As I have every year since 2015, I went to the annual Summit on Climate Change. Lasting from November 6 to 17, it is organized by the Fiji Islands but held in Bonn for logistical reasons. Bonn is the former capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and houses the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Still suffering from knee tendinitis, I can't travel there by bike as planned and as I frequently do when on a report. Similarly I veto carrying a tent in my luggage. Without the carte blanche that is usually extended when I arrive on two wheels, it will be difficult for me to get permission of the home owner to unfold my tent; and then it's still a German November, the cold will be the most likely scenario. For once, I rent a car; and without GPS or phone connected, and not speaking German I am facing some difficulties.
Still lacking a press card or security clearance, for the first time this year I was unable to enter the COP compound. Frustrated at first, it then occurred to me that this would give me time to photograph some of the business of coal mining: such as the existence of a ghost town due to the exhaustion of mines, or the great action of Ende Gelände "So far, no further!" - Here And No Further "(a major civil disobedience movement in Germany, which aims to limit global warming by phasing out fossil fuels).
Indeed, even after 22 UN conferences, no binding decision has yet been taken with regards to the polluting countries of the world. And protests have arisen against the non-coercive nature of the decisions taken to enforce the Paris agreement concluded in 2015, with the ambition revised upward last year (COP22 of Morocco) to maintain global warming below 1.5° C.
This is evidenced by:
- the arrival of the Pacific Climate Warriors (from the Pacific Islands to call on the leaders of the planet to take more ambitious climate measures),
- the gathering of 10,000 people in the central square of Munsterplatz,
- 1,000 cyclists on Bundesstraße 9 from Cologne to Bonn for climate protection, and
- more than a thousand activists blocking mining infrastructure 50 km from COP23 (Ende Gelände), etc.
Already this summer, a month before the German parliamentary elections of 24 September, about 3,000 activists from all over Europe had blocked RWE-owned plants near Cologne in North Rhine (this company owns the four coal-fired power plants in the region, among the most CO2-emitting energy sources). (1) And since 2012, occupation camps in the Hambach Forest (12,000 year old forest and one of the last primary forests in Central Europe) have been trying to slow the expansion of the giant open pit coal mine Tagebau Hambach, near Aachen in western Germany. The lignite (cheap brown coal) that is extracted is one of the most polluting coals. All these people are anxious to denounce hypocrisy and want to unmask this image of a model Germany on the ecological level (she had decided to get out of the nuclear business after the disaster of Fukushima).
The criticism does not come only from NGOs. "The UN denounces the 'catastrophic' gap between commitments and the goal of 2° C." The words are from "Erik Solheim, director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which publishes its annual report on global climate action." (2) The organization insists that we will have to implement real actions as early as next year. But the promises are hard to realize.
Nevertheless the enthusiasm to do something is present even on the side of the Americans. Proof of this is the gigantic pavilion paid for by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer. There for once, after tough negotiations with the security team, I am allowed to enter take some pictures. Despite the announcement of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris agreement by the new president Donald Trump, the American civil society is still onboard. The coalition "We are still in" and the initiative presented at COP23: "America's Pledge" ("the American promise" which is an alliance of prominent governors for the climate) is directed by the governor of California, Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg. This is another facet of the United States, one that is active in regard to limiting global warming.
As regards scientists, there are 15,000 from 184 countries to sound the alarm this November 13 in the face of environmental degradation. This call of unprecedented scale is based on the analysis of 9 global indicators, whose evolution is followed from 1960 to 2016: stratospheric ozone, freshwater, fishing catch, maritime dead zones, forests, vertebrate species, CO2 emissions, temperature change and population. (3)
But "The record of COP 23 is rather 'thin', the words of Nicolas Hulot, Minister of Energy Transition. (...) Certainly, this climate summit was presented as a transition COP, very technical, therefore one should not expect spectacular advances. (...) Little progress and much work to be done next year. » (4)
At my rather minor level, I am not unhappy to have visited Germany despite the difficulties mentioned above. In addition to continuing the chronicle of the COP, this new report could be considered as a complement to the documentary work done in France in recent years on energy production including the French nuclear industry.
As an epilogue, we include images of the protest in front of the Hall of Fame during the One Planet Summit, held at La Seine Musicale, Seguin Island, Boulogne-Billancourt on December 12th.
A sleepless night in a "Macron bus" (low cost transportation for those who cannot afford to take the train) and a gross error in setting my camera made me miss a lot of photos. A few remain of the hundreds of climate activists who call for the cessation of financing for fossil and nuclear energy and the imposition of big and useless projects; this action is organized by, among others, the Climate Action Network France, the Federation of Nature and Man, Oxfam France, Refedd, 350.org, Alternatiba, Bizi !, the CRID, Friends of the Earth France, Attac France and ANV-COP21.
"At the initiative of President Emmanuel Macron, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim have joined forces to launch the One Planet movement in December 2017, bringing together public and private actors." (5) "The goal of this summit is to find funding to honor the promise of $ 100 billion a year from 2020 made to developing countries and accelerate the global energy transition." (6)
"The French president has ruled out competition with the UN climate conferences, the last of which took place three weeks ago in Germany." (...) Yet, "many of the dozens of Heads of State and Government present did not bother to come to COP23." (7)
We conclude with the Manifesto of the 15,000 scientists published in the journal BioScience and carried in many newspapers including Le Monde:
"Manifesto of 15000 scientists for a new civilization" To avoid widespread misery and a catastrophic loss of biodiversity "Testimonials.re / November 15, 2017
Yesterday, Bioscience magazine published a manifesto signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries. Everyone is worried about the consequences of production and consumption patterns on the environment and human beings. They call for an end to the exploitation of nature and people, to put an end to waste and immediate measures to set the course for a new civilization. Here is the text of this statement, with inter-titles of Testimonials.
