✨NEW✨: Our report 'Discredited' - published yesterday is a deep dive on the voluntary carbon market in India with a focus on communities on the ground who are carrying out the emissions reduction activities that lead to the sale of offsets to companies
🧵below for highlights
.
@CSEINDIA
/
@down2earthindia
launches its comprehensive database of weather disasters in india in 2022 tracking seven extreme weather phenomena
Report:
2 sexual assault cases against him & yet the fan boys continue to defend him. I guess it’s good that Nike dropped him & didn’t fire the employee, but they stuck w him for few yrs after the incident. I also wonder if they’d have dropped him if the victim wasn’t a Nike employee
Truly alarming story about why Nike really broke with Neymar by
@WSJ
Nike Split With Neymar Amid Sexual-Assault Probe - WSJ
(Hours have passed since publication and still no comment from Paris Saint Germain.)
🧵Beyond Climate Finance -
@CSEINDIA
's position paper ahead of the Pact Summit in Paris
Climate ambition in the Global South cannot be unlocked whilst operating in a financial system that's inequitable by design
@sunitanar
@ananya_rao19
"Collectively, the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are responsible for a shocking 92% of warming beyond 350ppm. The US alone is responsible for 40%."
This year is the 30th anniversary of the first IPCC report, the moment the world first knew what it would take to reverse climate change.
We failed. Spectacularly.
For
@The_Corres
, I tried to explain the past 30 years of climate politics.
The framing of carbon markets as offering "grant-like" money for coal phaseout is a new kind of co-opting of climate justice language + it leaves the crucial energy transition in developing countries to the whims of the fraudulent voluntary carbon market
Loss & damage, as a negotiation space, is one of the purest distillations of the climate justice issue -
@itsametamanna
and I broke down the recent TC4 failure in Aswan, highlighting why the world needs to be watching this moment
@harjeet11
@CSEINDIA
The report has more such detailed case studies, but the bottom line is the current VCM isn't benefiting climate or communities - it serves the interest of the retinue of project developers, verifiers & others who make a profit out of the lucrative carbon "business"
Whenever someone says we will mobilise x billion dollars in any sector either through blended finance or other instruments, does it actually happen and is anyone going back and checking if the “mobilisation” actually happened?
For the past fortnight,
@aygoswami
and
@bluewrit
have been at
#SharmElSheikh
, attending conferences, plenaries and side events at
#COP27
and writing and reporting on the same for CSE-DTE. Today, they took this selfie after the COP27 Closing Plenary ended
In the Araku valley tribal farmers tend to trees for which the carbon rights - the right to sell credits and earn money - is handed over to a Paris based project developer. The farmers get "free saplings and trainings", but no $$ from the VCM for their labour
Macron’s summit didn’t precipitate anything remotely transformational, but (perhaps unintentionally) it’s created momentum for a deep examination of the climate and development financing crisis
My summary for
@down2earthindia
@ananya_rao19
@CSEINDIA
An example of climate change amplifying existing inequalities - the heat wave, a product of planet warming gases that India barely contributed to, can worsen India's access to finance
A heat wave that’s made parts of India the hottest in 122 years may be a warning that heightened climate risks could drag on economic growth and worsen the nation’s credit scores
Honestly the misuse of “resilience” and “grit” to divert attention from flaws like poor design and public systems in any city is really frustrating. Residents shouldn’t have to be so gritty in the first place
At the
#COP27
long-term finance negotiations, Turkey talks about "using public finance strategically to derisk investments to move from billions to trillions" - a buzzword phrase that's coming up often, and an issue
@adam_tooze
and
@DanielaGabor
have talked about
Acc to the Economic Survey 2021-2022 India's coal demand is expected to increase 63% by 2030, which doesn't line up with a "phase down" or "net zero"
"This clearly indicates the sluggishness in the shift to a cleaner economy" writes
@Soundaram_
India recently pledged at the climate conference in Glasgow that it will ‘phase down’ the use of coal. However, the Economic Survey 2021-2022 reveals otherwise.
Interesting anecdote here that the WH gave the green light to US negotiators to support the loss and damage fund, and this may have stemmed from a subdued reaction to the Inflation Reduction Act
Acc to
@CSEINDIA
/
@down2earthindia
's extreme weather database, India experienced extreme weather events on 291 of the 334 days from January 1 to November 30, 2022.
The database can be viewed here:
#LossAndDamage
The global VCM isn't just a buyer-seller market; there are dozens of intermediaries each profiting off the transactions. By how much? We don't know because - conveniently - they are "commercial" transactions
#BonnClimateConference
| Loss and damage discussions at the Glasgow Dialogue that commenced in Bonn, unproductive and lacks a promising direction.
@aygoswami
For this,
@TrishantDev
@rohinikrish9
visited close to 40 project locations in 4 Indian states and spoke to project developers, farmers, rural households, activists, traders, local leaders, and NGOs.
We encountered a shroud of secrecy. Some developers spoke to us providing surface level publicly available info, others stonewalled or claimed to be in a "silent period"
Seventy (70!) US NGOs have written to
@ClimateEnvoy
asking them to drop their demand for the LDF to be hosted at the World Bank (which is nothing more than a means to exert US soft power). Good to see that US civil society is not aligned with the administration on this
Almost 70 US NGOs wrote a letter to the Biden admin ahead of
#TC5
: "The world does not need yet another channel for international finance that is donor-driven and unaccountable to communities in the Global South. But it *does* desperately need a Loss & Damage Fund..." (1/?)
Biogas plants use manure to generate methane for stoves, avoiding biomass. But these stoves get subsidies from a State gov, & rural households also pay for a portion of the project cost, of which carbon finance is a miniscule portion - who is earning the carbon revenue?
T-minus ~20 minutes until the
#CBQuiz
starts at 7.15pm sharp!
We'll be tweeting each round, and you'll have to stay tuned for the answers (published later this week).
If you're playing online or in-person, tag
@carbonbrief
and use
#CBQuiz
for the chance to be featured!
I wrote about the perils of relying on forests to solve the climate crisis, and the new science that confirms this - an excerpt from our ongoing work on carbon sinks and getting to net zero emissions
Scientists have highlighted severe limitations associated with natural carbon sinks such as forests on land and the oceans, which make any reliance on them for climate mitigation goals seem like wishful thinking, writes
@aygoswami
from
@CSEINDIA
Now to the case studies:
"Improved cookstoves" are intended to displace polluting biomass "chulhas" or stoves. But rural households ALSO use LPG stoves given thru a govt scheme. In some cases they pay upto Rs 2350 for an IC, which is also earning revenue through carbon credits??
Since I’m very influenced by
@bonappetit
and now also
@maangchi
I tried Maangchi’s Korean style mapo tofu (gochujang and gochugaru dialled down A LOT, plus I added some sugar for balance) and it’s great. V nice that she uses pork shoulder, makes it texturally really solid
Developing countries need to build domestic green industry to adequately confront the climate challenge. Current trade rules can help or hinder this process.
My new analysis on climate and trade is out here:
@down2earthindia
Online debate on Feb 24👇
@HoarseWisperer
I discovered that office coffee cups are a good way to reheat small quantities of lunch because the high edges reduce chances of spillage. This is a good thing and I am happy about it.
#Amphan
uprooted big old trees on my street last night. Its landfall in Calcutta was considered weaker than its initial strength, so I can’t imagine what it’s wrought on the coasts