Skip to main content

COP21 reflections: What have we achieved and how do we go forward?

Image
By
On Friday, I am helping Alex Minshull, Director of Sustainability for Bristol City Council, wrap up the Bristol and Paris Pavilion with our partners from ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability. It was a great pleasure to be on the stage with Gino Van Begin, ICLEI’s Secretary General, and Yunus Arikan, ICLEI’s Head of Global Policy and Advocacy, both of whom have spent years advocating for the important role of non-state actors – an advocacy that was vindicated beyond all doubt over the last fortnight.

On Friday night, I am on the Eurostar, trying to make up for lost sleep and trying to wade through the penultimate draft of the text. Ironically, I have to buy bottled water at Paddington as there was no place to refill my new COP21 bottle… a reminder of how far we have to go. Ironically, I have to get a lift home from Temple Meads.

And then on Saturday, back home, I am admiring those who took to the streets of Paris with a message of hope, while waiting (and waiting) for the final announcement, following the Guardian and BBC news livestreams as a ‘shall’ became a ‘should’, as text was finalised, as countries read their final statements. And then at around 6:30 the agreement was ratified.

The next morning, Sunday, I am cooking breakfast on our gas hob and thinking: all of these – in tens of millions of UK households - will have to go in the next 30 years, less to limit warming to 2C.

What a challenge but what an opportunity.

*************

The dust is still settling; the full implications of an Agreement built on self-imposed commitments, peer pressure and united messaging rather than rigid and universal targets are not yet clear.

In Bristol we have made bold pledges on multiple international stages, but before we truly embark on realising those, we will hold a Mayoral and Council-wide election.

Nonetheless, every day this week on the Cabot Institute blog, I will offer a few reflections on what has happened and what must happen next – formulated between the agreement of the Agreement on the 12 December and the start of real work on the 14 December.

-----------------------------------------
Prof Rich Pancost

This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.  For more information about the University of Bristol at COP21, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital

Other blogs in this COP21 reflections series include:
What next for our planet?
What next for Bristol?
What next for the University of Bristol?







COP21 Daily Reports


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

By
This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment.  If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For example
Read more

1-in-200 year events

By
You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve
Read more

Detectable impacts of Climate Change in the UK; a new review for the next Climate Change Risk Assessment

By
2022 was another year of “unprecedented” weather. Provisional figures indicate that it was the warmest so far recorded, with almost every month hotter than average. Much of the country had a notably mild New Year, despite the cold snap in mid-December. This was preceded by the third warmest autumn on record , and that by a scorching summer, with the hottest day ever recorded in July. But summer’s heat waves were also accompanied by a rise in the number of daily deaths across the country. People around the world are becoming increasingly more aware of events like these, and their impact in the UK is particularly concerning amidst the ongoing cost-of-living, energy, and NHS crises. Aerial view of the Wennington wildfire, London, 19 July 2022. Source: Harrison Healey, Wikimedia Commons  (CC BY 3.0). Ahead of the Fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4), the Climate Change Committee (CCC) are asking what we know about the impact of past and present climate change on natural and
Read more