Beyond the hashtags, time to act on climate change

 Outside the imposing façade of the Bank of England in central London, a man carries his young daughter on his shoulder, chanting slogans about ending climate change and stopping the “blah, blah, blah” of conferences.

Next to him, a group of protesters holds aloft a banner that proclaims that “The Era of Fossil Finance is Over”. They are headed towards Trafalgar Square, where crowds are massing and troops of protesters are loudly chanting that the world needs a “system change, not climate change”.

In Edinburgh, Scotland, the staircase into the Waverley railway station proclaims that Scotland’s electric trains are cutting carbon emissions by more than 10,000 tonnes a year.

Next to it, and on thousands of other posters on the line to Aberdeen in the northeast and Glasgow in the west, and virtually everywhere else on Scotland’s wide ScotRail network, the national railway operator promises a cleaner, greener future and a faster journey to its Net Zero destination.

Seventy-five kilometres away in Glasgow, thousands of delegates are meeting for the COP26 conference, perhaps the most important climate change summit in the history of mankind. As temperatures soar and weather becomes erratic, Glasgow is being seen as the last chance for humans to save themselves from extinction. And while ScotRail is hurtling towards its Net Zero goal, there are concerns that its ambitions, just like those of many other organisations and countries around the world, are not enough and have come a bit too late.

Greenhouse gases

Net Zero refers to an imaginary state in which the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal of the same out of the atmosphere. For the delegates who have been gathering in Glasgow for two weeks now, that state is important because, for the harmful carbon dioxide at least, this is the state at which global warming stops.

The Paris Agreement proposes that States should achieve that in the second half of this century, but scientists and thought leaders are warning that, that could be too late. The time to act is now.

A new research report published on Monday this week by McKinsey and Company warns that, under a scenario with 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2030, “almost half of the world’s population could be exposed to a climate hazard related to heat stress, drought, flood, or water stress in the next decade”, up from 43 per cent today.

Even more ominously, the report warns that in a 2.0°C warming scenario above pre-industrial levels by 2050, about 800 million additional people could be living in urban areas under severe water stress compared with today; primarily as demand for water rises.

Should that temperature rise be above 2.0°C, one in seven of the total global rural population could be employed in the agricultural sector by 2050 because of severe levels of drought, and communities next to rivers, lakes or oceans could be exposed to severe riverine or coastal flooding as waters breach existing defenses. To put it more bluntly, the future is bleak, and Glasgow is being viewed as the last chance to slam the brakes on the train to a climatic catastrophe.

 On Monday, former US president Barack Obama warned that many people "either act like the problem doesn't exist or refuse to make the hard decisions necessary to address it”, and pointed out that online campaigns and hashtags might create awareness, but will not solve the problem. Only action can.

"Protests are necessary to raise awareness,” said Mr Obama, “but to build the broad-based coalitions necessary for bold action, we have to persuade people who either currently don't agree or are indifferent to the issue. We have to do a little more listening. We can't just yell at them, or tweet at them — it's not enough to inconvenience them by blocking traffic through protests.”

And that, perhaps, sums up the problem with the global climate change campaigns. Protesters in London told this writer that such negotiations are impersonal, the campaigns emanating from them painfully digital, and the whole enterprise lacking in action away from climate-controlled settings of symposiums.

By yesterday morning, the COP26 secretariat had fired slightly over 2,700 tweets in a span of just days to its 216,000 followers, while the #COP26 hashtag had garnered millions of impressions around the world, mostly of delegates announcing their commitment to the climate change conversation, or taking selfies on the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Away in the lowlands of Kajiado in Kenya or the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, frontline communities continued to brave the effects of the actions of an uncaring, unhinged and agonisingly destructive global enterprise.

Mr Nigel Topping, the High Level Climate Action Champion at COP26, warned that this had to end: “After a summer of fire and flood and a code red from climate scientists, we must reckon with the scale, immediacy and inequity of the climate crisis right now. We need urgent, innovative breakthroughs on resilience and to address loss and damage.”

His warning was echoed by Mr Gonzalo Muñoz, the Chilean High Level Climate Action Champion for COP25, who noted that “climate change disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, so we need to run two races at the same time – rapidly reducing emissions while building resilience for billions of people in climate-vulnerable communities.”

Global South

For Kenya and the rest of the Global South, that action should come in not just the form of commitments, but also financial aid. Delegates are agitating for the release of trillions of shillings in aid to combat the effect of climate change, and this meeting has been hailed as the one, after Paris five years ago, that could force rich nations to finally put their money where their mouths are.

So far, global leaders have committed to a shift towards locally led adaptation measures, and about 45 governments have pledged urgent action and investment to protect nature and shift to more sustainable ways of farming. Also, 95 high-profile companies from a range of sectors have committed to being ‘Nature Positive’, agreeing to work towards halting and reversing the decline of nature by 2030.

As COP26 enters the final stages this week, the focus is now shifting to whether action will follow the promises. African nations are also under the spotlight for not pushing the West enough to undo the damage centuries of environmental abuse have wrought on the continent. They have also had a weak show at the negotiating table, letting pushy Western delegates decide the fate of the most-at-risk communities instead of speaking for them.

At a protest in the streets of Glasgow on Sunday, Ms Yvonne Blake, a Jamaican immigrant who co-founded the Britain-based Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment lobby group, lamented that delegates from the Global South were not taking the opportunity to speak for themselves at the summit, and were instead letting others do the talking on their behalf.

"If these people are speaking about us and we are not represented, they do not speak for us," she said. "We cannot expect the people in COP to bring the changes, because they are the ones who created the problem. The climate crisis is a racist crisis and their 'solutions' are racist solutions."

Still, there is hope that this summit will finally slam the brakes on global warming. The World Bank announced this week that it will spend $25 billion in climate finance annually to 2025 through its Climate Action Plan, including a focus on agriculture and food systems. For Kenya and the rest of the Global South, this is the point of no return, the moment to stand up and be heard.

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