This COP29, It's All About The Numbers

This year's United Nations climate talks, COP29, wrapped Saturday. Throughout the talks, it was all about the numbers. With the help of NPR climate reporters Julia Simon https://www.npr.org/people/1119646476/julia-simon and Alejandra Borunda https://www.npr.org/people/1193795778/alejandra-borunda, we home in on two. First, $300 billion. That's the amount of money wealthy countries agreed to give developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and reduce pollution. Second, 1.5C. That's a warming limit countries agreed to try not to breach, but that is creeping closer every year. Want to hear the latest in climate news and solutions? Let us know your thoughts by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ atplus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Emily Kwong?

  This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, it's Emily Kwong. And today, we are recapping what's basically the Super Bowl of climate policy. I'm talking about the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Every year, leaders from countries gather to negotiate collective agreements about climate change, or at least, that's the hope. The 29th one, or COP29, just wrapped in Azerbaijan, and I hear it was a mess.

• 0:45Emily Kwong?

  Is that fair to say?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  It ended up finishing.

• 0:48Emily Kwong?

  Yay, they did it. Okay, here to tell us all about it are NPR climate reporters Julia Simon, who you just heard.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:55Emily Kwong?

  And Alejandra Borunda. Hello, Emily. Julia, set the scene here. What was the goal of the summit this year?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  This year was really all about the money. How much money wealthy countries would give to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and reduce their pollution.

• 1:11Emily Kwong?

  And as we all know, talking about money is a famously chill and easy thing to do, right?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Super chill.

• 1:17Emily Kwong?

  This is a really, really fraught topic.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  It's really fraught, because developing countries, they did the least to cause global warming. And they're looking for a big number from wealthy countries to help them do things like buy solar panels and wind turbines, things to help them move away from fossil fuels.

• 1:33Emily Kwong?

  So how much are developing countries getting right now in dollars?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, going into the talks, the number had been $100 billion a year for all developing countries. And if you think about it, this really isn't that much money. In Colombia, they are looking for a plan to transition their economy away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change. They are looking at $40 billion. They're one country.

• 2:00Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, this clearly is not enough for all the developing countries.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Nations of the world, I assume they want more.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Right. Many countries wanted at least $1.3 trillion a year.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  But as of late last week, they were not getting anything close to a trillion. As of Friday, the proposed number was $250 billion. Here's the representative from Bolivia responding to that number.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  This is not even a joke. It is an offense to demands of the global South.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  And Emily, there's another topic that's also been a source of big debate in the climate community and came up this year at the COP a little bit. And that is the number 1.5 degrees Celsius. Oh, like the climate benchmark. 1.5 to stay alive. We must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial times. That number. Exactly. You know what I'm talking about here. I do, I do. It showed up almost 10 years ago in the Paris Agreement of 2015. And it was a number that a lot of countries agreed to try to keep below in the massive project of trying to limit global warming around the world. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's getting uncomfortably close. And so there's a lot of chatter happening at conferences like these

• 3:14Speaker 02

  where people are starting to ask, is that goal even possible? And if not, what happens? Today on the show, numbers, numbers, numbers galore. Climate numbers that countries and scientists are thinking a lot about as the world works to limit global warming. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:40Speaker 04

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• 3:45Emily Kwong?

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• 4:53Emily Kwong?

  OK, Julia and Alejandra, let's talk about the money number first. The number that wealthy countries agreed to give developing countries each year, starting in 2035. What dollar figure did they arrive at? Did they even arrive at a number?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I talked to Jessica Green about it. She's a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  So there were all these numbers bandied about, right? And the 1.3 trillion was the one that came from the high-level group on climate finance that said this is what developing countries and emerging economies need. The number they got was 300 billion.

• 5:30Emily Kwong?

  How are developing countries feeling about that number? I guess at least 300 billion is something.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's something. It's very different than 1.3 trillion.

