SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt  — With the world on “a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” the United Nations chief told dozens of leaders to “cooperate or perish,” on avoiding further climate catastrophe, singling out the two biggest polluting countries, China and the United States. He was not the only one preaching with tones of fire and brimstone, alternating with pathos and tragedy, trying to shake up the world’s sense of urgency at this year’s annual U.N. climate conference. “Choose life over death,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore urged. “It is not time for moral cowardice.” …El-Sissi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to make deeper cuts in emissions with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. 

The vibes heading into COP27 are not good. There are many reasons that this year’s edition of the United Nations climate summit, which starts on Sunday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, is widely being pre-emptively cast as a failure. …Despite a steady drumbeat of punditry suggesting that ambition to transition off fossil fuels has been replaced by realism about oil and gas remaining essential, during fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, the evidence points in the other direction. The European Union, dealing with energy shortages as directly as anywhere, offers the best example. While trying to secure new gas supplies …to meet immediate needs, the EU is showing that it sees the situation as cause to hasten its shift toward renewable power… COP’s profile compels world leaders to show up every few years with newly ambitious national emissions-reduction targets, as in Glasgow, though that’s not expected of them at Sharm el-Sheikh.

The European Union is losing its forest carbon sink at an alarming rate, with harvesting for biomass fuel a key driver behind the loss, according to new research released on Monday. EU member states have experienced steep declines in their forest and land carbon sinks since 2002, or have lost them altogether, according to research by the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), a non-profit group. To achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the EU has set targets for increased CO2 storage in forests, soils and other land carbon sinks. But at the current rates of decline, most EU countries will fail to reach their 2030 land sink targets, the report warns. …The capacity of European forests to absorb CO2 has been shrinking over the years and needs to be restored, the European Commission admitted two years ago when it presented its climate target plan for 2030. 

NAIROBI, Kenya — The world is not on track to achieve forest goals of ending and reversing deforestation by 2030, critical for a credible pathway to the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal, according to a new report by the UN-REDD Programme, UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and the Green Gigaton Challenge (GGC). It finds that for the 2030 goals to remain within reach, a one gigaton milestone of emissions reductions from forests must be achieved not later than 2025, and yearly after that. The report, Making good on the Glasgow Climate Pact, finds that current public and private commitments to pay for emissions reductions are only at 24% of the gigaton milestone goal.  Only around half of these commitments have been realized through signed emissions reduction purchase agreements and none of the funding for these commitments has yet been disbursed. 

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — More than 25 countries at the COP27 climate talks on Monday launched a group they said would ensure they hold each other accountable for a pledge to end deforestation by 2030, and announced billions of dollars to finance their efforts. The first meeting of the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, chaired by Ghana and the US, takes place a year after more than 140 leaders promised at COP26 in Britain to end deforestation by the end of the decade. Progress since has been patchy, with only a few countries instituting more aggressive policies on deforestation and financing. The new group… accounts for roughly 35% of the world’s forests and aims to meet twice a year to track progress. Notable omissions from the group are Brazil with its Amazon rainforest and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ian McKelvie

Some foresters could be millions of dollars out of pocket due to a poorly communicated change in application deadlines, National’s Forestry spokesperson Ian McKelvie says. “Last month, the Ministry of Primary Industries sent an email to foresters announcing that they were moving the effective deadline to register forests for the Emissions Trading Scheme from the last day of the year to 25 October 2022, simply due to long processing times in their office. “This left forest owners just three working days to submit their applications. After that date has passed, their applications will not be processed until 2023. This change will prevent some forest owners from claiming five years’ worth of backdated credits to 2018. “Some forest owners stand to lose millions of dollars as a result of this poorly communicated change. …This is more than just incompetence, it is theft.

Projects meant to regenerate Australia’s outback forests to store carbon dioxide have been awarded millions of carbon credits – worth hundreds of millions of dollars – despite total tree and shrub cover in those areas having declined, a new analysis has found. It is the latest claim that raises doubts about the integrity of Australia’s carbon credit system, which the federal government and polluting businesses rely on to meet targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The analysis by six academics, including the former carbon credit scheme integrity chair Prof Andrew Macintosh, has been presented to a review of the system commissioned by the climate change minister, Chris Bowen. …Macintosh, an environmental law and policy professor at the Australian National University and former head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, said the analysis found compelling evidence of widespread problems with forest regeneration projects.