Could Someone Please Translate this Climate Change Gobbledygook?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… the social plausibility assessments show that global opportunities for climate action multiply, gain visibility, and materialize at least incrementally. …”

Densification of the global opportunity structure for climate action

A dense global opportunity structure that provides a variety of resources for climate action is a necessary condition to increase the momentum or change the direction of social drivers toward deep decarbonization. In the present Outlook, the social plausibility assessments show that global opportunities for climate action multiply, gain visibility, and materialize at least incrementally. In relation to the previous edition, we observe a quantitative increase of climate-related activities, such as more climate-related regulations, protests, net-zero pledges, and transnational initiatives within UN climate governance and beyond (Sections 6.1.1, 6.1.2, 6.1.3, and 6.1.4). However, these activities do not necessarily translate into a reduction of persistent ambition, implementation, and knowledge gaps. We ob- serve only limited evidence in terms of qualitative shifts in the global opportunity structure for climate action. These relate to incremental changes in soft and hard law or to voluntary and binding schemes of climate governance (Sections 6.1.1 and 6.1.5). Negotiations at the COP26 in Glasgow, UK, have not managed to address implementation gaps and required steps to phase out fossil fuels. This is by and large also true for COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, which took place after our assessment of UN climate governance was finalized. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), transnational initiatives, fossil-fuel divestment, and corporate responses remain largely voluntary, despite the pressure from climate litigation and social movements to render these into legal provisions or policies (Sections 6.1.2, 6.1.6, and 6.1.7). In fact, the densification of the global opportunity structure in terms of quantitative increases still requires qualitative shifts in the resources for climate action, such as new forms of activism, new policy instruments, and hardening of soft law (Sections 6.1.3, 6.1.4, and 6.1.5). The same is true of low-carbon consumption patterns (Section 6.1.8) and increased integration of diverse actors and ways of knowing into knowledge production, decision-making, and climate governance processes (Section 6.1.10). In this regard, Indigenous Peoples play a crucial role in bringing these issues to the fore along with climate protests and social movements and in helping preserve existing natural forests, which can make a greater contribution in terms of natural sinks toward carbon neutrality than affor- estation (Sections 6.1.4, 6.1.10, and 6.2.5).

Source: Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook

Your tax dollars at work. Perhaps Hamburg should test academic water supply quality. Or at the very least the scientists who wrote this impenetrable word thicket should have added “improve clarity of communication” to the list of vital preconditions for preserving their 1.5C global warming target.