COP30 is here! – #158/159
Can multilateralism (still) save the world?
The Big Picture
COP30 is off and running.
And so, to get you started, here is a smattering of links to read.
As things stand, COP30 is being held at a time when, as COP30 chief Andre Correa do Lago said, rich countries have lost enthusiasm for combating the climate crisis. Cases in point? Not only has the US blocked a historic climate deal for shipping, the EU too has submitted freshly weakened 2040 climate goals at COP30.
This raises a larger question about multilateralism. “COP30 will open under the weight of two parallel realities. A world increasingly divided and distracted, and a planet running out of time. Whether Belém can bridge that gap will determine not just the fate of this “Implementation COP”, but the credibility of the climate process itself,” From Can multilateralism still deliver at COP30?
If not, what happens to adaptation and mitigation? “$2.3 to $2.5 trillion – this is the amount of capital Emerging Markets and Developing Countries (EMDCs), excluding China, need per annum to meet their climate goals, according to the Independent High Level Expert Group (IHLEG). By 2035, that figure will climb to $3.2 trillion annually, with $1.3 trillion expected from international sources. But the reality is sobering. By 2023, EMDCs mobilised only $196 billion in 2023, as per the latest study by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI). To stay on track, they’ll need to increase their capital mobilisation elevenfold. Here, financial support from developed countries — politically known as climate finance — can bridge the financing gaps. But it needs political willingness, reform of multilateral institutions, a change in form and types of financing, and removal of institutional bottlenecks,” from The 300 billion question ahead of COP30.
If this money is not forthcoming, what should countries do? “Over and above domestic constraints, shifting global priorities have fueled uncertainty regarding international climate finance. This year, key developed countries announced plans to review multilateral commitments and slash foreign aid budgets. These developments have only compounded concerns of developing countries, adding to those pertaining to the quantum and quality of climate finance historically delivered. Therefore, a credible Roadmap becomes critical to dispel uncertainty over the availability of external climate finance for developing countries. Based on analysis from the latest study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), here are six steps to enhance climate finance for developing countries,” from Mapping the road to $1.3 trillion at COP30.
One of the standout ideas from COP30 is Tropical Forests Forever Facility. ”The TFFF is the biggest and boldest plan yet to staunch the loss of tropical forests that are a pillar of climate stability…. Championed by Brazil’s globally respected environment minister, Marina Silva, and drawn up with advice from the World Bank, London financial consultants and several governments, the TFFF aims to disrupt the financial logic for deforestation by raising $125bn (£95bn), investing it in bonds, and paying out the returns as a reward for countries and communities that conserve their standing forests.” How could the Tropical Forest Forever fund proposed at Cop30 tackle deforestation?
PS: While on COP30, have you seen CarbonCopy’s #COPConservations. Listen to all our pre-COP podcasts here on Spotify.
News of the week
Climate change continues to roil India.
Even as Cyclone Montha was hammering Andhra and Tamil Nadu, the Konkan coast was getting soaked as well. This newsletter spent the first week of November travelling down the coastal road that connects Mumbai with Goa. It has rained longer than usual this year. “The rains began in May and have not let up since,” said a pharmaceutical distributor in Rev Danda, about 30 kilometres to the south of Alibag. “The crop has been all but ruined.” Search online, however, and you will not find any allusions to this.
Also, as this newsletter gets written, AQI over Delhi (and much of north India, one thinks) has touched scary depths.
And this, despite the government doing its best to massage the numbers. People came out to the streets to protest. And found themselves detained by the police. GRAP-3 too has not been called into force by the Delhi government. All this despite news that Delhiites’ life expectancy is down by as much as 8 years and the Lancet saying 1.7 million deaths were linked to air pollution in 2022 alone.
Delhi, of course, is not the part of India blessed with an administration following anti-people and anti-environment policies. Pune is still trying to axe trees for its riverfront project. And then, there is Mumbai. Its planners are eyeing Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) yet again. This time around, they have cleaved its eco-sensitive zone — which accounts for 48% of SGNP’s 106 square kilometres — into three categories and allowed construction in two of them.
