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COP27: the key takeaways for civil engineers

Date
02 February 2023

The recent COP27 meeting highlighted the importance of keeping the 1.5C pledge alive and of mobilising financial support for low-carbon infrastructure. Civil engineers have a crucial role to play in achieving both goals.

COP27: the key takeaways for civil engineers
Last year's Pakistan floods were among the worst in the country's history.

With 54% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, and some 70% worldwide, being linked to infrastructure, civil engineers are critical to the implementation of solutions to climate change.

Reports of flooding in Pakistan and Germany, and heatwaves in London, are reminders of its devastating effects.

As ICE senior vice president Anusha Shah put it at the ICE COP27 Question Time event: “What happens in Pakistan won’t stay in Pakistan.”

The COP27 UN Climate Change Conference, which took place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, focused on addressing these issues.

COP27: an introduction

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into force in 1994 and the 198 countries that have ratified it are known as Parties to the Convention.

Their aim is preventing “dangerous” human interference with the climate system.

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the supreme decision-making element where implementation of the UNFCCC is reviewed.

The recent COP in Egypt was the 27th meeting of the COP on climate change.

Many of the COP27 negotiations and coverage focused on fossil fuels, and the loss and damage fund.

But in the final overarching agreement – called the cover decision – there were new issues highlighted:

  • Explicit chapters on food, oceans and forests, showing a recognition of the link between protecting nature and climate change.
  • Emphasis that ongoing geopolitical issues such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “should not be used as a pretext for backtracking, backsliding or de-prioritising climate action”.
  • Added emphasis on the importance of protecting our water resources.
  • A figure of US$4trn per year to be invested in renewable energy by 2030.
  • Identification that commercial banks require “transformational” change.

The UNFCCC states the key takeaways from COP27 as being:

  • Establishing a dedicated fund for loss and damage.
  • Mobilising more financial support for developing countries.
  • Maintaining a clear intention to keep 1.5C within reach.
  • Holding businesses and institutions to account.
  • Making the pivot toward implementation.

Young people were also given greater prominence at COP27, being mentioned in the cover text for the first time.

The event included a first-of-its-kind pavilion for young people and the first youth-led Climate Forum.

UNFCCC executive secretary Simon Stiell urged governments to incorporate the potential solutions being put forward by young people into policymaking.

Achieving climate justice: the loss and damage fund

The loss and damage agreement seeks to provide support to developing countries and was a monumental breakthrough achievement for COP27.

It was a key topic, partly because the conference was hosted in Africa.

It has been the subject of tense discussions for decades and a growing political barrier to climate negotiations, particularly in the past 10 years.

This is the first time an issue as big as this has been on the negotiating agenda and agreed to within one COP, although details of the fund remain to be negotiated.

About 2 billion people on the planet do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion do not have access to clean cooking fuels.

These communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change yet are also those with the lowest CO2 emissions.

This generates an imbalance associated with the negotiations about who needs to do what.

Wealthy countries need to rapidly mitigate and decarbonise their industries.

At the same time, rapidly emerging economies need to develop without the same kind of high CO2 trajectories as wealthier countries, but also not be restricted in their development opportunities.

Developed countries have set a bad example in this regard and there’s no chance of keeping 1.5°C alive if all countries develop in the same way.

Money needs to be provided to countries for appropriate low-emission technologies so that people can have access to basic services.

These countries also need to be allocated their fair share of the carbon budget.

This means that some developed nations need to reduce their emissions to enable other countries to develop and get their citizens to a decent standard of living.

Adapting to the climate crisis – everything from building sea walls to creating drought-resistant crops – could cost developing countries anywhere between US$160bn-US$340bn annually by 2030.

The loss and damage fund will encourage more investment into new infrastructure.

It’s an opportunity for engineers to look at how to deliver resilient, sustainable and people-centred infrastructure services to those in need.

Greater investment is needed for basic services such as clean drinking water
Greater investment is needed for basic services such as clean drinking water

  • 2 billion people do not have safe drinking water
  • 2.5 billion people do not have clean cooking fuels
  • US$160bn-US$340bn – potential annual cost of climate adaptation to developing countries by 2030

Mobilising financial support

Climate finance took centre stage in the negotiations.

Deliberations focused on setting a “new collective quantified goal on climate finance” in 2024, taking into account the needs of developing countries.

The cover decision from COP27 highlights that a global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investments of at least US$4tn-6tn a year.

Delivering such funding will require a swift transformation of the financial system and its structures.

There is still a serious concern that the previous commitments of developed countries to mobilise jointly US$100bn annually by 2020 has still not been met and that the need for deliverable solutions to financing decarbonisation continues to grow.

As long as the pledges and previous commitments aren’t met, negotiation with the affected countries is hard.

There is dissatisfaction about the way finance is being provided, who’s managing it and how it can be accessed.

The ICE, as a founding member of the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI), was involved in the COP Resilience Hub to consider opportunities and barriers in energy and mobility entrepreneurship, with a focus on business models and financing.

Speakers noted that entrepreneurs often had bankable projects but no access to finance, whereas financiers had the money but no pipeline of projects.

The Bridgetown Initiative, proposed by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, got a lot of attention at COP27.

It seeks to break the deadlock over climate finance by using the power of international reserve currencies to drive private investment into transition projects in low- and middle-income countries.

This would reform the broader public financial systems to get money directly to different types of entities other than national governments.

The ICE’s Financing Low-Carbon Infrastructure report, which was published during COP27, highlights the role of the civil engineer in financing low-carbon projects.

