For those of you who missed the webinar, here are five notable wins and losses identified by our presenters, Vicki Lee Wallgren, Director of the Global Arctic Programme at World Wildlife Fund (WWF); Martin Sommerkorn, Head of Conservation at WWF’s Global Arctic Programme; Susan Natali, Senior Scientist and Director of the Arctic Program at Woodwell Climate Research Center; and Sara Olsvig, International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and newly appointed member of the Arctic Initiative’s International Advisory Board.
The Wins
1. The final agreement included stronger language protecting Indigenous rights and recognizing Indigenous Knowledge.
One significant positive outcome from COP28 was the inclusion of Indigenous rights and human rights in the final text, said Olsvig. This included several recommendations aligned with the Inuit Circumpolar Council COP28 position paper.
In particular, Olsvig praised the textual separation of Indigenous peoples and local communities. “In some parts of the world, governments are actually not recognizing their Indigenous peoples and conflating them with local communities. And local communities can be anyone who has power. So failing to end this conflation is a direct risk to the rights of Indigenous peoples,” she explained.
Thanks to the advocacy of the Global Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus, the final text differentiates between the two groups, removing the “and” and inserting a comma in the common phrase “Indigenous groups and local communities.”
Olsvig noted that the final text incorporated a reference to ethical and equitable engagement with Indigenous peoples in global climate policymaking. She partially attributed the change to the success of the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s Ethical and Equitable Engagement Protocols, which have been “well-received across the Indigenous world as a good guiding principle for how to engage with Indigenous peoples.”
2. COP28 drew stronger connections between climate change and nature.
Given the inextricable links between the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, Wallgren said she was “happy to see that there was some explicit mention of the Global Biodiversity Framework in the Global Stocktake text,” as well as a joint statement on climate, people, and nature by the presidencies of COP28 and COP15.
Sommerkorn was likewise cheered by the Global Stocktake’s strong emphasis on nature-based solutions – actions to protect, conserve, restore, and sustainably manage and use natural and modified ecosystems in order to address social, economic, and environmental challenges.
The final agreement acknowledges “the importance of conserving, protecting and restoring nature and ecosystems toward achieving the Paris Agreement,” said Sommerkorn, adding that the adaptation-focused section of the final agreement also clearly states that climate impacts can be reduced “through the management, enhancement, restoration, and conservation of all ecosystems on the planet.”
The Losses
3. The phase-out of fossil fuels is too slow to avoid catastrophic warming in the Arctic.
For the first time, negotiators secured language in the final text that calls upon countries to “transition away from fossil fuels…so as to achieve net zero by 2050.” The panelists, while acknowledging this was an important step, were pessimistic that the agreement would deliver the short-term action necessary to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“How can I celebrate the fact that the words fossil fuels were in there? Oh my gosh, if I'm celebrating that, then my standards are really, really low,” said Natali. “And also, the language was to transition away from fossil fuels to achieve net zero by 2050. In the last IPCC report and in the latest science, we're not going to stay below 1.5. We have to be transitioning to net zero much, much sooner than 2050 if we actually want to stay below 1.5.”
“We can't negotiate with the melting point of ice, and we are running out of time,” stressed Sommerkorn. “Our very good efforts to conserve and protect biodiversity for people and with people in the Arctic might not work if we fail to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.”
4. There was less emphasis on the cryosphere at COP28 than in previous years.
The scientists on the panel expressed dismay that the final agreement contained only one mention of the cryosphere, the collective term for the regions of the Earth where water freezes into snow or ice. Sommerkorn pointed out that the mention was an old one, recycled from the COP26 agreement.
Changes in the cryosphere heavily influence Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and landscapes. For example, greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, which contains twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere, could accelerate the pace of global climate change and make it impossible to achieve the Paris Agreement’s targets for stabilizing the Earth’s temperature, explained Natali. Shrinking glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet are also contributing to global sea level rise.
Previous COP agreements specifically mentioned some of these cryosphere impacts, tipping points, and feedback. Their omission in the COP28 text represented “step backward” for the cryosphere, Natali said.
5. Arctic Indigenous peoples are still excluded from loss and damage conversations.
On the first day of COP28, delegates reached an agreement on a loss and damage fund to help poor nations cope with the growing costs of climate disasters. Several countries pledged a total of $700 million to the fund, but this falls well short of the estimated $400 billion in losses developing countries face each year.
That limited funding is also inaccessible to Arctic Indigenous communities.
That’s because the loss and damage fund is built around a “false dichotomy” between the Global North and Global South, Olsvig told the webinar attendees. Arctic Indigenous communities are already being severely impacted by climate change, but they are ineligible to apply for the fund because they are located within developing countries and would have to go through their national governments to do so.
The Global Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus will continue to push for direct access to the fund for Indigenous peoples in all regions, said Olsvig. “We are not the only ones, us in the Arctic, that cannot access the Loss and Damage Fund as it is being built now.”
