Rod Oram reports from the world climate summit that a session dedicated to agriculture had a notable absentee, New Zealand's Fonterra and farming industry
Today the COP27 climate negotiations in Egypt begin their second and last week confronted by a range of towering challenges of Himalayan proportions.
By far the greatest is to achieve some progress on finance to help developing countries respond to the grievous loss and damage they’re suffering from the escalating climate crisis.
Such countries, led by the Group of 77 plus China, achieved an historic precedent last week in getting the issue of finance to respond to loss and damage onto COP’s agenda for the first time.
“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution,” Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, to COP27 last week, pointedly referring to the legacy of slavery and imperialism.
“Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.”
But to their intense frustrations, the intricate, highly politicised negotiations now here at COP27 are over work programmes and timelines for devising new structures as quickly as possible. They are not about springing into action with substantial emergency finance.
Also, the US in particular, plus some other developed countries, have said categorically they reject the concept of liability and thus climate reparations for the damage caused by their past emissions. Nor is it about unlimited funds for whatever loss and damage developed countries will suffer in the future.
Thus, this week will test diplomatic processes to the very limit, likely even to breaking-point, as the nations of the world seek to find some common ground, and ways to get substantial finance flowing to crisis-struck developing countries as quickly as possible.
Finance in many forms looms large across much of COP27’s agenda, given money is vital to spurring transitions to climate-compatible energy supplies, economies and societies. Such “implementation” is the over-riding goal of this COP.
The sums mooted are large but manageable, says Lord Stern, the British climate economist and former head of the UK Treasury. He cites a figure of some US$2 trillion a year globally by 2030, based on work he and others did in a UN high-level experts’ group that reported to this COP. He points out that the increase in investment is modest, given much of it will come from switching money to clean technologies instead of carbon-intensive ones.
Meanwhile, Saturday was Agriculture and Adaptation Day. Given farming, food and their associated changes in land use globally are the single largest source of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, it was remarkable this was the first time they’d been accorded a focus day at a COP.
Even more so, because of farming’s acute damage to biodiversity and other vital components of ecosystem health in developed and developing countries.
Only a total transformation of farming and food systems can address those issues, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food said in a report released just before COP27.
Yet, the work has barely begun, it said. For example, only 3 percent of public climate finance goes to food systems, it calculates.
Many other farm and food groupings have given the same messages in recent years, such as the Food and Land Use Coalition (which includes many major agribusinesses) and the World Economic Forum’s Foods Systems Initiative.
But yet again in recent days yet another climate plan from a group of agribusinesses has been widely criticised by NGOs for failing to deliver a credible strategy. This one was from leading producers of cattle, palm oil, soya beans and cocoa – such as JBS of Brazil, the world’s largest red meat producer, Cargill, the US commodities giant, and Wilmar, a major Singapore-based food processor.
On Friday, the global dairy industry took its turn to report its climate progress to COP27. This was an update on Pathways to Dairy Net Zero, which was launched last year by the Global Dairy Platform.
GDP is a global alliance of dairy companies founded by Fonterra in 2006 when Andrew Ferrier was its chief executive. Miles Hurrell, the co-op’s current CEO is on GDP’s board; and GDP, based in Chicago, is run by Donald Moore, a former Fonterra executive.
GDP says more than 140 organisations have backed its Pathways to Net Zero programme, including governments, research organisations and the world’s top 10 largest dairy companies including Fonterra. The industry members account for some 40 percent of global dairy supply.
Friday’s two presentations on Pathways to Net Zero were long on themes and programmes. Speakers included Dr Harry Clark, who is co-director of the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, co-chair of the Livestock Research Group of the Global Research Alliance for Greenhouse Gases, and a former commissioner on the NZ Climate Change Commission. He talked briefly in general terms of the avenues by which emissions can be reduced.
But the Pathways presentations were devoid of goals or details. For example, the overall target is given as only a reduction in dairy greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; and Net Zero remains undefined.
Yet, there are some leaders in GDP and Pathways, such as Hein Schumacher. He is chair of GDP and chief executive of Royal FrieslandCampina. The Dutch co-op’s goal is “to achieve net climate-neutrality in terms of our scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions” by 2050 using externally verified, climate science-based targets.
Meanwhile, Fonterra has sent no representative to COP27, nor has it set it and its farmer-shareholders any methane reduction goals. Even though they are NZ’s largest single source of emissions, accounting for 21 percent of our national annual total.
Elsewhere on Agriculture Day, in the style of COPs, a plethora of initiatives were launched by governments, research organisations and businesses, and a crowded programme of presentations, major and minor, flowed from many country, sector and NGO pavilions.
At the big end of this vast spectrum, the US and UAE launched a US$8 billion programme for research into climate-compatible farming. Some 275 governments, businesses, academic institutions and other organisations are part of the effort, the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate .
In contrast, New Zealand, a country that tells the world it’s a global leader in agricultural science, innovation and entrepreneurship, was conspicuously absent from COP27’s Agriculture and Adaptation Day on Saturday.
