COP25 talks are coming to an end today. As world leaders gather in Madrid, Spain to discuss their climate strategies and the rules to reach their targets under the Paris Climate Agreement, activists of all ages gathered to protest the slow pace at which governments are acting on the issue. During the high-level plenary session, Hilda Flavia, an activist from Uganda, told negotiators “you’ve been negotiating for the last 25 years, even before I was born,” highlighting the lack of progress given the urgency of the matter.
Two reports issued prior and during the COP25 talks further stress the urgency of the climate change challenge. One report published last week by the Global Carbon Project, says that although the rise in emissions was much smaller this year than in the last two, the continued increase means the world is far from meeting Paris agreement goals by 2050. And according to another report published by the UN Environment Program in November, emissions would have to fall by 7.6 percent a year for the next 10 years to stay within the limits advised by scientists.
Latin America is anything but safe from the effects of climate change. This year has seen a historic rise in deforestation, and as Rebecca Ray writes for Global Americans, deforestation can oftentimes be linked to the fragmented and ambiguous governance of infrastructure programs financed by development finance institutions. Given the infrastructure boom in the region, infrastructure-linked environmental and social risks may be accelerating. And as we highlight in our High Level Working Group paper on the Caribbean’s extreme vulnerability to climate change, the climate crisis poses an uneven burden on the economy and future development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean. Focusing on The Bahamas alone, the total cost of Hurricane Dorian in September amounts to $3.4 billion, equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP. As Victoria Gaytan notes, for SIDS in the Caribbean, climate change is a “life or death matter.”
