Are we serious about attaining ambitious climate change goal?

Delegates leave a hall after attending a session at the COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan on November 19, 2024.

Photo credit: Reuters

COP29 climate talks officially end today. But as history repeats itself (as with all successive COP summits) very little progress is expected. The empty promises and hollow rhetoric are quite the norm. To think otherwise is simply being wishful.

Nonetheless, I understand many will hold a different view whatever the outcome. Already, some have begun touting the deal on trading carbon credits as a major win from the summit. I disagree.

Why? If I say I'm moving two steps forward, one step back, it only means I’m making progress despite having some setbacks. But if I say I'm moving one step forward, two steps back, it can only mean I'm losing ground no matter what I do. This last position is what I think carbon credit markets are about; net regressive.

For me, there have always been more questions than answers. Please allow me to wonder aloud: How many new cookstoves does Africa need to install to move the needle? Is it realistic to expect the global south to keep their forests untouched for years just because they were paid for?

Why are developed countries allowed to appear to be reducing emissions while passing the task on to developing countries? How come it’s only the man in the middle (read brokers, economic agents...) benefiting the most from existing carbon offsets money? Isn’t working to “reduce emissions” and pursuing “net zero” goals a contradiction?

To add, the 2023 investigation (led by Thales West, an assistant professor of environmental geography at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands) which found that 94 percent of the credits from rainforest protection projects had no benefit to the climate makes this new push somewhat hard to accept.

Look, I may be wrong but all I see are schemes creating a false sense of progress. An illusion that emissions are being reduced without any real progress.

I have resigned myself to the fact that as sure as cabbage is cabbage, the legacy of broken promises will always follow COPs.

Not surprisingly, people are trapped in their own folly. Old habits die hard. That's why I applaud the United States for "stopping the pretence" and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It proves the old adage about human weakness: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” holds true.

Someone joked that the day when change happens is when the sun will get too hot that even after wearing perfume, negotiators will still smell like roasted maize.

But jokes aside, far from being a pessimist, I take comfort that there are other measures being explored besides carbon credits.

But let's not kid ourselves. Talking about net zero targets for all countries by mid-century while championing solutions such as carbon credit that rewards complacency rather than real mitigation efforts is not being realistic.

Continuing to walk this path is burning up precious time and running down the goodwill needed for achieving climate goals. And as we think about real options, the sea is rising, heat waves are becoming intense, floods are becoming frequent and droughts too close in between.

Mwanyasi is MD, Canaan Capital

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