The Climate Change Conference – COP 27 brings governments from around the world to Egypt to continue discussions on the issue of climate change. Paraguayan government attends meeting with agenda that prioritizes “climate finance”; however, environmental policy continues to bet on false solutions without addressing the underlying problems linked, mainly, to the agro-industrial model.
The twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties on climate change takes place from November 6 to 18 in Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt), the world’s governments are focused on discussing strategies to achieve agreed climate goals, which are still far away . a lot to accomplish.
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Climate financing, focus of COP 27
The central focus of the COP 27 conference is climate finance, based on what the Paris Agreement – an agreement that contains global climate goals and how to finance them – calls common but differentiated responsibilities: Developed countries, responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that generate global warming, had to contribute 100,000 million dollars to deal with the effects of climate change, both in the areas of adaptation, mitigation and damage and loss caused by extreme weather conditions. events.
These resources should be allocated to developing countries to implement policies in each of the above areas; however, climate finance faces several challenges. According to the official COP 27 website, the reports on climate finance that will be presented during the summit “show that while there has been an increase in global climate finance flows, key mobilization targets for developing countries have not been met”.
The policy document prepared by the National Commission on Climate Change and which reflects Paraguay’s official position for the Summit indicates that Paraguay reaffirms that climate finance and the mobilization of financial flows must be granted from developed countries to developing countries. . It also indicates that actions related to adaptation will be a priority in the application of financial resources to address climate change and “recognizes” that the mobilization of current financial flows to developing countries is not sufficient to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and implement the national commitments made by the country in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Money for fake solutions
The document reveals that the country received a total of 181 million dollars over the period 2019-2021 and that according to an estimate of the costs, the implementation of the mitigation plans led by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development would cost about $16.4 billion. Despite being one of the priorities for the use of climate finance funds, the country has not yet calculated the costs associated with the implementation of the adaptation objectives and the costs associated with the losses and damages caused by the effects of climate change.
Although there is no precise data on the programs in which the above funds have been invested and are intended to be invested, it is essential to point out that a large part of climate finance at the global level, and in particular in the Paraguay, is aimed at false solutions, that is, “green policies” which, in reality, do not address the underlying problems and do not constitute real solutions to the problem of global warming and the climate crisis.
In the case of Paraguay, whose main contribution in terms of greenhouse gases is linked to massive deforestation for the advance of the agricultural and livestock frontier, there are no government plans that really aim to limit this situation. On the contrary, many of the “green projects” promoted by the government are based on false solutions, such as the promotion of forest crops, which in practice become large monocultures of eucalyptus and other exotic species which also have serious environmental consequences. . .
Green hydrogen and carbon markets
Climate policies in Paraguay are “betting” on false solutions such as green hydrogen and carbon markets. However, these proposals do not address the underlying problem, fundamentally linked to the production model, based on the concentration of land and its almost exclusive use for the production of goods.
In this sense, the engineer and environmental researcher, Guillermo Achucarro, in his book Climate Policy in Paraguay, An Anti-Extractivist Reading, points out that false solutions are based on a view that “it leaves out many causes of climate and environmental crises,” so that they do not translate into critical responses to the dominant production model in Paraguay. “In this way, an extremely complex problem is reduced to market solutions, making the real causes of the high CO2 emissions in our country invisible.“, he says.
Achucarro concludes that “the actions of the various governments in Paraguay basically follow this same logic. The idea of reducing GHGs arises from the idea of establishing ecological and/or environmental strategies to compensate for the destruction of ecosystems, with the aim of maintaining deforestation and extractivist expansion despite planetary limits.”.
What should be considered at COP 27
The improvement of climate finance systems at the global level is an urgent need, to which must be added that these funds are invested in real solutions which must clearly be based on an alternative model of production and consumption that is truly socially and ecologically sustainable.
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