Combining IPCC targets with SDGs

The Donal Trump administration is withdrawing from multilateral mechanisms to tackle development, health and environmental challenges just as the world is impacted by accelerated climate breakdown.

The US pullout of the Paris Agreement signed by most countries in 2015 to curb emissions, his plans to increase fossil fuel production, and cut funding for global nature conservation and climate adaptation, threaten to reverse the past decade of progress.

All this comes as the United States has decided to cancel participation of its scientists in a critical meeting this week of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Chinese city of Hangzhou which is set to agree on a timeline and budget for its Seventh Assessment Report.

The Conference will be also discussing geoengineering options to remove carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere, to capture and store it. Some scientists say that at the rate emissions are spiking worldwide, cutting back on fossil fuel use will not be enough to keep global average temperatures in check.

Some of the CO2 emitted today is absorbed by the oceans and plants, but most of it remains in the atmosphere for as much as 1,000 years.

Carbon sequestration remains controversial, and environmentalists argue that the best method of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to increase forest cover around the world. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an international body of scientists from 195 countries and was set up nearly 20 years ago to provide governments regular reports on the state of the global climate as well as propose measures to adapt to the climate crisis and reduce emissions.

Previous IPCC assessments have painted an increasingly alarming picture of overshoot of greenhouse gas emissions, and the world is already nearing the 1.5C target for 2050 set in Paris 20 years ago. 

The 62nd session of the IPCC taking place in Hangzhou from 24-28 February will pool available scientific data on climate change, analyse it and come up with recommendations for governments as part of its regular 6-year process. 

But the outlines of the Seventh Assessment report is not due till 2028, and many scientists worry that at present rate of atmospheric and ocean warming, it will be too late to take meaningful action. 

Now, a new study has shown that past IPCC reports have failed to align its targets with another time bound plan agreed to by most of the world’s countries at the United Nations: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Read also: UN climate report declares planetary emergency

“The Hangzhou meeting is the right time to influence decision-making to holistically link climate change and sustainability issues in the upcoming IPCC reports,” says Prajal Pradhan of the Integrated Research on Energy, Environment, and Society at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, and lead author of a new report in the journal Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

The SDGs were agreed upon at the United Nations the same year as the Paris Climate Agreement to achieve a set of 17 development targets by 2030 to, among other things, end poverty and hunger, ensure health and education, and reduce emissions to mitigate climate change.

The SDGs superseded the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and underlined the interlinkages of the global crises like inequality, migration, food production, poverty and climate breakdown.

Pradhan, who is a scientist from Nepal, and his fellow researchers and authors analysed 150 chapters of the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the IPCC to see how much they had incorporated SDG targets.

“Our analysis shows that the reports contain gaps when it comes to the SDGs,” notes Pradhan. “Climate change and sustainability cannot be seen in isolation, and several SDGs are not sufficiently reflected in the previous IPCC reports, such as gender equality, education, inequality, and health issues.”

Besides its 17 broad goals, the SDGs also have 169 sub-goals and incorporate them into the next scientific assessment of the IPCC because they relate to structural problems with national development, many of which pre-date the climate crisis. 

Says Pradhan: “If we want to achieve climate action, we need to link them to development issues. Climate change has negative impacts on several SDGs. At the same time, they can also have a positive effect on several sustainability goals. There are synergies and trade-offs.” 

The paper in Resource, Environment and Sustainability notes that while SDGs figure more prominently in the IPCC”s Sixth Assessment Report compared to the Fifth, there is a need for a  more holistic coverage of sustainability and development goals as the underlying causes and solutions to the climate crisis.

Incorporating SDGs into the Seventh Assessment Report, it adds, would make the next one more policy-relevant, stimulate more research on SDG and climate change linkages.

Says Klaus Hubacek, another co-author from the University of Groningen: “Climate change is not just about rising temperatures, there is also a direct link to people’s well-being, which the SDGs emphasise. These development issues resonate more with governments, and this is how they hope to accelerate climate actions.”

Read also: Underreporting the climate emergency

The paper was a collaboration between scientists from 15 institutions worldwide which also included other Nepali scientists like Shobhakar Dhakal of the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and , Maheswar Rupakheti, as well as former and present members of IPCC working groups like Bart van den Hurk, Debra C Roberts. 

The researchers hope that the journal article will convince participants at the IPCC meeting in China this week to push urgent global action on climate mitigation and adaptation by integrating SDGs more closely with emission targets and strategies to cope with impact. 

“Timing is key,” Hubacek notes. “The SDGs are in place until 2030. If the IPCC reports incorporate SDG targets they will help the sustainability agenda beyond 2030, a potential follow-up.”

Read also: More equal than others

This article is brought to you by Nepali Times, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.