Sustaining All Life and the COPs
Sustaining All Life (SAL) was organized in 2015, with the goal of taking RC understandings about the natural healing process, and the connections between oppression and the climate crisis, to the activist gatherings associated with the United Nations climate talks (called COPs, for Conference of the Parties).
Sustaining All Life has attended every COP since then, as well as other major climate talks in the United States.
Our delegates lead the following:
- Workshops: We present basic RC theory connected to some aspect of oppression and the climate emergency—racism; war; the oppression of Indigenous people, young people, women, Arabs).
- Forums: Participants share their personal experiences with the climate crisis, climate activism, or their work on the climate crisis as Global Majority and Indigenous* people, young people, women, Muslims, and so on. [* The peoples of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and South, Central, and Caribbean America, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass. Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status. Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts the assimilation.]
- Listening projects, support groups, fundamentals classes, and caucuses: Participants share their experiences, listen to each other, and learn a little about RC.
Thousands of people have come to our events, and many have expressed an interest in learning more about us. Many SAL delegates and volunteers have maintained relationships with people they’ve met at the COPs. Through these connections, we have started RC Communities in at least the following countries: The Gambia, Cameroon, Guinea, and Morocco. We are still teaching RC to people we’ve met from Nepal, Egypt, and Madagascar. People are increasingly interested in tools for addressing the emotional stress from living in the escalating climate emergency and the divisions that impair the effectiveness of the climate justice movement. The work of SAL has also strengthened the work on the climate emergency in the RC Communities.
Sustaining All Life attends the COPs because the United Nations is the international body addressing the climate emergency. No other global organization is looking so much at the big picture and working to unite the world in addressing the crisis. (There are many global climate advocacy groups, but none of them have near the reach or the power of the United Nations.)
THE IPCC AND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES AND TREATIES
The First World Climate Conference was in 1979. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC—the United Nations climate science body) was established in 1988. Since then, many conferences have been held, and the IPCC has released several assessments of the impact of climate change worldwide.
The first global climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was signed in 1992. In that treaty the parties (197 countries) recognized that we have a problem and agreed on international cooperation to combat climate change, by limiting average global temperature increases, and to cope with its impacts. The treaty called on developed countries, as they’ve been the source of most greenhouse gas emissions, to lead the way in cutting emissions. In 1995 the first COP (Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC) was held in Berlin, Germany.
In 2015 the Paris Agreement was signed, at COP21, to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise in this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. It was acknowledged that the commitments made at COP21 to reduce emissions were inadequate to reach the goal and was therefore decided that the national pledges would be revised every five years.
In October 2018 the IPCC issued a key report: Global Warming of 1.5 C Degrees. This report states that to keep warming to 1.5°C requires reducing emissions by about 45% relative to 2010 levels by 2030, and reaching net zero (the point at which the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount removed) by about 2050. COP26 focused on this goal.
A 2021 IPCC Report reaffirmed the findings of 2018 with more data and more certainty that the situation is dire and caused by human activity. It concluded that the largest emitters must reach true net zero by 2045.
(Note that during all these years, human-caused carbon emissions have grown at an average annual rate of 3.5 percent.)
ISSUES AND OUTCOMES AT COP26
The issues that had been contentious and unresolved in Paris and at subsequent COPs were in the spotlight at COP26:
Loss and damage: Developing nations object to focusing on future emissions without addressing the past emissions of developed countries that have caused the climate crisis. They assert that principles of equity and “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” demand that wealthy nations make deeper and faster cuts in emissions than developing nations and help to shoulder the costs of climate destruction in those countries. The wealthy nations have consistently fought any language that hints at their liability for the damage caused by climate change.
Climate finance: It remains voluntary. COP26 called for doubling the financial resources given to poor nations to address the impacts of the climate crisis. But the wealthy nations have yet to meet the financial commitments they agreed to in Paris.
Pledges: The pledges made at COP26 remain inadequate. The current 2030 targets put us on track for a 2.4°C temperature increase by the end of the century. (It was 2.7°C before COP26.)
Even with all the new COP26 pledges, we will emit roughly twice as much in 2030 as is required for 1.5°C. Acknowledging this, the parties committed to meet again next year (2022), instead of in 2025 as originally planned, to submit long-term strategies for reaching net zero by 2050.
Some other important (though inadequate) results of COP26 are as follows:
- Fossil fuels were referred to for the first time.
- A doubling by 2025 of financial aid to poorer countries for adaptation was urged.
- There was a call to accelerate the “phasing down” of coal and the phasing out of subsidies for fossil fuels.
- 100+ countries agreed to end deforestation by 2030 and made some serious financial commitments.
- 100+ countries committed to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
- 40+ countries (not including the United States, China, Australia, and India) committed to phasing out coal-fired power.
- The United States and China made a joint agreement to do more to reduce emissions.
- India committed to reaching net zero by 2070.
- A “just transition” for workers was mentioned for the first time.
The agreements do not do the following:
- They do not push developed countries to achieve real emissions reduction now to keep to the 1.5°C target.
- They do not meet calls for climate reparations for those who are most harmed and have contributed the least to the climate emergency.
- They do not phase out, they only phase down, coal.
- They do not adequately help countries respond to the damage from the climate crisis.
- They do not address loopholes for offsets that give big emitters and corporations a pass for cutting emissions while claiming “net zero.”
- They do not include a mechanism to ensure that carbon trading leads to an overall reduction in global emissions.
A GROWING IMPACT
As things get harder, RC tools and understandings become more valuable, and more people recognize their importance. More and more people remember us from past COPs and openly appreciate the resource we bring.
We keep finding ways to reach more new people at the COPs, along with the activists we have reached in the past. We also find more ways to share our understandings about discharge and the importance of addressing racism and other oppressions as an essential part of solving the climate crisis.
Shoreline, Washington, USA
(Present Time 206, January 2022)