| By Akshat Rathi As US President Donald Trump slashes international climate commitments, smaller nations are already showing they're not going to sit idle and let the fight against global warming grind to a halt. "I want to remind people that hope is a condition that we choose," said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley on a Zero podcast interview. "Resilience is what buttresses and gives hope its best chance, which is why we are working" on reducing emissions and adapting to climate change. Mottley, who leads a small island nation in the Atlantic Ocean, was speaking at a conference organized by the United Nations-backed group Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll). In front of dozens of leaders of developing countries, Mottley announced that her country now has a roadmap to reach net-zero emissions by 2035. That's ambitious. This year the country will get only about 15% of its electricity from renewables. Though Barbados's oil extraction is declining, it still has some active wells that extracts about 1,000 barrels of oil a day. Germany's net-zero target, which is among the most ambitious in Europe, is for 2045. So how exactly can Barbados beat it? Mottley's promise is backed by an "energy transition and investment plan" that the country's government developed with help from experts at SEforAll. It was a process that took nearly two years for the SEforAll team to model and secure government approvals for. The first step was to understand Barbados's current and future needs, then model the use of available technologies to move the country to carbon-free energy and estimate the cost of the transition of about $10 billion. It resulted in showing that Barbados, which had announced in 2019 an intention to reach net zero by 2030, would not be able to do so economically with today's technologies. However, net zero by 2035 is "technically viable," said Kanika Chawla, SEforAll's chief of staff. "But it will need concerted effort from the government and enough financing." Barbados is also at the forefront of using innovative financial instruments to secure the money it needs. At the conference Mottley announced the closing of $110 million in funds to build a water reclamation facility that will make it more resilient to extreme-weather impacts. SEforAll has been working with other governments around the world to develop realistic climate strategies. The group's modeling helped Nigeria establish a target to reach net zero by 2060; Ghana to move up its net-zero goal from 2070 to 2060; and Kenya to amend its national energy policy. Such plans, when backed by evidence and sound models, can attract financing. SEforAll says Nigeria has secured more than $3.5 billion from development banks and similar organizations, which it hopes to multiply by soliciting matching investments from the private sector. These kinds of nuts-and-bolts efforts are also happening at a grander scale through the work for the NDC Partnership, another body set up by the UN. That effort helps developing countries craft their national climate plans. These proposals—called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—are tallied up to track whether the world is on track to reach the Paris Agreement's climate goals. Even though NDC commitments are voluntary, countries are urged to make credible goals. NDCs can become the basis of government policy and investment decisions from private companies. The NDC Partnership is backed by the nonprofit World Resources Institute. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the philanthropic organization of Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is one of the funders of SEforAll. However, most developing countries lack the expertise needed to understand how to set climate goals and, crucially, how to develop policies that will help them meet those goals. The NDC partnership, which is now co-chaired by COP30 host Brazil, works with more than 70 countries to develop these climate plans. The main goal at COP30 is to secure bold and ambitious national climate plans with targets looking ahead to 2035, which the UN hopes will show that the world is making progress on tackling climate change even as Trump has announced the US will exit the Paris Agreement. SEforAll's team says it is ready to convert those NDCs from developing countries into energy transition plans. Next in line is Pakistan. "We have 198 parties under the Paris agreement," said Ana Toni, chief executive officer of COP30. "One of them has decided to leave, but 197 are still committed to the multilateral agreement." | 
No comments:
Post a Comment