“The plan negates the pitched battles of the 1990s to protect the eco-sensitive zone,” wrote Question of Cities. “Thousands of slum settlements there were evicted on the orders of the Bombay High Court after Mumbai’s environmentalists, especially the Bombay Environmental Action Group, had approached it to demand their eviction to protect the SGNP…. It is important to note that the encroachments were not in the core forest but in the buffer or eco-sensitive zone. Protecting this zone was considered critical then; now, three decades later, the BMC officially proposes massive construction in it including eco-tourism facilities, businesses, housing units to rehabilitate Adivasis and eligible encroachers, infrastructure projects like drainage and transport systems. What changed in the intervening decades that the eco-sensitive area can now be officially built upon? Is this not contempt of court?”
In the case of SGNP, the probable reason is the politician-builder nexus. From elsewhere in Maharashtra, however, comes another anti-people decision — this time for far meagre gains. “The thick green jungle and rust-red hills of Lote, on India’s west coast, give way to a small hill where a factory looms against the sky,” wrote Guardian.“The factory is almost brand new, but its machinery is not: it comes from the former Miteni factory in Vicenza, Italy. Miteni closed down in 2018 after one of the worst environmental scandals in the country’s recent history: after decades of producing Pfas forever chemicals, the company’s management was brought to trial for contaminating water resources in an area where 350,000 people live. In June, its former executives were found guilty... And yet, all of the company’s equipment, its patents and processes… is now here in Lote Parshuram MIDC, a vast industrial enclave almost 4,000 miles away, wedged between villages and groves of trees. And the factory has just started to produce forever chemicals again.”
Other news. For a while now, this newsletter has been wondering about a seemingly sudden spike in the costs of thermal power projects.
Here is what we had said in #129. “What is happening to thermal power plant (TPP) economics? Last week saw an announcement that one more TPP is coming up — this time in Haryana. The 800 MW project will cost Rs 8,470 crore. The questions, once more, come tripping out. Have TPP costs crossed Rs 10 crore/MW? “Around 2003, the fixed cost of setting up a coal-based power plant stood at Rs 4 crore a MW,” CarbonCopy had written in 2021…. When (that) article was (being) written, fixed costs for TPPs had climbed to Rs 5 crore/MW. How can the Haryana plant cost Rs 10 crore/MW after just four years? It’s coming up on 233 acres of land. How much can the government be paying for this land? Even at Rs 10 crore/acre, that still works out to Rs 6 crore/MW. This is not adding up.”
Then came further instances of high capex. Here is #149. “The Adani Group announced a new 800MW ultra-supercritical thermal power project in the Anuppur district of Madhya Pradesh. The odd thing? It will cost Rs 10,500 crore. Or Rs 13.125 crore/MW. The Group is also setting up a 2400MW ultra-supercritical thermal power project for Bihar. This one is projected to cost $3 billion. Or Rs 25,500 cr. Or Rs 10.6 crore/MW.”
The last of these projects has now slipped into further controversy. Former energy minister RK Singh has claimed the state government has since awarded the project to Adani at Rs 15 crore/MW. A long-term loss of Rs 62,000 crore to Bihar, he said. Another report, incidentally, pegs the cost of the project even higher at Rs 30,000 crore but says its cost/unit will be Rs 6.075. The arithmetic here needs to be understood.
Yet other news. When the SC constituted its Special Investigation Team to look into the charges surrounding Vantara, there had been some surprise around the tight deadline handed out to the SIT. It had all of a fortnight to answer ten-odd questions set out by the SC bench. One reason for the hurry, it was speculated at the time, was a forthcoming CITES visit after too many countries complained about Vantara’s quicksilver accumulation of animals.
