes people do engage in conspiratorial behavior. Yeah. Well, but sometimes, I mean, you look at what lobbyists do, you look at what fossil fuel lobbyists do, you look at what American diplomats do. And you find that what they do is they conspire with each other and with the rich and powerful sometimes to create the outcome they want.

12:58Yeah. And it's in this case, it kind of seems to me that they got it. Now, also, it was said earlier that, well, the USA is only one country. But, you know, the situation we're in is in a situation where effectively there are a few countries in the world that can basically sink us just by themselves. The United States is one such country. China is another. Brazil is another. And right now, the United States is sinking us all by itself in terms of what they do actually doing on the ground and in terms of what they're doing diplomatically. So that is another reason for grave pessimism, it seems to me.

13:36Of course, it's encouraging that California is there. And of course, it's encouraging we've got the coalition of mayors and so on and so forth. But I do think that we need to ask ourselves, is this process actually fit for purpose? And what myself and Simon Sharp and various other people have suggested is it profoundly isn't. That is now visible. And we need to think about other ways of doing it differently, for example, through climate clubs. OK, well, so I was going to ask you that because even people like Christiana Fugueres, the hero of Paris, now says that she's lost faith in the cops. And that's quite a big thing for her to come out with that.

14:15So what do we replace them with or where do we go, Rupert? Well, let me start with Christiana Figueres, because it is quite remarkable the shift in her position recently. She's been the key proponent of so-called stubborn optimism for the last 10 years. Stick with the process, double down, etc. And now she's finally saying we're not going to solve climate change. She's starting, as I see it, to face into the awful reality that we're in. And that is essential, because if we only if we do that, will we be in a position to actually cope with what's going to be coming at us climatically. And that takes us to adaptation, which hopefully we'll talk about in a minute.

14:55And B, think honestly about whether the system as it stands is worth continuing to invest in. So, you know, what would climate clubs look like? What we really need, it seems to me now, are coalitions of the willing to move ahead of other countries, to move ahead of the broad consensus, which is never going to be robust or fast enough. And for countries to do things like have carbon border adjustment mechanisms in earnest, potentially even trade wars against other countries that do the wrong thing on climate and try to lead the world in the right direction. Will that be enough? Well, almost certainly not, but it might be significantly more than what we currently have.

15:33And what we currently have is palpably failing. Another way, of course, it's failing is in relation to the concept of net zero. So you all were lamenting earlier, oh, you know, why is net zero so misperceived and so forth. But look, I do think we have to take a bit of responsibility for this. The framing of net zero always has been and continues to be completely disastrous. It's completely opaque, technocratic framing. That's why it's used so much by our opponents, because they know that it's rubbish and they know that other framings would work less well for them and better for us. In the Climate Majority Project, what we suggest is a much bigger pivot to de-center, to some extent, mitigation altogether.

16:15I think it's a good thing that the president of this COP is calling this COP an adaptation COP. I don't think it's going to do what it really should do in relation to adaptation, but I think it's good that we're starting to get adaptation being taken more seriously in public rhetoric and in climate diplomacy. What we say in the Climate Majority Project is let's actually centre much more considerations of adaptation, which are much more meaningful to the ordinary person on the street. If we begin with impacts and vulnerability and only start to make the case on the basis of that for the much broader climate and carbon shift that we need, then we might actually start to get somewhere.

16:53Net zero is putting us on a hiding to nothing. What is the UK's biggest killer today? It may surprise you to learn that it's dementia. One in three people born today are likely to develop it at some point during their lifetime. Dementia is everywhere, and it affects us all. Its cruelty overwhelms those living with it. Its scale overwhelms the NHS, social care and the economy. Its complexity poses overwhelming challenges in how we research, diagnose and treat it. But for the first time, breakthrough medications have emerged which can slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Diagnosis is also being transformed with the development of simple blood tests that could offer a cheaper, earlier, less invasive option for getting a specific diagnosis and allowing treatment to begin sooner.

