John Englart

Outcomes from Poland and UN climate Conference COP24: more action needed

Australian Environment Minister walks off the stage after delivering Australia’s ambition poor statement.

It has been a hectic two weeks for negotiators at the United Nations Climate Change conference, meeting in the heart of Poland’s coal province of Silesia. The conference was due to close on Friday 14 December, but intense negotiations continued overnight and were only finalised on Saturday evening.

The Paris rulebook was (mostly) landed to continue the momentum from Paris in 2015, and this was a vital measurement of the conference success, but some elements were just too contentious to achieve consensus and have been pushed forward to COP25 meeting in Santiago, Chile in 2019.

Climate Action Moreland Convenor John Englart has been following the negotiations, discussions, and protests online and posting blog articles over the last two weeks. He also tracked Australia’s Environment Minister Melissa Price and her public presence on social media and deciphered her High level speech for Australia.

Australia won one Fossil of the Day award for refusing to rule out using Kyoto credits to meet Paris targets, and shared in another award from the conference. While Climate policies are on the rise globally, global ambition level by many countries is still lacking, with Australia rated highly insufficient and delaying global progress.

Progress is always slow at UN conferences and time is not on our side. The Prime Minister of Fiji and President of COP23 summed up the next steps needed following COP24:

“The next steps are clear. In 2019, dialogue must give way to action. The Talanoa Dialogue must give way to the Talanoa Call for Action, which acknowledges the importance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, of halving global emissions by 2030 and of achieving net-zero-emission, climate-resilient economies.

All governments must now return home and launch or ramp up domestic review processes to prepare new or enhanced NDCs, and develop long-term emissions strategies. To achieve this, they must work closely with all members of the Grand Coalition, including sub-national governments, the private sector and civil society. We expect all countries to come to the UN Secretary-General’s summit in September 2019 prepared to show concrete progress and stronger NDCs. As a global community, we cannot accept anything less.”

Read John’s blog posts from the last fortnight. Awesome work:

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