Tag Archive for: COP28

The threat spectrum

Planet A

The host nation of COP28, the United Arab Emirates, has been criticised over leaked documents that reveal plans to leverage the climate discussions to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies. The summit is being led by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is both the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and the UAE’s special envoy for climate change, creating the perception that he may be compromised by the conflict of interest inherent in his dual role.

The briefing materials, obtained by the centre for climate reporting, were prepared for Al Jaber’s bilateral meetings with the other 27 governments at COP28. They indicate ADNOC intended to focus on collaborating with nations to extract their oil and gas resources, and contained specific proposals for countries such as China, Colombia, Mozambique, Canada and Australia.

The materials raised concerns among climate summit veterans, who believe they could undermine trust in Al Jaber’s presidency and jeopardise the summit’s success. However, a COP28 spokesperson denies their accuracy and emphasises the confidentiality of private meetings, while ADNOC has remained silent on the matter.

Democracy Watch

In Nepal, police have employed rattan sticks, tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of protesters advocating for the reinstatement of the monarchy, abolished 15 years ago. Organised under the ‘campaign to protect nation, nationalism, religion, culture and citizens’, demonstrators showed their anger at the country’s political class. On the same day, a similar number led by the Communist Party-affiliated Youth Organization Nepal marched to demand the resignation of the current prime minister and an end to corruption.

Since the monarchy’s abolition in 2008 to resolve a Maoist insurgency, successive governments have failed to fulfil commitments to uplift one of the world’s poorest nations. Protesters attempted to breach a police barricade on the outskirts of Kathmandu and march towards the city centre, prompting intervention by riot police to quell the crowd. In the clash, some officers were injured by stones hurled by protesters, while the monarchist campaign coordinator Durga Prasai reported that approximately 10 of the campaign’s protesters were injured, two critically.

Nepal has grappled with political instability since 2008 with frequent changes in government hindering economic progress and leading many to seek employment abroad, especially young people. The current prime minister, former Maoist rebel chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as Prachanda, heads a coalition with the centrist Nepali Congress party, while the last king, Gyanendra, lives as a commoner in Kathmandu.

Information Operations

Pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets have alleged that illegal weapons deliveries are being funnelled through Ukraine to sow division and erode western support amid the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. Following the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign narratives have portrayed Ukraine as a corrupt and unreliable partner. In videos and posts actively distributed on Facebook and Russian Telegram channels, for example, users claimed without evidence that Ukrainian authorities had sold NATO-supplied weapons to Hamas on the black market or negotiated arms deals with Hezbollah fighters.

Other disinformation narratives have claimed that weapons deliveries to Ukraine are linked with increased crime and civil unrest in Europe. This deliberately conflates the isolated issue of small arms being taken out of Ukraine with the notion that irregular migration from the country is driving industrial-scale arms trafficking operations.

Ultimately, Russia and its information manipulation agents will likely continue to distort the truth to push narratives that serve its national interests and strategic objectives, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Follow the Money

US prosecutors have charged the cryptocurrency exchange Binance with conducting over $1 billion in transactions with sanctioned countries and known criminal actors. The indictment alleges that Binance made $275 million in payments to cryptocurrency ‘mixing’ service BestMixer and received $106 million from the Russian dark web market Hydra.

Separate indictments charge Changpeng Zhao, who has stepped down as CEO, and former chief compliance officer Samuel Lim with allowing the illicit transactions to take place. Zhao will pay a $50 million corporate fine as part of a $4.3 billion settlement to resolve the years-long probe.

The charges and settlement come on the heels of the fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX who siphoned stolen customer funds from 2019 to November 2022 to fund a lavish lifestyle and cover high-risk investments.

The implications of these transgressions amplify existing concerns about cryptocurrency and highlight the critical need for stringent compliance standards.

Terror Byte

The West Papua National Liberation Army-Free Papua Organisation (TPNPB-OPM), a separatist group that Indonesia classifies as terrorists, has adopted more divisive and extreme tactics in its pursuit of an independent West Papua. This year, amid increasing tensions and sustained violence in Nduga Regency, the TPNPB-OPM threatened to kill Papuans working with Indonesian security forces and shoot down and burn planes carrying government officials, as well as capture their pilots.

And on 28 August, the TPNPB-OPM shot dead a prominent Papuan activist and social worker, Michelle Kurisi Ndoga. A TPNPB-OPM spokesperson emphasised there was strong evidence that Ndoga was an intelligence officer who informed Indonesian authorities of the location of Papuan refugees and TPNPB-OPM camps.

