COP28 and Implications for US Agriculture
December 20, 2023, by Debbie Reed, Executive Director
Implications of COP28 for US Agriculture
As has been widely noted in the popular press and in climate change focused outlets, agriculture and food systems were a significant focus of COP28 [28th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)]. COP28 hosted the first-ever day dedicated to food and agriculture during the second week, which is when the high-level discussions and agreements occur. This highlights the importance given to food and agriculture systems at the COP. Also, as reported by US Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, there seemed to be less resistance to and more support for agriculture in past years when receptivity was rockier, and more focused on GHG emissions from agriculture, rather than solutions offered by agriculture.
Why was there more support for agricultural solutions at this COP? I believe the answer is two-fold: political expediency and technical necessity.
Political expediency: After 28 annual COPs, governments are still failing to deliver necessary GHG reductions to avoid dangerous global warming, particularly from the 3 largest emitting sectors: energy (fossil fuels), transportation and buildings. That is a huge, ongoing, significant political failure. Yes, some notable progress was made; but it is not what was teed up by COP27 and previous COPS. The fact that COP28 was hosted by an oil-producing state was an easy signal that achieving consensus language to phase out fossil fuel use – the intended outcome – would not be achievable. So, the COP was bound to fail on this critical issue. The parties agreed instead to ambiguous language to “transition away from fossil fuels”.
Technical necessity: The continued political failure to phase out fossil fuels even after 28 annual COPs dedicated to that issue is why we are seeing dangerous climate impacts from unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture, as a business done outdoors, is in the climate cross hairs. Our very survival globally depends on our ability to produce food. It is thus a global technical necessity that we address the necessary transformation of agricultural and food systems to be more resilient to climate change. There is no other option. Literally, our survival depends on it.
Billions of dollars of pledges were made at COP28 to support the transformation of food and ag systems to be more resilient to climate change. But agriculture is also a natural climate solution – and we saw commitments to research and finance to help deliver the support to farmers and ranchers to implement climate solutions.
The true test from here – over the next months leading up to COP29 – will be whether those commitments turn to actual cash and whether the infrastructure to deliver financial support and assistance to the world’s farmers and ranchers – including in the US – comes to fruition.
Some finance pathways will be more secure than others. For instance, we have seen a significant ongoing commitment and leadership by the Biden Administration to work on the food and agricultural climate agenda already, to the tune of billions of dollars of investments made. The ability of the US to leverage new global finance streams announced during the COP is more likely made based on the Administration’s leadership, plans and successes to date.
Specifics on Commitments Made at COP28 Relative to Food and Agricultural Systems
Commitments have included a large focus on methane from livestock systems for instance, and funding to help mitigate these emissions. This is essential – the requirements to really address methane from livestock systems are not currently within the power or financial means of most agricultural producers in the US or even globally. Take livestock feed additives as an example. There is considerable evidence that some of these feed additives can reduce 75% or more of enteric emissions from livestock. But they are generally far too expensive and result in zero direct benefits to farmers to utilize; the benefits accrue to the atmosphere and to society – so any pledges and resulting public and private funds to pay for the delivery of tools and technologies to producers to utilize is necessary, and hopefully is a direct and timely result of the pledges being made.
COP28 attention to the issue, and the announcements and the pledges are a great step in the right direction. What is required is public-private dedication to the follow-through. Without that follow-through and direct financial support to producers to adopt and utilize new technologies and new methodologies to reduce GHG – and the commensurate educational and technical support to assist them (such as the development of necessary infrastructure, supply chains and delivery systems, etc.) – then we will not achieve the potential that is being recognized and pledged. The true test will be in how fast the promise and the pledges can be turned into reality for the farmers and ranchers who are producing the world’s food.
What makes me confident that this can and will happen is the fairly new but welcome presence of private sector actors and corporations in the food and beverage sector and the agricultural sector. They are participating in unprecedented numbers not only at the COPs, but more specifically, in assuming their own corporate GHG commitments that mirror government commitments. In the few years since these corporate actors have entered the fray and started making their own commitments and investments, we have seen funding, actions, and mitigation approaches actually come to fruition.
What is necessary now is to leverage the public and private sector commitments – and I do not want to leave out philanthropic commitments which are also growing – to meet the challenge.
ESMC is a good example of how we can deliver the needed resources to farmers via public and private collaboration. We work with the food and beverage supply chain to deliver GHG reductions in a harmonized, national scale agricultural mitigation program dedicated to collective success across the supply chain. We work with producers on the ground and corporations whose commitments we help to meet. These sorts of delivery programs and systems are needed to ensure the commitments turn to action and the actions generate real outcomes that can be tracked and quantified and scaled and improved over time.
Background Primer on the UNFCCC and the Role of Agriculture
The COPs (which stands for Conference of the Parties) represent governmental negotiations on how to meet global collective and individual country commitments to mitigate serious consequences of climate change. COP28 references the 28th annual COP – meaning this is the 28th year approximately 198 signatory countries have gathered to discuss commitments and progress.
By all counts, we know this collective approach is failing, and has been for nearly 3 decades. We are seeing the negative impacts of climate change and are exceeding stated goals to keep warming to within 1.5C.
The official business of the COPs is political, technical, and financial.
- The political aspect regards global frameworks or agreements about how to mitigate climate change and is linked to how individual countries commit to and report on reduction commitments and strategies.
- The technical and scientific agenda informs COP activities, targets, and commitments. Generally, items must be addressed by and embraced by the technical agenda and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of scientific experts from member countries) before they are acknowledged or acted upon within the political agenda.
