Targets and lies: Global summits are hiding the reality of the environmental crisis
By: Victor Anderson
Date: 5 December 2024
Campaigns: Climate
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro set in motion two main processes responding to the global environmental crisis. Both began with treaties – on climate change and biodiversity – and followed these up with conferences of the parties (‘COPs’) bringing together the governments of the countries that signed up to the treaties.
Both treaties have had COPs this year. The one on biodiversity took place in Colombia, which was ironic because the Government of Colombia has been subject to numerous claims against it by corporations using the ISDS system of corporate courts, the exact opposite of the sort of global co-operation called for in Rio 32 years ago.
This year’s conference was designed to check on progress with the targets and promises made at the 2022 COP, which took place in Kunming, China. Kunming called for governments to submit action plans to conserve nature. Two years later, only 44 of the 190 countries that signed up to do that have actually delivered plans.
The Kunming agreement also called for developed countries to contribute $20 billion per year. The amount pledged at this year’s conference, in Cali, Colombia, was $163 million, less than 1% of that amount.
A “bright spot” (according to the report in science journal Nature) was the agreement for companies to pay into biodiversity funding. A business benefitting from genetic information extracted from nature “will be encouraged to pay 1% of its profits or 0.1% of its revenue” to fund conservation. Note that “encouraged”: the scheme is voluntary.
It is hard to imagine the targets set in 2022 being achieved, not only because of this lack of finance and action plans, but also because of what happened to the previous targets, agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. The UN reported: “At the global level, none of the 20 targets have been fully achieved, though six targets have been partially achieved.”
The 29th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention (COP29) was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, a leading centre of the oil region surrounding the Caspian Sea. Hopes were not high. The situation is similar to that for biodiversity.
In 2015 at the Paris Climate COP, government representatives agreed a declaration which included the goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels”. That declaration led to rejoicing in some quarters, where this was hailed as an important achievement.
It is now clear that, although staying below 1.5° is still theoretically possible, if a highly unlikely set of policies and circumstances were to be combined, for all practical purposes 1.5 is dead. According to the UN Environment Programme, the world is currently on course, on the basis of existing policies, for a rise in average global temperature of between 2.6 and 3.1 degrees by 2100, around double the 1.5° target.
Hiding reality
This contrast between targets and outcomes is stark, and governments must surely see that. This raises the question of what role the COPs and their targets actually play. The conferences provide a means by which well-meaning scientists, diplomats, and campaigners can try to make the world a better place, but they also have another function, which is being far more successfully achieved: hiding reality.
For both climate and biodiversity conferences, the gaps between targets and achievements has reached the point at which publicity about targets now functions as lies, and the combination of those targets has come to constitute a Big Lie. This is a Big Lie about the state and future of the planet, something we really cannot afford to be misled or lied to about.
It isn’t only politicians seeking votes who benefit from this arrangement. We all like to feel that things are OK and will be OK for our children and grandchildren. We like to feel that our ’leaders‘ are looking after us and that the planet is in good hands, despite evidence to the contrary. Anything different from that either points the finger at ourselves as citizens as having some share of responsibility, or at the need for serious political and economic changes.
NGOs can themselves be part of this ‘calming consensus’. Their comms and marketing departments tell them the public don’t like bad news and that pessimism causes people to turn off. Their lobbyists tell them politicians like to hear more positive messages. Businesses tell them to focus on the opportunities rather than the problems. All of this has some validity, but it is also very dangerous. It’s very much like drinking a drink that calms the nerves and makes everything look much rosier than it really is. Now and then that can be OK, but it can also become addictive.
It is at this point – a point we have already gone beyond – that a consensus builds up, amongst politicians, public, and NGOs, and with economists and the media making their contributions too, that fundamentally misleads as to the state and prospects for our planet and the life on it. As a result, changes that need to be made don’t get made because they don’t appear to be urgent or necessary.
That’s the point at which targets turn into lies.
Victor Anderson is a member of Global Justice Now’s council.
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Photo: UN Climate Change – Habib Samadov (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