World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice
William J. Ripple Christopher Wolf Thomas M. Newsome Mauro Galetti Mohammed Alamgir Eileen Crist Mahmoud I. Mahmoud William F. Laurance 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries
BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, December 2017, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125
Published:13 November 2017
Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”. These concerned professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.” In their manifesto, they showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. They proclaimed that fundamental changes were urgently needed to avoid the consequences our present course would bring.
The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing Earth's ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the biosphere can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm. The scientists pleaded that we stabilize the human population, describing how our large numbers—swelled by another 2 billion people since 1992, a 35 percent increase—exert stresses on Earth that can overwhelm other efforts to realize a sustainable future (Crist et al. 2017). They implored that we cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and phase out fossil fuels, reduce deforestation, and reverse the trend of collapsing biodiversity.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by exploring available time-series data. Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse. Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels (Hansen et al. 2013), deforestation (Keenan et al. 2015), and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption (Ripple et al. 2014). Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends. We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats (Crist et al. 2017). By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.
As most political leaders respond to pressure, scientists, media influencers, and lay citizens must insist that their governments take immediate action as a moral imperative to current and future generations of human and other life. With a groundswell of organized grassroots efforts, dogged opposition can be overcome and political leaders compelled to do the right thing. It is also time to re-examine and change our individual behaviors, including limiting our own reproduction (ideally to replacement level at most) and drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of fossil fuels, meat, and other resources.
The rapid global decline in ozone-depleting substances shows that we can make positive change when we act decisively. We have also made advancements in reducing extreme poverty and hunger (www.worldbank.org). Other notable progress include the rapid decline in fertility rates in many regions attributable to investments in girls’ and women's education (www.un.org/esa/population), the promising decline in the rate of deforestation in some regions, and the rapid growth in the renewable-energy sector. We have learned much since 1992, but the advancement of urgently needed changes in environmental policy, human behavior, and global inequities is still far from sufficient.
Sustainability transitions come about in diverse ways, and all require civil-society pressure and evidence-based advocacy, political leadership, and a solid understanding of policy instruments, markets, and other drivers. Examples of diverse and effective steps humanity can take to transition to sustainability include the following (not in order of importance or urgency): prioritizing the enactment of connected well-funded and well-managed reserves for a significant proportion of the world's terrestrial, marine, freshwater, and aerial habitats; maintaining nature's ecosystem services by halting the conversion of forests, grasslands, and other native habitats; restoring native plant communities at large scales, particularly forest landscapes; rewilding regions with native species, especially apex predators, to restore ecological processes and dynamics; (developing and adopting adequate policy instruments to remedy defaunation, the poaching crisis, and the exploitation and trade of threatened species; reducing food waste through education and better infrastructure; promoting dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods; further reducing fertility rates by ensuring that women and men have access to education and voluntary family-planning services, especially where such resources are still lacking; increasing outdoor nature education for children, as well as the overall engagement of society in the appreciation of nature; divesting of monetary investments and purchases to encourage positive environmental change; devising and promoting new green technologies and massively adopting renewable energy sources while phasing out subsidies to energy production through fossil fuels; revising our economy to reduce wealth inequality and ensure that prices, taxation, and incentive systems take into account the real costs which consumption patterns impose on our environment; and estimating a scientifically defensible, sustainable human population size for the long term while rallying nations and leaders to support that vital goal.
To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world's leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home." (3
(1) https://reporterre.net/Des-milliers-de-personnes-ont-manifeste-en-Allemagne-contre-le-charbon
(2) https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/climat-lonu-denonce-lecart-catastrophique-entre-les-engagements-et-lobjectif-de-2c_72991/
(3) https://www.temoignages.re/developpement/changement-climatique/manifeste-de-15000-scientifiques-pour-une-nouvelle-civilisation,91363
(4) https://www.franceculture.fr/environnement/lutte-contre-le-rechauffement-climatique-promesses-et-belles-paroles
(5) https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/politique-etrangere-de-la-france/climat/one-planet-summit/
(6) https://reporterre.net/Au-Pantheon-Pas-un-euro-de-plus-pour-les-energies-fossiles
(7) http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2017/12/12/one-planet-summit-macron-donne-rendez-vous-l-an-prochain-pour-une-reunion-de-chantier_1616078Climat
As I have every year since 2015, I went to the annual Summit on Climate Change. Lasting from November 6 to 17, it is organized by the Fiji Islands but held in Bonn for logistical reasons. Bonn is the former capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and houses the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Still suffering from knee tendinitis, I can't travel there by bike as planned and as I frequently do when on a report. Similarly I veto carrying a tent in my luggage. Without the carte blanche that is usually extended when I arrive on two wheels, it will be difficult for me to get permission of the home owner to unfold my tent; and then it's still a German November, the cold will be the most likely scenario. For once, I rent a car; and without GPS or phone connected, and not speaking German I am facing some difficulties.
Still lacking a press card or security clearance, for the first time this year I was unable to enter the COP compound. Frustrated at first, it then occurred to me that this would give me time to photograph some of the business of coal mining: such as the existence of a ghost town due to the exhaustion of mines, or the great action of Ende Gelände "So far, no further!" - Here And No Further "(a major civil disobedience movement in Germany, which aims to limit global warming by phasing out fossil fuels).