AOSIS chair: 1.5C target must remain within reach

Ryan Ba­choo in An­talya, Türkiye.

The Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS) is re­fus­ing to aban­don the 1.5-de­gree Cel­sius warm­ing tar­get, in­sist­ing that gov­ern­ments must ac­cel­er­ate cli­mate ac­tion and en­sure promised fi­nanc­ing reach­es vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties as ne­go­ti­a­tions con­tin­ue at COP31.

AO­SIS chair Ilana Seid said the lat­est sci­en­tif­ic warn­ings about the like­li­hood of the world ex­ceed­ing the 1.5-de­gree thresh­old must prompt an ur­gent re­sponse from gov­ern­ments, with greater am­bi­tion on emis­sions re­duc­tions and in­creased fi­nanc­ing for im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Speak­ing in an in­ter­view on the side­lines of the Unit­ed Na­tions cli­mate sum­mit in An­talya, Türkiye, Seid said the ne­go­ti­a­tions were pro­gress­ing large­ly as ex­pect­ed, with par­ties se­cur­ing agree­ment on the agen­da on the open­ing day.

How­ev­er, she said the re­al test of COP31 would be whether gov­ern­ments could move be­yond com­mit­ments and demon­strate how ex­ist­ing cli­mate agree­ments would be im­ple­ment­ed.

“COP so far is go­ing as ex­pect­ed,” Seid said, not­ing that dis­cus­sions were con­tin­u­ing around the cov­er de­ci­sion, while ne­go­ti­at­ing po­si­tions and al­liances re­mained large­ly con­sis­tent with pre­vi­ous cli­mate con­fer­ences.

She said AO­SIS was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about a Unit­ed Na­tions En­vi­ron­ment Pro­gramme re­port warn­ing that the world was like­ly to over­shoot the 1.5-de­gree Cel­sius tem­per­a­ture lim­it.

“This COP needs to have a re­sponse to that,” she said.

Seid ar­gued that the re­sponse must in­volve both in­creased mit­i­ga­tion am­bi­tion and the flow of cli­mate fi­nance to coun­tries and com­mu­ni­ties al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the con­se­quences of cli­mate change.

The COP31 pres­i­den­cies have de­scribed the con­fer­ence as an im­ple­men­ta­tion COP, and Seid said that am­bi­tion must trans­late in­to tan­gi­ble ac­tion on the ground.

Asked whether the 1.5-de­gree tar­get was still achiev­able, par­tic­u­lar­ly as some po­lit­i­cal lead­ers ap­pear to have ac­cept­ed that the thresh­old could be breached, she main­tained that it re­mained the bench­mark for glob­al cli­mate ac­tion un­der the Paris Agree­ment.

“Our po­si­tion is that 1.5 is still the tar­get, that is the le­gal agree­ment that's in the Paris Agree­ment,” she said. “And we need to ac­cel­er­ate ef­forts to bring it back.”

Seid point­ed to the grow­ing af­ford­abil­i­ty of re­new­able en­er­gy tech­nolo­gies com­pared with fos­sil fu­els as an op­por­tu­ni­ty gov­ern­ments should seize to ac­cel­er­ate the tran­si­tion.

She al­so high­light­ed the rapid adop­tion of elec­tric ve­hi­cles in some coun­tries, cit­ing Nor­way, where she said more than 99 per cent of new ve­hi­cles were elec­tric.

She de­scribed such de­vel­op­ments as ex­am­ples of how tech­no­log­i­cal adop­tion could move from grad­ual growth to ex­po­nen­tial ex­pan­sion, pro­vid­ed the nec­es­sary fi­nanc­ing and pol­i­cy sup­port were avail­able.

Seid al­so iden­ti­fied car­bon cap­ture tech­nolo­gies as part of the po­ten­tial re­sponse should glob­al tem­per­a­tures over­shoot the 1.5-de­gree thresh­old.

How­ev­er, she ac­knowl­edged that it was too ear­ly in the ne­go­ti­a­tions to de­ter­mine whether de­vel­oped coun­tries and oth­er ma­jor ne­go­ti­at­ing blocs were demon­strat­ing the will­ing­ness need­ed to ad­dress the fi­nanc­ing de­mands of vul­ner­a­ble na­tions.

She said some coun­tries con­tin­ued to re­sist greater mit­i­ga­tion am­bi­tion, while oth­ers were push­ing to ex­pand the pool of con­trib­u­tors to cli­mate fi­nance.

For AO­SIS, the pri­or­i­ty is to avoid re­open­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions on agree­ments al­ready reached, in­clud­ing the Paris Agree­ment and the New Col­lec­tive Quan­ti­fied Goal on Cli­mate Fi­nance (NC­QG).

In­stead, Seid said gov­ern­ments must con­cen­trate on how those com­mit­ments could be de­liv­ered.

“We've ne­go­ti­at­ed NC­QG. We don't want to do that again. We've al­so ne­go­ti­at­ed the Paris Agree­ment and we don't want to do that again,” she said.

A suc­cess­ful COP31, she added, would pro­vide a clear roadmap for ac­cel­er­at­ing the de­liv­ery of cli­mate fi­nance, par­tic­u­lar­ly fund­ing for adap­ta­tion.

Last year's agree­ment to triple adap­ta­tion fi­nance must now be trans­lat­ed in­to ac­tu­al re­sources reach­ing vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries, she said.

“The dev­il's in the de­tails,” Seid said, ar­gu­ing that gov­ern­ments must es­tab­lish how coun­tries would be sup­port­ed in ful­fill­ing their cli­mate oblig­a­tions.

She al­so is­sued a mes­sage to Caribbean peo­ple fol­low­ing the ne­go­ti­a­tions, urg­ing them to demon­strate sol­i­dar­i­ty with their po­lit­i­cal lead­ers as they ad­vo­cate for the re­gion's in­ter­ests.

AO­SIS rep­re­sents 39 small is­land and low-ly­ing coastal de­vel­op­ing states, many of which face dis­pro­por­tion­ate threats from ris­ing sea lev­els, ex­treme weath­er and oth­er cli­mate im­pacts.

Seid de­scribed the al­liance as a moral com­pass in in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate ne­go­ti­a­tions, point­ing to its role in se­cur­ing the in­clu­sion of the 1.5-de­gree tar­get in the Paris Agree­ment.

“Please sup­port your lead­ers and call them, mes­sage them, tell them, give them some sol­i­dar­i­ty,” she said.

“Our lead­ers need our help. They need our sup­port.”

She said strong pub­lic back­ing was es­sen­tial to en­sur­ing Caribbean and oth­er small is­land lead­ers could en­ter ne­go­ti­a­tions with the con­fi­dence and po­lit­i­cal sup­port need­ed to de­fend their coun­tries' in­ter­ests.