We know what happened next. The SIT gave a clean chit to Vantara. Last week though, the SIT’s report was countermanded by the CITES report. “Several imports still raise questions regarding the origin of the specimens, the application of Article VII, paragraphs 4-5 and the use of source and purpose-of-transaction codes, and the exercise of due diligence by India,” it wrote. With that, concerns on the origins of the animals reaching Vantara — whether wild-caught or trafficked — stand revalidated. Now to see what happens in the CITES meeting later this month. For now, the investigating team has outlined the steps India must take — and Indian officials are said to not be looking forward to CITES this year. One waits and watches. For now, do read the whole report.
In the meantime, there is also this. Remember the Spix Macaws transferred back to Brazil from Germany? Some of them seem to have carried a virus back to the rainforest.
Yet, yet other news. IIT Kanpur’s cloud seeding over Delhi failed. India’s oilcos c0ntinued to pivot away from Russian oil. Coal India has set itself the production target of 875 million tonnes next year. The people of Raigarh and Goa continue to protest against coal mining and transport. Rajasthan has just inaugurated a solar park with 2,450MW of solar generation and 5,000MWh of battery energy storage systems. There are worries that India’s solar module sector is slipping into overcapacity.India’s commentariat is getting excited about carbon trading. One wonders what is up. India has joined TFFF as an observer — and has notified new deep sea fishing rules that keep foreign trawlers out.
Elsewhere in the world, Trump has ordered a resumption of nuclear testing; his oil and gas expansion plans are not working out well; and dolphins in the Bay of Biscay are leading shorter lives than before.
PS: We missed the previous instalment of this newsletter. It was, per usual, an eventful week. Dick Cheney died. Zohran Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo to become New York’s mayor-elect. This essay in New Lines touched a chord with us. Trump met Xi and cut tariffs on the country. Times that leave watchers with whiplash, these.
CarbonCopy longread of the week
“India has entered the global carbon trading arena, recently signing a Memorandum of Cooperation with Japan on the Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM). The mechanism allows Japan to invest in greenhouse gas-reduction projects in partner countries like India and earn carbon credits in return—making it India’s first bilateral carbon market deal under Article 6.2 (A6.2) of the Paris Agreement…. Given that India is exploring many similar opportunities with other countries, it is critical to ensure that projects that come to India under A6.2 are shielded against any controversies plaguing the offset carbon market. In this context, there are some important learnings from the progress related to Article 6.4 (A6.4) of the Paris Agreement, which deals with the centralised architecture for global carbon offset markets.”
From: What can India’s bilateral carbon credit deals learn from the centralised global carbon market?
RIP, James Watson
Climate solution of the week
What should RWAs do with their wastewater? One apartment in Bangalore has some answers.
Climate longreads of the week
Destination India: Illegal gold laundered clean by the Ghana government (Reporters’ Collective)
A farce, a road map legitimising environmental destruction: It took the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation nine long years to prepare and release the draft zonal master plan for the eco-sensitive zone of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, thanks largely to sustained pressure and court battles by activists. Glaring omissions and loopholes, unsound system of classifying the zone, not recognising the riparian systems, and a farcical process of inviting objections are some of its drawbacks, shows this analysis and discloses some suggestions made to the civic body (Question of Cities)
Delhi’s failure to act against the biggest source of its air pollution – vehicles (Scroll)
Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It (ProPublica)
End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled (FT)
Will higher defence spending boost the European economy? (FT)
Teesta now flows to kill. How the river forgot to forgive (The Print). Also see their accompanying report on the Chenab.
Nobody’s fighting for the Delhi Ridge. Few even know where it begins and ends (The Print)
China’s shift to clean energy is saving the Paris Climate Accord (Mint)
And do read this report on Karnataka’s wolf population (Deccan Herald)
PS: This is #158 & #159, folks. Here is Issue #1, from April 2022. We have been around for a little over three years now. When this newsletter started, we felt unsure if there would be enough news to justify a weekly format. That fear has now been displaced by a more real concern — how many large transitions are we spotting? Do please feel free to leave comments re: the developments you think are worth mentioning. And thank you for reading.