- Financial commitments are one way to achieve political and technical goals, either collectively or for groups of countries (parties). There are many instances of pooled financial commitments to support research and technology agendas to help address scientific or technical gaps in knowledge or actions; or, to support capacity building of less-developed countries to participate in the activities of the UNFCCC.
UNFCCC Country-Level Commitments
Country Parties must develop and report comprehensive GHG inventories, which contribute to the global stock take of how much each country currently (and historically) contributes to global atmospheric CO2e concentrations. The US is an official signatory (and thus Party) to the UNFCCC.
Countries follow UNFCCC guidance on how to develop these inventories, and make commitments called Nationally Defined Contributions (NDC’s) on what their reduction targets are, compared to a baseline year of emissions.
Country-level GHG inventories and NDC’s are based on sector-level GHG emissions, and commitments to reduce GHG emissions by sector.
Historical Sectoral Focus of UNFCCC Activities
In the early years of the UNFCCC the major focus of mitigation activities was on the three sectors with the highest global GHG emissions: the energy, transportation, and building sectors. These sectors are still focal points of the negotiations, as indicated by the COP28 focus on fossil fuels. This early focus is explained by two things: the GHG-intensive nature of these sectors (think: the GHG emissions of fossil fuels and the embedded GHG emissions in the transportation and building sectors); and the fairly easy and straightforward ability to estimate and track the GHG associated with these sectors. They were the lowest-hanging fruit, sectorally, to address.
Other sectors have become focal targets over time. The earliest introduction of the forestry and agricultural sectors came up in the late 1990s as a US proposal to claim reductions towards mitigation commitments from increased soil carbon and forestry sinks. Unfortunately, the US proposals were viewed as a means for the US to claim reductions that were not “real” and were described by criticism as a means to ‘optically adjust the US mitigation targets.’
It is noteworthy that by raising sinks on the political agenda, the US proposal was viewed as skirting the technical agenda. This lent credence to criticisms from the EU and environmental NGO’s that the proposals were not technically or scientifically valid. This in turn led to a political backlash against the US proposals, and ultimately marred the prospect for biological sinks to be taken seriously as either political or technical mitigation opportunities for a period of time.
One notable beneficial outcome of the US proposals was that the IPCC and soil scientists – led by the EU, Australia, and the US – did add the issue of soil carbon sinks to technical and scientific agendas, and a significant period of investment in R&D ensued. Due to this political hiccup, and to the complex nature of GHG emissions associated with the agricultural sector, agriculture is/was literally the last sector to receive significant focus within the UNFCCC agenda. We are seeing that play out now, in real time.
Historical Role of Agriculture in the UNFCCC: The Last Sector
The initial introduction of the forestry and agricultural sectors (now referred to as Natural Climate Solutions) came up fairly early in the UNFCCC, in proposals by the US Clinton Administration during COPs 4-6 (1998-2000) as legitimate soil carbon storage sinks for which countries could claim progress towards emissions reductions commitments. The proposal was novel as there was no underlying text in UNFCCC documents that supported it. This led to significant pushback from the EU and most global and US environmental NGO’s (to its credit, the one supportive US NGO was The Nature Conservancy) for the US proposals. Ultimately, the issue resulted in the total collapse of an otherwise consensus document and UNFCCC agreement during the 2000 COP6 in The Hague.
In the aftermath of the COP6 UNFCCC collapse, the forestry agenda and forest sinks were added to the political agenda. Though not without controversy, the technical ability of forests to sequester carbon was scientifically known. Soil carbon sinks did not have a commensurate amount of scientific and technical documentation and were added to the technical agenda for assessment. The result is that – coupled with the complex nature of agricultural GHG emissions and mitigation and quantification approaches – the agricultural sector and soil carbon sinks in particular became bit of a political third rail in the negotiations for nearly 2 decades.
Based on research triggered by the early US proposals over time, the IPCC came to support soil carbon sinks as scientifically valid and necessary climate mitigation technologies; the 2015 IPCC report (CITES). That technical consensus meant that soil carbon sinks could be addressed in the political agenda of the UNFCCC. That, coupled with significant private sector commitments and investments in agricultural sector climate change mitigation activities beginning in ~2015 and increasing almost exponentially since then, bring us to the present focus on agricultural and food sectors in the UNFCCC COP28.
Historical Role of Observers and the Private Sector in the UNFCCC
Stakeholders have always played a legitimate and important role in the UNFCCC and the COPs (and intersessional and other meetings and negotiations that happen between annual COPs) as observers. Observers include stakeholders who closely follow the negotiations and who contribute to the political, technical, and financial agendas and discussions; and stakeholders who are there to make announcements, hold side events, etc.
Many observers serve in advisory roles to their country delegations and negotiators. Country negotiators often ask observers to help reach out to other country delegates to test or seek support for ideas or proposals, or to understand their objections or lack of support for proposals or language.
As the number of participating COP observers has increased over time, the logistical set up at the COPs has changed to create separate “zones” for negotiators and observers and other non-accredited stakeholders.
Only negotiators and their designated teams and accredited observers have badges to access COP BLUE zones.
The Green Zone is to host non-accredited stakeholders and observers and to create space to accommodate the many new stakeholders participating in the UNFCCC processes. Side events, announcements, meeting spaces and a place for negotiators to participate with non-accredited stakeholders all take place in the Green Zone. The new addition of Green Zones is a positive sign of growing private sector engagement externally, since a lot of new science, initiatives, commitments and reports are unveiled by corporate actors during these side events.