In response to this and other extra-judicial killings, Indonesian security forces have stepped up efforts to find and kill members of the TPNPB-OPM. In October, a joint military and police operation reportedly killed five suspected insurgents, including a local rebel commander, prompting reprisals and further violence against civilians.

The case for climate realism after COP28: prepare for the worst, now

This year’s annual climate negotiations (the 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28) are beginning in Dubai.

Once again, it will not provide us with the solutions needed to rapidly pull the brakes on emissions and adapt to rising impacts—particularly when it is increasingly co-opted to expand oil and gas activity). The Global Stocktake will show, as the UN Environment Programme did recently, that we’re on track to dangerous warming. Technical discussions will promote cooperation on mitigation and expand adaptation financing but they will still fail to set us on a course to a secure future climate.

We must stop looking to COPs (cynically, or hopefully) as a focal point for success. That only sets us up for disappointment and places an unreasonable expectation on negotiators to achieve the impossible.

Instead, we need to grapple with our own failure to wrap our heads around the practical realities of climate change.

A growing trend in the climate world is to counter the doom and gloom around climate futures with optimism. The alternative, given the relentless pace of climate records being broken, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reaching new heights, and the breaching of dangerous temperature thresholds is understandably exhausting to contemplate.

Optimists remind us that we have grown renewable energy capacity massively in recent years—and we are rapidly improving our understanding of how to adapt to climate change. They contend that failing to showcase our successes when talking about challenges creates the impression that we don’t have solutions. The optimists insist that a positive vision is needed to motivate broad political action.

Excellent.

Except optimism alone won’t work fast enough. The climate is continuing to warm at a disturbing pace. We’ve barely managed to fund developing countries’ adaptation needs—now at a gap of 10–18 times their needs annually. Many advanced economies are on track to miss their targets, with plans and investments watered down or scrapped. Climate denialists and delayers are effectively undermining action. Given this waffling in advanced economies, it’s understandable that emerging economies still tie economic development to fossil fuels despite the availability of increasingly cheap renewable energy.

The backdrop to this is that the science of where climate risk will take us is complicated. We have improved our understanding of physical climate risk—floods, fires, heat, storms—but are only beginning to understand the compounding and cascading effects on social, economic and political systems that can truly multiply their impact.

Disasters are already hitting harder and faster and they will do so with greater frequency, concurrency and intensity. Global finance will be disrupted, supply chains threatened and disease vectors expanded. Food may become more expensive and access to it less assured. Droughts and floods may rise. People may move, voluntarily or involuntarily, to seek opportunity or shelter, while nations may see both rising internal unrest and increasing external threats as existing tensions are exacerbated under these new climate conditions.

Stacked against these competing views from climate optimists and pessimists, though, is the reality that too many influential voices remain unconvinced that climate change is a threat at all—or that it’s worth the costs to tackle it.

Recent statements from political leaders, amplified by a worrying surge in the number of anti-climate activists, are likely contributing to a rise in the proportion of voters who suggest we must delay climate action until after we’ve addressed the cost-of-living crisis.

Some even opportunistically claim that climate action drives the inflationary crisis, despite unambiguous evidence to the contrary. Yet what drove inflation? A massive reactive and consequently poorly coordinated response to a single, but serious, communicable disease. A complex mix of supply-chain disruptions, government interventions and macroeconomic impacts led us here—because we were not prepared, even when we should have been.

How ironic it is that these climate deniers are using the consequences of our failure to deal with Covid-19 to justify delaying reducing climate emissions and adaptation, leaving us to face an even wider and more intense set of future threats. We remain complacent about a threat that will overwhelm us because there are still political leaders, bureaucrats and business interests making bets on whether they need to take our worsening emissions trajectory seriously.

How should we reconcile the optimistic and pessimistic climate narratives to make up for the lost ground they’ve each contributed to in the fight against climate change? We need a vision of an achievable and safe future that realistically includes intensifying, and now unavoidable, climate impacts.

We need to be realistic about the urgency and stop pretending we can delay climate action to some dubious future point. Inaction becomes costlier with each passing day.

We need to expand our boundary of analysis and assessment beyond country borders. The Indo-Pacific matters deeply for Australia’s future security, yet our understanding of both domestic and cross-border climate risks from the region is still emerging.

Every choice and investment across government needs to be made with a changing future climate in mind. We need to urgently understand, cost and prioritise our scarce current and future resources to tackle climate risk.

Most fundamentally, climate change is not something to be hopeful, cynical, bullish or bearish about. It is a physical reality. It does not care how we feel. It will not care if we fail.

Let’s stop waiting for someone else to solve it, burying our heads in the sand or squinting to see a silver lining.

It’s time to grapple with reality.