The Glasgow Climate Pact keeps 1.5°C alive!
Just. UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “It’s an important step but is not enough. We must accelerate climate action to keep alive the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.”
Some key points from UK COP26:
- Agreed to strengthen Nationally Determined Contributions to 2030.
- Yearly political roundtable. Leaders’ summit in 2023.
- Paris Rulebook completed after six years of discussions. Includes process to hold countries to account.
- For the first time, COP agreed action on phasing down fossil fuels.
- Went further than before in recognising and addressing loss and damage.
- Commitments to increase financial support.
Helm: “Woefully inadequate” “At the Paris COP, the world leaders failed to come up with a legally binding set of targets. Glasgow sang from the same old hymn sheet, ..... one more heave is going to crack the climate change problem. “It has not and it will not.”
Sir Dieter Helm is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford. He was Chair of the Natural Capital Committee, providing advice to the UK government.
How can IESF British Section lend its weight to Net Zero?
On the face of it, there is much to welcome in the Glasgow Climate Pact, though success depends on immediate and determined action by all. Without that, I fear that Professor Helm is right, we – or rather our children and succeeding generations – are staring down the barrel of climate catastrophe.
Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of UNFCCC and an architect of COP21 in Paris, has a good approach: Stubborn Optimism, grit and determination in the face of daunting but unavoidable challenge. Watch her video.
Engineering actions
One of the best hopes for accelerating progress is that many businesses are making firm commitments to net zero, supported by increasing expectations to measure and report progress through ESG, TCFD and other regulatory mechanisms. Considerable carbon emissions derive from carbon embodied in the concrete and steel in infrastructure and buildings and so it is good to see many engineering and construction companies amongst them.
Arup declared on 8th November that it will not take on new energy commissions involving the extraction, refinement or transportation of hydrocarbon-based fuels from next year, having already committedto whole lifecycle carbon assessments for all its building projects.
The New Civil Engineer magazine reports Andrew Wolstenholme, Group Technical Director of Laing O’Rourke, discussing the need to find a procurement pathway to net zero. Laing O’Rourke is one of the many engineering and construction businesses who have committed to net zero.
Two documents, PAS 2080 Carbon Management in Infrastructure, and the Carbon Reduction Code for the Built Environment, provide excellent guidance on how to manage whole life carbon. They should be promoted by government and institutions, and adopted widely.
There are many engineering business opportunities in which the UK can lead, including decarbonisation of the manufacture of steel and concrete, small modular reactors, conversion of coal-fired power stations, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen by electrolysis, and development of battery technologies. And, looking further ahead, nuclear fusion.
IESF and personal actions
IESF and its members are in strong positions of influence. We can discuss these ideas and many others with our families, friends and colleagues. We can lead by example by starting to make choices in our own lives to reduce our own carbon footprints. As a professional body, we have greater reach.
Little public attention is paid to the extent to which consumption drives carbon emissions. For the UK, net imported emissions account for close to 40% of the total emissions for which we are accountable. But, imported emissions are excluded from formal reporting per the Climate Change Act. So targets for future emissions and the means of achieving them are about production and only include UK territorial emissions, not imports. Consumers make choices that impact suppliers and manufacturers: we can choose products and services that reduce our carbon footprint and thereby show that we are serious about rapid reductions. Governments can exert more direct influence by taxing carbon at borders or the point of sale.
IESF members could apply a similar, but simple, methodology to that we should increasingly expect of businesses by setting a baseline and seeing how choices we make can set us on a pathway to net zero. We can then use our wide networks of contacts to influence others to do the same. For success, Everybody (person, family, community, society, organisation, business institution, council, government, .....) has to be on board.
Will The Glasgow Climate Pact keep 1.5°C alive?
As Professor Helm says ‘experience offers no hope that it will’. Momentum towards net zero, or at least talking about it, built considerably in the run up to COP26. What can each of us do to help turn that momentum into real and substantial action?
Philip Pascall