Some headline reflections to start, from week two:
- There’s lots of evidence that businesses are seeing climate change as an opportunity rather than a threat and are committing individually and in groups to large scale investment to create impact and reduce risk. Business sees the demand from society.
- The whole question of adaptation and resilience has been surfaced at this COP, and it’s been laid bare how little action and investment has happened to date. This is an area as big as climate change mitigation; it needs urgent attention.
- Lower and middle-income countries are in danger of being left out, and that will be a problem for the whole world. With so many competing priorities insufficient attention has been given to analysing prioritising risk, understanding the relative roles of public and private sectors, and where possible formulating investable projects. It’s clear to me that these problems will not be solved without more help and very significant money from the wealthy parts of the world, whatever the nuances of the negotiations.
- Overall, it was a privilege to be a part of COP26, however small. The negotiations will never produce all the results the planet needs, but substantive progress has been made. What was more energising for me though, was how citizens, businesses and cities are now driving change. For example, there were many protest groups in Glasgow this week, but all of them were saying “go faster”. There was nobody from society pressing for less change. I heard from many CEOs of major businesses describing the hard targets they were working towards and the billions of dollars being invested and from city leaders worldwide showing real leadership.
A diary of the first part of my week:
Monday, 8 November: Adaptation, Loss and Damage Day
My first day as part of the IET’s observer delegation and immediately the scale of the COP becomes apparent.
Much of what’s going on is well-documented for example the presidential programme, however much isn’t so easy to see from the outside particularly the events across the range of national and thematic pavilions in the blue zone.
Adaptation and resilience is an important theme for this COP and the title of each day is only partly a clue as to what to seek out. For example, today I learned more about the role of business, and how the US government is acting on the links between climate change and health.
I attended a great session involving a panel of four CEOs - the main takeaway, in wealthy countries the pace is now being set by consumers rather than governments.
Sustainable business is simply good business, consumer attitudes and awareness is moving faster than regulatory and policy processes, which is driving business action, which in turn drives governments to aim higher.
Sustainable brands grow faster, sustainable methods use fewer resources and are therefore cheaper, sustainable approaches are less risky so finance is cheaper, and your organisation becomes a magnet for the best people.
Big to-do items are around building trust; the need for consistent measurement financiers can rely on, and labelling consumers can draw meaning from when making choices. A business-focused around sustainability needs to think in four layers, all at the same time:
- sorting out internal matters – own carbon footprinting
- Supply chain emissions
- the ability to leverage brand power to drive change, and
- Advocacy and progress at a more systemic level.
In another session, the challenge of making climate adaptation projects bankable for private sector investment was discussed.
Around $3-6 trillion is needed per annum, which compares to a few hundred million dollars today, and almost none funded in the private sector. As someone who spends time helping many countries create bankable power projects there were strong resonances for me.
As well as what’s generally perceived as a difficult risk environment, adaptation projects tend to have high upfront costs and long payback periods, making them vulnerable to changes in host country politics that have led to expropriation or changes in contract terms. This can be mitigated by data, understanding the full impacts of resilience failures, so the true value of avoided resilience failure to the host country can be understood.
We heard about how with help from the Global Climate Fund (GCF), Jamaica has pioneered a templated and replicable approach.
A further challenge is creating a pipeline of bankable projects.
Colombia, again supported by GCF, has developed digital approaches to sourcing and filtering potential projects, assessing them against underlying criteria for quality, local acceptance, and bankability. This has enabled the development of a 46-project pipeline. Just doing that has started to attract interest from multiple investors.
Business models for bankability is still an evolving area, with a strong role for equity from philanthropic and other “first loss” sources blended with more conventional sources of finance. That allows early projects to move forward and lessons learned to de-risk future projects.
Overall this felt like both a massive global challenge and a massive opportunity, in the early days of its evolution. At stake is the well-being of billions of people.
Later the US pavilion hosted a fascinating discussion on the Biden administration’s approach to climate change and health, having learned from the pandemic that the consequences of both are distributed very unequally, with the poorest suffering most.
This links the two topics across the US government, both to green the US health sector (which emits 8.5% of US carbon dioxide emissions), and to enhanced resilience and health, especially amongst the disadvantaged. On the first, a baseline assessment of federal healthcare will be followed by a roadmap and a target date for net zero for healthcare that aligns to the wider Biden administration goals of a 50-52% reduction by 2030, and net zero by 2050.
Private sector healthcare, a major part of the US system, will be tackled with similar ambition, through a partnership approach.
On resilience, a vulnerability and adaptation assessment is to be undertaken, leading to a National Adaptation Plan for health, and recognising that real work has to be done to tackle health inequality – the poor and sick people live “where the oil refineries and truck routes are”.
It was stated that phasing out fossil fuels would be the greatest public health intervention that could be made and that a much greater focus in healthcare needed to be on upstream causes of ill health – which generally were also climate-related.
The hope was expressed that the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors “Do No Harm” would thereby mobilise the medical profession to the cause of addressing causes of climate change because they are so health-related.
At some point today former President Obama arrived and gave his address. Other than seeing some enhanced security I was unaware until hearing him speak on the television later!
This event is big!
Tuesday, 9 November: Gender, Science and Innovation Day
Three experiences to tell you about on gender, science and innovation day - two good, one disappointing.
A theme coming through much of today (and other days) was that of a just transition – just between genders, between the wealthy and those struggling to get by, and between rich countries and those with low and middle incomes.
The role of the cloud in climate change, with seniors from IBM, ATOS, Amazon, all framed by the wonderfully named Global Optimism.
Lots of positive stories about the cloud as a democratising force around the world, and data-led solutions driving outcomes that both reduced emissions and drove better business.
All panellists felt there was a new spirit of collaboration amongst tech first that had not been seen before. Frustrations included the amount of duplicated effort, the need for much stronger accountability, lack of pace and urgency, and slow learning from successes and failures.
Lots of talk also about reducing the carbon footprint of digital, currently 4% of global CO2 and growing rapidly. Measures discussed included better data centre cooling, new types of processor, and an early shift to 100% renewables, which Amazon has said it will do by 2025.
A session with three US electricity utilities, all hugely positive and clearly driving the decarbonisation agenda in their areas – energy, transport, buildings. Bursting with initiatives and collaborations, a sea change from a few years ago.
Billed as “Public service organisations with purpose” there was lots of talk about creating platforms for entrepreneurs to innovate on in finding new services and models to serve consumers, and lots also about equity, so all benefit “we don’t want to invest so just Tesla owners breathe clean air”.
Combined with my experience yesterday on climate and health, America really does seem to be grabbing hold of the race to zero.
And the disappointment… was an official side-event on transport decarbonisation in low- and middle-income countries.
Much of the discussion centred around roadmaps for personal vehicle electrification, yet there was almost no reference to the need to deploy charging infrastructure at scale, and no reference to the challenges of often fragile and overloaded electrical systems having to cope with massive demand increases, matched by major expansions of generation from low carbon sources.
A subsequent session on hard to abate sectors (heavy haul road freight, aviation and marine) seemed on firmer ground.
So after a couple of days some impressions are beginning to form.
There is the vital matter of the negotiations between governments globally but more of the COP is there for NGOs, for business, for cities, for innovators.
Events spread across three formal Zones (blue, green and Innovation), and to venues all over Glasgow.
Everyone with an interest in climate change is here – ranging from engineers and technologists to artists and actors. Other than for official UNFCC and UK Presidency schedules there is little coherent event promotion and scheduling – in many cases discovery is by word of mouth or consulting daily schedules outside the national pavilions but, somehow, it all seems to work.