Hello, and welcome to the second edition of From a Climate Correspondent.
This is now the third edition of the new From a Climate Correspondent newsletter, we hope you are enjoying it so far. This issue looks at the recently concluded UN climate talks, asking whether what was supposed to be a latin american conference met that promise.
Please do get in touch with any thoughts or feedback - we’re really keen to bring in different voices and perspectives.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
Disclaimer: While some of us work regularly for other publications, this newsletter is not affiliated with any organisation.
A Latin American COP?
Letter no.3 by Jocelyn Timperley in San José, Costa Rica
Members of Extinction Rebellion and FridaysForFuture blocked the roads outside the COP venue on Friday, calling the meeting 'another lost opportunity.' Photo by Kiara Worth
In 1981, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez released Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a novel which recounts the murder of Santiago Nasar. Beginning in his household the morning he is killed, the story jumps through time to detail the events before and after.
“I think this COP was that, it was like the Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” Costa Rican journalist Michelle Soto tells me over the phone from Madrid, where she attended this year’s UN climate conference (known as the “COP”). “I think it was doomed from the beginning.”
Weak leadership
As talks dragged on two days later than planned, drink stands shut up shop and sleep deprived negotiators roamed the corridors looking for coffee. A new Twitter account called “is cop 25 over?” quickly picked up hundreds of followers.
Despite the extra time, countries still failed to agree on several of the main goals, including a common set of rules for a new global carbon market. There were many reasons for this, not least the entrenched views of big emitters such as the US, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia.
But some have also blamed an “irresponsibly weak” Chilean leadership for enabling stubbornness. “Chile should have taken the conversation to another path,” says Soto.
For example, she says, it could have established a dialogue platform to set up a pathway for an agreement to be made next year. “Everybody knew there was not going to be agreement on [carbon markets], since day one,” she says.
The image that Chile projected to other countries at the COP also affects the whole region, says Soto. “They will say there's no leadership in Latin America to take up difficult conversations like that.”
Division at the top
She may have a point. Latin American countries are increasingly at loggerheads on climate action. Brazil, once viewed as a climate leader, now has a sceptic president apparently content to oversee accelerated deforestation. Meanwhile, Costa Rica’s team of clued-up negotiators led a group of COP countries to specify minimum carbon market standards that go specifically against Brazil’s demands.
“The governments find themselves maybe more divided than before,” says Felipe Pino, from Civil Society for Climate Action (SCAC), a coalition of 150 Chilean environmental groups which organised an “alternative COP” for the public.
In contrast, says Pino, civil society in Latin America is “more unified than ever” in its demands from governments on climate. “You see it in the activities that we do in civil society, in the conversations that we have, and the networks like SCAC or CAN [Climate Action Network] Latin America”.
Chile’s lost voice?
The UN climate conferences rotate every year around five different regions, but for various reasons the past four have now been in Europe. Next year’s conference, set to take place in Glasgow, Scotland, will continue the trend.
This year, officially Latin American’s turn to host the talks, there was a particular saga. The conference was initially set for Brazil but moved to Chile when Jair Bolsonaro took office and decided against hosting it. A month before the talks began, Chile announced it would no longer be able to host them due to the ongoing civil protests, and it was moved to Spain.
I asked both Soto and Pino how this change affected the COP this year. “It changed, because so many people in the civil society sector lost their reservations and money [for Chile],” says Soto. “The civil society movement would have been stronger if it was in Chile, because it's cheaper to travel to Chile from Latin America.”
SCAC had spent a year organising its “alternative COP” for civil society in Chile, which they decided to go ahead with despite the official COP being moved. They also sent as many delegates as they could to the COP, and adopted a “Latin American Manifesto for the Climate” during the talks to deliver to negotiators.
“We managed to show the local problems of Chile and Latin America [at the COP],” says Pino. “But clearly we couldn’t do as much as if it had been here.”
At a time when growing public concern over climate change seems matched only by the rise in right-wing populism, however, the changed location of the COP is in some ways a drop in the ocean. Carbon markets are about money in the end, and this is always where climate negotiations get tense.
Ultimately, the death of progress at these talks, and elsewhere on climate, is still the inability of many governments to take action on a scale in line with climate risks.
Must reads from the region
Why Chile’s Inability to Host the U.N. Climate Talks Is Symbolic of the Work Activists Still Need to Do, Time, 11 Nov
It’s “good news” that the climate conference still happened this year, writes Fatima Ibrahim, a climate activist working on Green New Deal UK. But the move to Madrid also meant “the massive disenfranchisement” of Latin American social movements who spent the last year organising around it, she says.
COP25: Chile summit withdrawal hits tourism but opens new door for environment activists: Euronews, 2 Dec 2019
Many activists in Chile were sceptical of president Sebastian Piñera’s moves to host the climate change conference in the first place, write Naomi Larsson and Charis McGowan. Some believe the protests will achieve more on climate in the long-term than hosting the conference.
COP25: What are Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia doing?: Open Democracy, 6 November
OpenDemocracy explores what governments in Latin America are doing to reduce carbon emissions and what to expect from them in the coming years.
Amazonian leaders' long campaign for climate justice: Al Jazeera, 14 December Paula
Dupraz-Dobias tracks the journey of indigenous representatives from the Amazon to Europe to advocate against the increasing deforestation for agriculture, forestry and mining in their region. They find an ally in Pope Frances, and disappointment at the COP.
Irreconcilable rift cripples UN climate talks as majority stand against polluters: Climate Home News, 15 December
"Invigorated by the US withdrawal and rising nationalism at home, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia, defended loopholes and opposed commitments to enhance climate action.” Chloe Farand reports from Madrid as the climate talks draw to a close.
What else I've been watching...
Broadcasting from the UN climate conference in Madrid, Democracy Now! interviews Angela Valenzuela from Fridays for Future Santiago. "I think if COP was going to take place in Santiago, [Chilean president Sebastián Piñera] was forced to listen to people, and to hear their demands and try to solve the situation in a more democratic way," says Valenzuela. "But he was not willing to do that."