Climate change is a global crisis, but remedial actions must be local, planned, deliberate, structured, and financed. Every voice and action should count.
Yet for 30 years now, the global community has procrastinated, and talked of wake-up calls every year, as the ecosystem degrades. How many wake-up calls does humanity require to act – resolutely and consistently – on the global crisis?
Only 29 of 194 states have laid out concrete plans of action on financing, adaptation, and mitigation. The majority are still waiting for more wake-up calls.
Previous Conferences of Parties (COP) have, for a decade, been promising to mobilise $100 billion a year for adaptation and mitigation action in developing countries.
The promise is still pending. There are huge adaptation gaps, especially in developing countries that suffer the consequence of climate change, even though they are least responsible for damage of the ecosystem.
Governments have generously responded to wars – advancing billions of dollars for military efforts, weapons, logistics and caring for refugees.
Climate change endangers the whole world, but the responses are lukewarm and procrastinating. Actions supporting mitigation and adaptation efforts are deferred.
There is reluctant action around food security and green energy. Climate refugees are not supported with the same urgency as those displaced through Vladimir Putin-generated war in Ukraine.
How can it be that killing each other during wars is prioritised, but saving the earth from human activities that destroy global ecosystems is deferred?
After the Paris COP countries laid out climate change policies, laws, regulations, and structures for mitigation and adaptation. But adaption gaps are widening because of the high cost of mitigative actions.
Glasgow Climate Pact of 2021 committed to doubling adaptation funding. But turning commitments into concrete plans and actions have been far from realised.
For two weeks ending Saturday, state parties and non-state actors are discussing actions towards achieving the collective and global climate change goals as agreed upon under the 2015 Paris Agreement and Convention.
The salient feature of the Paris Accord is to keep the global average temperature rise this century as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat has a global membership of 197 parties. It's the parent treaty of the Paris Agreement and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The motif of these accords, under the UNFCCC, is to stabilise greenhouse atmospheric gas concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. This must be done within a time frame that allows ecosystems to adapt naturally for sustainable development.
The 2021 Glasgow COP26 and 2022 COP27 in Egypt should be moments of turning commitments into action. The Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit, which ends on Saturday, in the Egyptian city, should be a turnaround moment.
Victims of the destruction of the ecosystem need clarity on climate financing and funding for loss and damage from climate change. Talk of collective ambitions of state parties must give way to locally-led actions on resilience and adaptation activities.
The focus should be actions that address the water-climate change nexus and climate-sensitive activities around agriculture and green energy.
University lecturer and climate change adviser to Homa Bay governor
