35% electrification by 2035: minimum target at the UN climate summit

BarcelonaWith the price of oil skyrocketing due to the conflict in Iran and deadly heat waves and floods the order of the day, the world's governments should be focused on the fight against the climate emergency and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. But, paradoxically, this year's UN climate change summit, COP31, which kicks off this Monday in Turkey, is shaping up to be one of the most inconsequential and least productive of all those held so far. The Turkish government shares the presidency of the summit with Australia's (it was the consensus solution they found because both countries wanted to host the summit) and, in an attempt to offer some tangible result from the meeting, proposes including in the final agreement a commitment to reach 35% electrification by 2035 globally (we are currently at 23%).

It is a proposal that has a high probability of succeeding for two reasons. Firstly, because it can be presented as a need for energy security, amid the current context of volatile energy supplies, and secondly, because the agreement will most likely not specify which type of fuel this electrification must use. "It is very important to ensure that enough attention is paid to electrification with clean energy," Kaysie Brown, associate director of Climate Diplomacy and Geopolitics at the think tank E3G, who was in Barcelona invited by Cidob, points out to ARA.

This nuance of "clean" electrification does not appear in the Turkish proposal, even though this word could leave the door open to sources that are not only renewables, such as nuclear energy or even natural gas, which countries like Russia are fighting to have considered "clean" or "transition" energy (this second term is also applied to gas by the EU), despite it being a fossil fuel.

Turkey wants to incorporate this 35x35 commitment into the final text of COP31, which requires a consensus agreement among the 198 summit participants and therefore makes it highly likely that the word net and especially the mention of renewables will not appear. "We demand that this electrification goal be exclusively with renewable energies and that at the same time measures be incorporated that guarantee that these renewables do not reproduce the extractivist model that we see today with the mining of critical minerals that are necessary for green technology," remarked Clàudia Custodio, from the Observatory on Debt in Globalisation. To achieve this, it would be necessary to extract this agreement from the official concluding text of the summit, so that it does not require the consensus of all the governments gathered, just as has already been done with other contentious issues.

In fact, the second major theme of this summit, which was left pending from the last meeting in Brazil and which would be the most important of all if it were achieved, arrives already so watered down at the opening of COP31 that little is expected of it. It concerns the agreement to make "a transition that moves us away from fossil fuels." This phrase, which was able to be included in the final text of COP28 in Dubai, three years ago, disappeared from the official texts in the two subsequent summits (COP29 in Baku and COP30 in Belém). Brazil, which was the host of COP30 last year, failed in its attempt to once again include this commitment in the final text of that summit and pledged to work all year to bring a text to Turkey. And it will do so, but it is already clear that this agreement will not be part of the official negotiation of the summit, but rather will be presented in the space called "Action Agenda," in which bilateral agreements are closed or voluntary adherence commitments for states are put on the table.

Voluntary roadmap to reverse the 1.5°C

Brazil will go to Turkey with a "roadmap for the transition away from fossil fuels", which about sixty governments are expected to join. These are the world's most ambitious states regarding climate matters, those that want to end fossil fuels and have committed to net-zero emissions, but among them, there is not one of the major fossil fuel producers. Up to eighty governments signed a letter at COP30 in Brazil to request this agreement to progressively reduce coal, gas, and oil, including the European Union, and some states, like France, have presented a national "roadmap" of their own in recent months to do so. A crucial and above all urgent issue, now that the UN has already admitted that the planet will soon exceed the 1.5°C threshold of global warming (relative to the pre-industrial era) that the Paris Agreement recommended not to exceed.

The only hope is that once we exceed it, it can be brought back down, but this will not be achieved unless emissions cease and CO₂ is also captured from the atmosphere. But this will be very difficult if the commitment does not pull in any of the major CO₂ emitters, such as China, India, or the United States, the second largest global emitter, which will not officially attend the summit, as Donald Trump has withdrawn the country from these forums. Governors, congresspeople, and business leaders from the United States who are still committed to the climate fight will attend, however.

COP31 has been defined as "the summit of implementation". "The Paris Agreement is closed, its regulations have already been agreed upon, so now it is the time to implement the agreements," points out Kaysie Brown, and she invites focusing not on negotiations between states but on the Action Agenda part "which is where there will be effective execution." The analyst admits that the current geopolitical context is by no means the best for climate summits, but notes that progress is being made in the technological sphere. "Ten years ago, when the Paris Agreement was signed, there was political commitment, but the economic and market forces were not supportive. Now, in a way, just the opposite is happening," says Brown. Green technology is cheaper and growing more than ever, only it does not yet serve to replace fossil energy but rather to add to more energy consumption.

"Implementation should not take place at summits. It is states and local governments that are responsible for implementing climate agreements," remarks Olga Alcaraz, a veteran of UN summits with the Climate Change Governance Group at the UPC. Regarding the UN, however, some rules of the game remain to be defined concerning the financing that wealthy countries must provide to the most vulnerable to adapt to new climate realities. In December, the first disbursement from the loss and damage fund is expected, as noted by Anna Pérez, from the think tank IDDRI. This loss and damage fund should serve to cover the costs of disasters like the one that left a thousand dead in Nepal this very summer, as they are directly attributable to the climate crisis (the origin was a glacial melt).

Pérez points out another issue that has ended up entering the global climate forum, which is that of "trade," as many states like India want to debate within the COP mechanisms such as the carbon border tax that the EU imposes on products it imports from outside the continent. A tool to fight against the climate crisis that is now being questioned and is being attempted to be repealed at climate summits.