On the shuttle bus to the third day of COP21, the global climate summit held in Paris last month, I struck up a conversation with a German-French couple in their early 20s. We had one of those nice traveler connections, and by the time we got to the huge convention center, we took photos of each other in front of the sign announcing the Conférence sur les Changements Climatiques 2015.
They didn’t have credentials, so I bid them adieu at the door and joked, “Maybe I’ll see you again at a future COP.”
“Oh, I was thinking this might be the last one?” said the woman.
No. Sorry. As I wrote this article, the COP hasn’t wrapped up but I could still say for certain that this wouldn’t be the last global negotiation. And we’re not going to be done next month, next year or even next decade.
Our climate is changing rapidly because of the way we produce and use energy, grow food and manage forests. To stop overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases (GHGs), we have to change pretty much everything about how we live and do business. We have to put the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the center of pretty much all our economic decisions, public and private.
That doesn’t mean I’m without hope. In fact, the last several years have seen the negotiations move onto a track that has a real chance of success, and one of the main reasons is a concept with the cool acronym, NAMA.
NAMAs
Understanding NAMAs, Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, will help you understand what happened at COP21 and how developed countries will aid developing countries in choosing clean energy when dirty energy is cheaper.
To explain, I need to introduce another acronym: INDCs, or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. (The “contribution” is what each country is going to do toward realizing the global goal of reducing GHGs enough to stabilize the climate.)
Every country but a rogue handful (you can Google them) submitted their INDCs showing roughly how they’re going to stabilize or reduce their GHGs and how they’ll accomplish those goals. It’s not enough, of course, but it’s a good start. Since each INDC is determined nationally – as opposed to being part of an international treaty – it can be strengthened at any time.
Developed countries will accomplish their INDCs with their own resources. The United States will get most of the job done by phasing out coal power plants and bringing on more clean renewable power – victories for which we can thank Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency, who have used executive power to work around Congress.
Most developing countries will need financial help to achieve their INDCs, and that’s where their NAMAs come in. NAMAs describe each developing country’s prime opportunities for slowing down the growth of its emissions in the near term and eventually reducing emissions.
One of Kenya’s best NAMA opportunities, for example, is to develop new geothermal power plants; while in Costa Rica, making coffee production greener will be a cost-effective way to reduce GHGs.
According to Mexico’s NAMA, our fast-growing southern neighbor can cut a lot of GHGs by making public transport in cities more modern and efficient. This would be done by replacing old, diesel-guzzling vehicles – most owned by private operators who jealously guard their routes, no matter how inefficient—with an optimized network of hybrid or even all-electric buses.
Mexico, Kenya, Costa Rica and other developing countries might eventually do these sorts of things themselves – or they might not. They’ll do them a lot faster with money from developed countries.
The Money Trail
How much the developed countries will pay to help poorer countries do their NAMAs, when, through what systems and with what guarantees – these were some of the freakishly complex questions that made the COP21 agreement so hard to negotiate, and they’re the questions that will keep climate negotiators busy for a long time as they implement the Paris deal.
Then there’s the “loss and damage” perspective of the developing countries. They say they need money not just to implement their NAMAs, but to prepare for and recover from the extreme weather that climate change is already causing.
I got a good personal introduction to this viewpoint riding home from COP21 one night when I sat next to a delegate from a developing country.
She believes her country is already suffering from climate change, and she and her government want the developed countries to pay for the “loss and damage” they’ve suffered and will continue to suffer. After all, it was we – not they – who overloaded the atmosphere with GHGs by 200 years of burning fossil fuels.
At past COPs, developed countries promised to build up a climate fund that will be worth $100 billion per year by 2020. This money would be earmarked to help developed countries build low-carbon energy systems – implementing their NAMAs.
And it would help them build more climate-resilient communities by doing things like moving coastal residents to higher ground, being more efficient with water in farming, improving urban drainage systems and even building dikes like those that allow the Dutch to live below sea level.
As you know by now, the Paris deal included the $100 billion fund. Developing countries expect this $100 billion to be new climate-related money, but so far, they have reason to think that most of the “climate finance” commitments announced so far are just traditional aid “re-branded” as climate aid. “Most of it is not new aid,” said my acquaintance.
Like other tropical countries, hers is suffering from drought which has sharply cut back the availability of water to generate hydropower. “We have blackouts almost every day.”
When I asked about her country’s options for developing new power generation capacity, she mentioned wind and solar, but it would take many years to build a reasonable amount of generation capacity. Nuclear would be emissions-free, but very expensive.
Their cheapest option would be new coal power plants, and without money for alternative clean power, they’ll probably build them.
While we could rightly blame her country and others like India for building new coal power plants that will emit heavy GHGs for decades – we can’t deny their imperative to live a modern life, with the health and convenience that reliable electricity provides. However if we fund their NAMAs generously, we could see them “leapfrog” some of the dirty phases of development that we went through and build their economies with cleaner power.
I have many questions about how this is going to play out, such as how is the US going to come up with its share of a $100 billion annual climate fund, since Congress is the only branch of government that can appropriate money? And given the high levels of corruption in many developing countries, how can we be sure the NAMA money is really going where it’s supposed to?
But it seems clear that a lot of checks must be written to developing countries over the next decades to avert a climate catastrophe.
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Jim Hight is the senior editor for the Climate Change Business Journal and was one of the five journalists whom our managing editor, Susan, met while on a press trip to Germany in November.