17:42Beyond the lab, innovations like virtual reality are helping people live richer lives, helping them to stay connected with the outside world and improve their social and mental wellbeing. All this is raising the prospect of dementia becoming a manageable chronic condition. You can find out more by reading the full article at the link in the show notes, sponsored by Alzheimer's Society. So talking of adaptation then, one of the things on the agenda this time is the global goal on adaptation. And adaptation as a concept, it's controversial, isn't it? People say we should still be spending on mitigation.

18:15Can you lay out for us that sort of tension between prevention and dealing with what's actually happening? Yeah, well, to the folks who still say, and there are less and less of them, but they're still dominant. The folks who still say we should just focus primarily on mitigation, we should double down on that. I say, I'm sorry, you've had your chance and you failed, and it's failed for a reason. The mitigation issue, the decarbonisation conundrum, is the greatest collective action tragedy that humanity has ever faced. It was always going to to be almost impossibly difficult to face it. It's utterly impossible to face it in a world run by corporations and by insane populists.

19:00So we have to find another way in. And in any case, you know, the ship of saying, well, we should just keep on doubling down on mitigation and so forth, that ship has sailed. We are even, Antonio Guterres is now admitting we're moving past 1.5 degrees, you know, absolutely tragically, absolutely disastrous. This is a planetary boundary that we are passing. And what that means is we have to face into the storms, the storms that are here and the worst storms that are coming. We have to take adaptation absolutely seriously. It still isn't taken nearly seriously enough in news coverage, still isn't taken nearly seriously enough in climate politics or climate activism.

19:38That's why in the Climate Majority Project we're saying there needs to be a whole kind of shift in where we start from here. If we're going to reboot climate politics and climate activism. The way we'll do it is by taking adaptation way more seriously. Because, for example, only if you do that, only if you actually start to take adaptation seriously and try to adapt to what is here and what is coming, will you start to really understand that there are limits to that process. You see what I'm saying? That only if you actually take adaptation seriously will you understand that there are limits to adaptation.

20:12And then we might be able to get back into taking litigation and decarbonisation seriously. So there are multiple ways, and I could explain more of them, in which the focus on adaptation is to everybody's benefit. It's a mind bomb, basically, as Greenpeace would have said in the days of old. Focusing on adaptation is a mind bomb. It's a shift in a whole way of seeing what climate is as a question and as a concern. And if we take it more seriously, it can be to the benefit of all of us, including those of us who quite understandably are incredibly concerned about the situation on the mitigation and decarbonisation front.

20:50And Simon, do you see a shift in the way of adaptation is being thought about at this COP, going into this COP? I mean, people are certainly talking about adaptation more. I think, you know, just to reiterate what I was saying earlier, I mean, the idea that mitigation has failed when we're, you know, as I said, we've taken, you know, at least a degree off projected warming this century. That seems like a pretty weird definition of failure to me. Obviously, that's very far from being sufficient. It's very far from keeping warming below 1.5 throughout the century or even bringing temperatures back to 1.5 of warming by the end of the century.

21:26But nevertheless, that's huge progress. And I think the idea that people historically say, oh, we should just focus on mitigation is just a straw man. It's not a straw man, Simon. It's really not a straw man. I've heard it over and over again across the years. People have written it. People have said it over and over again in climate politics, climate activism, climate diplomacy, climate philosophy. I could cite your chapter and verse endlessly. But, I mean, it's part of the Paris Agreement. You know, the Global Goal on Adaptation is part of the UK's Climate Change Act. The fact that the climate adaptation policy hasn't responded sufficiently, that to me seems not greatly different to the fact that policy hasn't met the moment on cutting emissions.

22:15But I remember right from the very early days when I was covering climate change as an issue that the chief scientific advisor at the time, Bob Watson, was saying we needed to prepare for up to four degrees of warming. but adapt for at least two degrees. So that's been around forever. I think there's now this idea that, oh, we've failed and therefore we have to focus on adaptation. And we've got lots of problems in this world. And if we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, then maybe we are as stuffed as you made out, Rupert. But I'm not sure I agree with that. Well, I didn't say we were stuffed, to be fair.

