Every month there will now be a new feature on One Planet Only, the largest Brazilian publishing movement to promote sustainable practices and face the climate crisis: the monthly series of live sessions of #Sem Climão, with members from the Scientific Council of the project. The opening meeting was of the highest level: Marcos Coronato spoke with Sérgio Besserman, the strategic coordinator of the Climate Reality Project-Brasil and the climate and the sustainability curator at the Museum of Tomorrow, and Ana Toni, executive director of the Institute for Climate and Society. Ana explained about the visit of the President Designate of COP 26, Alok Sharma, and what is expected at this next meeting.
“Alok spoke about the five themes that, for him, will define the success or otherwise of the COP. The first is that the COP keeps alive the hope of maintaining the average increase of the temperature at 1.5 ºC. The second is the funding for the required actions; $100 billion a year has been promised by developed countries for developing countries up to 2025, and he intends to deliver this. The third theme is about adaptation, not only about projects for countries, but also the resources to achieve this. Next, it is to show that very poor countries that have never caused climate change, such as islands, for example, now need to deal with enormous consequences, including loss of land – which is this significant environmental liability. And last, but not least, is the closure of the rules of the Paris Agreement, in particular what we call Article 6, which is the global Carbon Market and its rules. This is the only chapter still not closed in terms of negotiation,” explains Toni.
Besserman, in turn, was clear: humanity is dealing for the first time with a challenge in which it does not own the agenda. “In fact, it has no control whatsoever over the agenda. The agenda is determined by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. From this point onwards, humanity has to decide whether to continue emitting these gases and so forth. The entire political ritual, of diplomatic negotiations, is different this time. What is warming up the planet is not the amount of greenhouse gases we are emitting now, but it is the amount of them already in the atmosphere and the fact that they will take different times to decline,” he says.
