Political leaders, policy makers, scientists and civil society are wrapping up the first week of the COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Delegates are immersed in climate financing details, focusing on implementing the loss and damage fund, and negotiations on funding at least $1 trillion annually to cover the cost of climate action in developing countries – the “New Collective Quantified Goal” (NCQG).
Among the main topics in this round of COP negotiations are arguments about which countries will contribute to the NCQG, how money from the loss and damage fund will be paid out, as well as other climate finance mechanisms like carbon trading and taxes.
Amidst the political debates, scientists emphasize that the need for action and solutions is clearer than ever.
The negotiations are unfolding amid growing political and financial uncertainty. And before COP got started, some political leaders and activists, frustrated with slow progress on climate action and skeptical that politicians would agree to make meaningful changes, advocated for skipping the conference altogether.
If the main impediments to meaningful climate action are political, how can scientists push for meaningful – and faster – climate action? Climate and political science experts say there’s much to be done: the fight is increasingly at the local and national level, where natural sciences are key to adaptation and planning, and social sciences to designing and selling policies that will weather an uncertain political landscape.
The science itself could not be more clear: “The information is there. It doesn’t get better,” said Frank Biermann, a professor at Utrecht University and founder of the Earth System Governance Project. “You can’t be more convincing than bringing together several thousand natural and social scientists (at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to write these huge reports since the 1990s.”
Progress is being made, he said, noting positive trends like the rising share of renewable energy in Europe – but it’s clearly not enough. “While policies are being adopted and action is being taken, it is not fast enough,” said Biermann. “The curve is bending, but not quickly enough, and far, far not enough to keep us in the risk-free area – to the extent that there is any risk-free area left,” he added.
“We know a lot about the natural sciences; we have to understand why the politics are not functioning, and getting even worse,” Biermann added.
The answers to those questions will help to tailor policy and communication to local political realities. Biermann noted the U.S., where green subsidies and other climate action has been packaged as economic policy, part of a pitch to slow inflation and encourage new green jobs.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a similar argument during the first week of COP in Baku: “Make no mistake, the race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future, the economy of tomorrow, and I don’t want to be in the middle of the pack – I want to get ahead of the game,” he told delegates.
At the Earth System Governance Project’s BACKLASH study, researchers are taking on those political questions in a systematic way, looking at protest movements and pushback to climate policies, aiming to help craft strong climate policy with a fighting chance at the ballot box.
“How can you go forward with an ambitious climate policy without losing the next election?” Biermann asked. “Social science is fundamentally important to really understand and therefore also to improve all of these conflicts.”
Climate and other natural sciences laid the foundation for these conversations by making the case for climate action over and over until it has become impossible for most governments to ignore.
“That is a huge success, and that is a success where science has played a major role in the process of establishing that, yes, the climate is changing, yes, humans are the cause of it, and yes, it’s not going to be great,” said Martin Visbeck, head of the physical oceanography research unit at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, and an ISC Foundation Fellow and Member of the ISC Governing Board.
“The interesting question, where other types of science come in, is ‘Now, what?’” Visbeck said. He highlighted the need for natural science responses to more localized effects of climate change – estimating and planning for the damage caused by rising seas and ocean temperatures, as well as threats to agriculture and dangerous weather pattern changes, among many emerging problems.
“These are major transformations in sectors like energy, transport, food, which will involve a whole slew of other sciences,” he said. “When the diagnosis becomes clear, now it’s about the cure – and quite often the cure requires different expertise than the diagnosis.”
At the same time, climate action faces worsening geopolitical tensions and waves of nationalism, Visbeck added. “That is bad for solving global problems like climate change, but it’s also bad for science, because it reduces our capability of working together,” he said.
More than ever, we need information and skills-sharing between experts in different countries – to help Global South countries get the most out of negotiations on loss and damage, and to share advice on adaptation and mitigation, among other areas.
“We will not solve the climate problem in Europe or in the U.S. or Russia – we will only solve it together,” Visbeck said.
“Is a summit still important? Ten thousand people flying there, all the carbon emissions, et cetera et cetera. I would say it’s really important,” argued Biermann. “You need such meetings to have some type of moving forward,” he said.
With the burden now on countries and national governments to implement climate action, he added, international agreements provide a framework for measurement and transparency – and for a way to hold countries to account for lagging behind.
“Without these summits, we would not have the global agreement on temperature targets. We need them for transparency. We need them to have some attempts at holding governments accountable,” he argued. “They are not the problem-solvers, but they are a part of the solution.”
The International Science Council (ISC), its members and partners are involved in several official COP29 side-events and parallel meetings. The full extent of our engagement is detailed here.
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