22:55I mean, that's your words, not mine. What I said is we're in very serious trouble and the situation is very grim. And what I said is if we want to reboot what we're trying to do, which, you know, I think we're all on the same side with, then we're going to have to do something different. What I meant by saying that we'd failed. You're quite right, of course. Of course, climate policies have taken some of the edge off the grimness of the situation that we're heading into. And in that sense, that's been a success. What I meant by saying that we failed is that where we are now shows failure. We are breaking through the 1.5 degree planetary boundary.

23:28It's now basically certain that we're going to break through two degrees. Climate politics and diplomacy is on balance moving in the wrong direction. I'm really not sure what failure is, if that isn't failure. All right. Look, let's rather than just keep, I think there's points to be made on both sides here, but let's try and pick out something that we can hopefully find. What are you keeping your eye on at this point? So what's the sort of thing we should look out for or hope for to come out of this particular summit? Yeah. Simon, do you want to take that one first? Yeah. So I can give you a couple of specific outcomes that we're going to be tracking.

24:04So as I mentioned in the Paris Agreement, the global goal on adaptation. But unlike mitigation, where there was a very clear target, it's quite easy to measure global greenhouse gas emissions. Adapting to climate change is much harder. It's very context specific. it depends on you know the place the people the geography and all sorts of other things and so 10 years after the Paris Agreement was signed we still don't have a real way to measure progress and so at COP30 in Brazil they're meant to be agreeing a set of indicators so that we can really start to get a handle on how we're doing on adaptation so we're going to be watching that that's really important there's also going to be negotiations about COP reform Rupert mentioned this idea that a lot of people are dissatisfied with the COP process.

24:49And so that's something that hasn't, at least as far as I can remember, hasn't ever been on the agenda formally before. That is going to be discussed in Brazil. Is that like the Lords? They're never going to reform themselves because they've got their own interests at heart? Well, the fact that it's on the agenda to start with, I think, is significant. And then there's some stuff that's important outside of the formal negotiations. and so people might remember last year we agreed this new global goal for climate finance of 300 billion dollars per year that was meant to flow from developed to developing countries and a lot of developing countries were you know massively disappointed with that outcome but there was also this idea of a so-called Baku to Belém roadmap of raising climate finance from all sources towards 1.3 trillion dollars a year by 2035 that's just been published this week to be honest it's pretty woolly we've got an article on our website um explaining what's in it there's lots of these people could do that some other people might might consider doing these things you know it's not massively clear how that's going to move a needle but nevertheless that that's going to be under discussion and one just one last thing to mention there's um something that brazil's very keen to push which is called this tropical forests forever facility and this is the idea of a very big 125 billion investment fund, private investment backed by public money, which would invest and then use those investment returns to fund tropical forest countries that keep their forests intact.

26:19It sounds big and bold and, you know, like it could be, you know, a nice idea. But what I'm hearing is quite a lot of concerns about the fact that it's going to rely on, you know, the vagaries of the market to make money to pay people to do stuff. And quite apart from that, you know, They were originally hoping to get£25 billion in public money pledged into the fund. And so far, they've only got£1 billion. So, yeah, we'll be watching what happens for that as well. Yeah, I did like that idea. It's been around for quite a long time, hasn't it? And I've always had hopes for it. So, yeah, we'll keep an eye on that.

26:55Rupert? Yeah, I agree with what Simon's just been saying there. I think it is somewhat encouraging that COP reform is on the agenda. I think that there is some helpful movement on the global goal for adaptation. In particular, it's vital if adaptation is ever going to be taken sufficiently seriously by the COP process, that there are real metrics and they're moving towards those. However, I would add that this issue of metrics, which sounds terribly technical, some of the progress that has been made, it's not really clear that it's progress in the right direction, if you understand me. Let me explain.