• 5:41Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Here's what Onkiruka Madukwe, a delegate from Nigeria, said.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  300 billion dollars till 2035 is a joke. And it's not something we should take lightly. I do not think it's something we should clap our hands and force us to take it. I do not think so.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  As Jessica pointed out, this money is not in the form of grants, which is what many countries wanted. It's loans.

• 6:09Emily Kwong?

  Oh, so not only is this dollar figure substantially less than developing nations wanted, it's in the form of money they'd have to pay back.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Right, and in the long term, these countries might end up with more debt. Also, here's Madukwe again. She mentions the NCQG. That's the acronym for this money.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  The NCQG was supposed to enable us to have realistic...

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Finance goals, $300 billion is unrealistic. And what she's talking about in part there is that as part of the Paris Agreement, all these countries have to submit targets for reducing their climate pollution by 2035. And the hope is that all these cuts combined will limit the world's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 6:58Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  What Anki Ruka Maduque is pointing out is that one of the main things this money is supposed to go to is helping countries meet those targets for reducing emissions.

• 7:10Emily Kwong?

  Right. You cannot cut emissions without transitioning

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:14Emily Kwong?

  how you produce energy, transitioning whole parts of your economy, and that costs money.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, you need money to buy solar panels or wind turbines or, you know, close down coal plants. And

• 7:24Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  with less money, that means developing countries can't have as ambitious targets in the first place to reach that 1.5 degrees goal, which is a big problem.

• 7:35Emily Kwong?

  Let's talk about the number that is driving this conversation that I'm realizing is very fraught. 1.5 degrees C, Alejandra, going back in the Wayback Machine. Like, how did all these countries, including us in the US, get so focused on that target in the first place?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  That is a great question, Emily. And basically, in short, for many years now, but especially since this big, special report by a bunch of scientists in 2018, scientists have warned that the risks of global warming could get substantially worse once we go past that level of warming, that 1.5 C.

• 8:06Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  This is Leila Wajdowski. She's a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

• 8:13Emily Kwong?

  The immediately kind of tangible impacts is an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme events.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  So what she's talking about here is just that, like, you get past 1.5 and you get more of the bad stuff that we're already getting. Heat waves that are even more intense than those we're having now, which is kind of terrifying, honestly, or stronger hurricanes, that kind of stuff.

• 8:34Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. I mean, no one wants stronger hurricanes, the ones this season were truly devastating.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing is that there's some even more alarming possibilities once we go past 1.5. Like, for example, if the Greenland ice sheet melts too much. The melt can actually become unstoppable. There's these processes that keep on going, no matter what we do after that. I used to have a professor back in climate science grad school, and he just, he always would say that we're just running the world's biggest science experiment. Like, let's see what happens when you pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide. Let's all stick around to find out.

• 9:13Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so how close are we to that 1.5 degrees Celsius at this moment in time?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  We, we are pretty close. If you use the methods laid out in the IPCC, and that's the, the big scientific consensus report that comes out every few years, that tells us that we're at 1.3 Celsius of warming.

• 9:30Emily Kwong?

  1.3, okay. Not quite there, but close.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I just want to be clear, that method has an issue. It's fundamentally backwards looking.

• 9:38Emily Kwong?

  Oh.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  It averages the observed temperature data from the last 10 years with models that look forward the same amount. But baked into that approach is this reality that it won't actually show us crossing 1.5 until a few years after that's already happened.

• 9:53Emily Kwong?

  Oh, I had no idea. That's how the math maths? Okay. I, I know this number came from science, I respect that. But is there another more real time way to estimate the warming of the climate? That seems kind of important.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you have identified something that many scientists are now working on because they also want to know more quickly. A new study actually just came out right before the COP meeting that uses an approach that is a little more snapshot-y, and it says we're probably closer to 1.4 C.

• 10:23Emily Kwong?