Engineers can help to facilitate money flowing into projects, design and build infrastructure with an awareness of what should be factored in from a carbon perspective.

They can also collaborate with financiers to deliver projects that generate clear revenues and payback.

A global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investments of at least US$4tn-6tn a year

Reducing emissions

Emissions reduction was one of the more disappointing elements of the negotiations as no significant steps were taken.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres made the clear statement at COP27 that “we are on the highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”.

The current financial and energy crisis has not helped, and the resulting issue of energy security has put back the decarbonisation agenda.

A UN Climate Change report published in October analysed countries’ climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and showed that current commitments would increase emissions by 10.6% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.

This is an improvement on the previous year’s assessment, but still not on track for the rapid downward trend that is necessary this decade for a 1.5C world.

The report states that “implementation of current pledges by national governments put[s] the world on track for a 2.5C warmer world by the end of the century” and that “greenhouse gas emissions must decline 43% by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5C”.

Current global commitments will not be enough to limit global warning to 1.5C
Current global commitments will not be enough to limit global warning to 1.5C

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, all 196 countries that are party to the Paris Agreement agreed to revisit and strengthen their climate plans.

Disappointingly, only 34 new or updated climate plans were submitted.

Every five years there’s a formal mechanism for evaluation and assessment.

This year, the First Global Stocktake will independently evaluate the progress made against the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Under the Breakthrough Agenda, launched at COP27, countries representing more than 50% of global GDP set out sector-specific ‘priority actions’.

These were to decarbonise power, transport and steel, scale up low-emission hydrogen production, and accelerate the shift to sustainable agriculture by COP28, which will take place in Dubai in December 2023.

The buildings and cement sectors are to be added this year.

The plan for transport focuses on implementing zero-emission vehicles at scale, including aligning policies and standards internationally and considering the shift to public transport and sustainable mobility.

However, the first annual progress report states that transport is not on track to decarbonise by 2030.

According to The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2022, the road transport sector accounts for about 6 GtCO2e, or 10% of total emissions.

This has risen by 13% since 2010 and needs to fall by nearly one-third by 2030.

The UN secretary-general’s High-Level Expert Group on Net-Zero Commitments of Non-State Entities published a report at COP27, serving as a how-to guide to ensure credible, accountable net-zero pledges.

Implementation of current pledges by national governments puts the world on track for a 2.5C warmer world by the end of the century

UN Climate Change report

Scaling up adaptation efforts

The African setting for COP27 was a driver for its adaptation agenda and there was significant progress.

COP27 president Sameh Shoukry announced the Sharm El Sheikh Adaptation Agenda – a 30-point plan to address the ‘adaptation gap’ and enhance resilience for 4 billion people living in the most climate-vulnerable communities by 2030.

This is the first time that state and non-state actors have rallied together behind a plan of action.

Governments agreed on the way forward on the Global Goal on Adaptation, while new pledges, totalling more than US$230m, were made to the Adaptation Fund.

However, the lack of focus at COP27 on mitigation and the resulting difficulties in maintaining the Paris Agreement pledge of a maximum of average 1.5C temperature rise by 2100 will influence climate impacts.

The increased severity and frequency of impacts of a 2C temperature rise, rather than a 1.5C rise, are worrying.

The infographic below shows the significant difference in impacts.

Description automatically generatedWhile there is a major effort ongoing to ensure that 1.5C is kept alive as a guiding principle, it‘s now highly likely that this will be breached – 1.2C has already been reached.

The current questions concern how much temperatures will increase above 1.5C, for how long, the impact on society and ecosystems, and how long it will take these to rebound.

The only way to avoid going over 1.5C is large-scale transformational decarbonisation alongside large-scale carbon sequestration and storage.

Avoiding an overshoot is now almost impossible.

Seth Schultz, chief executive of non-profit global consortium Resilience Rising, suggested at the ICE’s COP27 Question Time that for infrastructure with a projected lifespan over 25 years, engineers should be designing now for 2.5C of warming.

Integrating nature-based solutions in the infrastructure lifecycle is going to play a greater part in building systemic resilience.

A separate COP – the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) – took place in Montreal in December 2022, at which world leaders adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, including goals and targets to protect and restore nature.

What next for civil engineers?

As ICSI executive director Savina Carluccio put it at the ICE Question Time event, civil engineers need to look beyond compliance and the technical aspects of a project and focus on doing the right project.

The greener options for achieving outcomes must be considered first.

Civil engineers need to interact with policymakers and financiers, and influence which projects are implemented.

They need to make sure what is being designed is what society actually needs.

The Difference in Climate Impacts Between 1.5˚C and 2˚C of Warming
Taken from Half a Degree and a World Apart: The difference in climate impacts between 1.5˚C and 2˚C of warming, World Resources Institute. Click to enlarge.

In this, they need to be able to explain using non-technical language – drawing on the expertise of marketing specialists, filmmakers and artists to communicate their messages.

As Anusha Shah said at the ICE Question Time event, training is needed to ensure civil engineers have the right skills, and that climate change, mitigation and resilience is fully embedded into university courses and CPD modules.

Resources such as Infrastructure Pathways, which provides guidance on climate-resilient infrastructure organised by lifecycle phase, also need to be utilised.

Related links

For more information about the sessions that were run at COP27 by ICSI, of which the ICE is a founding member, visit ICSI at COP27: Driving Adaptation and Resilience in Infrastructure.

  • Sarah Hall, sustainability insights manager at Institution of Civil Engineers