  Ah, dread.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And Julia, just piping in here, you might have heard the news that this year, 2024, global temperatures are on track to average above 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time ever. The World Meteorological Association announced that recently.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I just, I know that sounds scary, but to be clear, that's not really how anyone thinks about this. It's just one year. And scientists know that temperatures bop around a lot because of things like El Nino or just like a randomly hot year. And so that's why they do that approach that looks at the longer term averages in the first place. But it's also not a great sign.

• 11:01Emily Kwong?

  Okay, to summarize, Planet Earth, she's warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. Maybe closer to 1.4, which is new information for me. It's alarmingly close to the 1.5 threshold, though. We must not pass in order to avoid some really scary possibilities of global warming. So how should I feel about this, like, really, heading into my weekend? Heading into my life, really?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  It's so hard because the reality is warming past 1.5 really does present these real existential threats to a lot of people around the world. Like, the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, for example, it could literally end up underwater if sea levels rise too far. And that's a real risk the farther warming gets past 1.5 C. Here's Abraham Nassak in their Ministry of Climate Change.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  1.5 is not just a number for our Pacific small island developing states. It is a line in the sand necessary to ensure our survival.

• 12:01Emily Kwong?

  A line in the sand necessary to ensure our survival. That is as serious as it gets. Like, his people's future depends on this.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think it's also important to know that passing that 1.5 level, it's not like falling off a cliff. It's more like we're playing a dice game that gets more and more loaded.

• 12:25Emily Kwong?

  Like, the probability that bad things happen gets higher.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But I do, I like, want to stress that it's not like we wake up one morning past this 1.5 level and have all of these things just, like, happen at once.

• 12:38Emily Kwong?

  Got it, okay.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Andrew Jarvis is a climate scientist at Lancaster University in the UK, and he's an author of that new study I mentioned before, the one that tells us that we're closer to 1.4 than 1.3. And he's like, honestly, it's very obvious what all of this should tell us.

• 12:54Emily Kwong?

  It should remind us that we should probably double down on our efforts. Well, doubling down can happen at COP. Like, this is what the negotiations are for, theoretically. So did folks at the meeting grapple with this part of the science, Julia? Like, did they make any progress toward keeping the goal of 1.5 a reality for the planet?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Well, every COP has their kind of different goal. This year was really about money for developing countries. However, those targets that are supposed to add up to 1.5 degrees...

• 13:28Speaker 01

  They're due in February, so that's coming up. And so there were some countries that, at the summit, submitted their targets, like Brazil. Brazil says their cuts align with the 1.5 degree goal. Climate policy experts say that's still unclear.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's this like, other issue kind of lurking here, which is that no one wants to admit that 1.5 might be almost out of reach. I talked with David Victor. He's a professor of innovation and public policy, and specifically, he focuses on climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And he was pretty, he was pretty clear about it.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  There's a huge political cost to being the first government or the first major firm saying that the goals are not no longer achievable. And so no one wants to bear that political cost, and there's no air cover for them to do something different. And just to clarify, I don't want people listening to lose hope. There are other countries that could have more ambitious goals. There are countries that do have more ambitious goals, like the United Kingdom. They came out with goals that are quote unquote 1.5 degrees aligned. So it is happening.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And I also find it helpful to remember that at one point, not too long ago, scientists were saying that like, 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century was on the table. But things have changed. The energy transition has progressed, so has other climate action, and all of that means that the projections, they've also come down. And now we're at somewhere around 3 degrees Celsius, or maybe even less. That part's up to us. It's not perfect at all. It's not ideal, but it is progress.

• 15:05Emily Kwong?

  Certainly, the future has already been altered because people have already been taking action. It's just a question now of like, what's going to happen in the next few decades?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And at the end of the day, everything we do to curb our emissions as much as possible, that matters. The more we cut, the better it is. This isn't a zero-sum game.

• 15:26Emily Kwong?

  Julia, Simon, Alejandra Barunda, thank you for walking us through all of this.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 15:33Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Sadie Babbitts. Julia Simon and Alejandra Barunda checked the facts. Gilli Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:57Speaker 04

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