Professor Rashid Sumaila, who is jointly appointed with the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, participated in the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow recently, as part of the University of British Columbia’s delegation of faculty and students.
We spoke with Dr. Sumaila, who is Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics, to learn more about his goals for attending COP26 and his key takeaways.
SPPGA: Congratulations on your participation in the UBC delegation to COP26. Could you please tell us about your goals for attending?
Given my research, my goal was to really push for the ocean to be part of the solution to climate change. Up until the last UN COP, the ocean was not anything people really considered; because we live on land, we forget that 70% of the planet is ocean. So I’m happy to say that many of us ocean people feel that we are finally now at the table. For example, for the first time, we had one sentence referencing our oceans in the summary agreement of COP26.
SPPGA: How did your participation in COP26 connect with your research interests and policy engagement?
I participated in two panels. In the first, there were four panelists and a coordinator (Nick Underdown of Open Seas): myself as an economist, Emma Cavan from Imperial College of London, Mike Walker of Our Fish, and Claudin Beamish, former member of the Scottish Parliament and Special Advisor to Scottish Labour Group on COP26. We looked at the role of the oceans and carbon sequestration. This is something that I’m working on now with a group of researchers from around the world who are supported by Our Fish. We’re planning to publish 10 to 12 papers in Frontiers in Marine Science, tackling different issues related to the notion that stopping overfishing is also climate action.
What we do with the climate impacts the ocean, and what we do with the ocean impacts the climate. – Dr. Rashid Sumaila
The second panel was moderated by Mirella Von Lindenfels of Communications INC Limited. Our discussion centered on our newly published paper in Aquatic Conservation, titled The Forgotten Ocean. We explained why the world needs a heightened focus on the ocean at the climate COPs, and how we can better connect science with policy action. There were four panelists: myself, Ambassador Peter Thomson, UN Secretary-General appointed Special Envoy for the Ocean, Waldemar Coutts who is Director for Environment & Ocean, Foreign Ministry, for the Chilean government, and Ilana Seid, UN Ambassador, Palau.
SPPGA: COP26 brought parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In your opinion, what needed to happen at the summit to ensure urgent action is taken to address global climate change? What was at stake?
A lot is at stake. In B.C. this year, we’ve seen how climate change can impact us. We became a place where the world could see the devastating effects of climate change, with these big punitive extreme climate events, from the heat dome leading to a whole township burning down from wildfire and then flooding and roads being washed out. We’re seeing similar the impacts around the world too.
We’re beginning to see the writing on the wall around the impacts of climate change, also in the developed world. – Dr. Rashid Sumaila
Going into the summit, many of us knew that we have a huge challenge bringing all these countries together to get them to do something together, with so many competing interests. There have been some positive results.
Halfway through though, Greta Thunberg said it was all greenwashing. She did a good job to push Delegates, but even the UN concluded that all the agreements won’t take us to our target of a maximum rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius; some see a rise of about 2.4 degrees Celsius even if all COP26 promises are kept.
It was nice to see countries come together – small and large, poor and rich. They came to some agreements which will move us forward a bit, but not to where we want or need to go. We need more effort to push for bigger change and we need to push our governments to implement their agreements.
Quebec actually signed on to the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, committing to no longer using oil and gas by a certain year. It was good to see more talk on gas and oil than ever before at COP.
I want to mention about coal. Right before COP26, China said “we’re going to stop financing coal development outside of China.” This is generally seen as a good thing but the problem is they didn’t say within China. If China had agreed to stop financing coal within the country, I would be much happier. There are social and environmental justice dimensions to this, because this means that the poorer countries will pay the price in terms of climate change.
SPPGA: Could you speak to Canada’s commitments emerging from this summit?
Canada had more delegates (over 1,000) than in any other country at COP26, even more than UK, the host country, including representatives from the Canadian and provincial governments, UBC, NGOs, and private companies, for example. So this was a good indication that Canada is serious about acting on climate change. UBC has obviously shown that we’re serious about our climate commitments.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made promises and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault gave briefings, some of which I attended. My issue is with implementation because political talk is easy, but implementing back at home is where we have to really push our governments. Activism is important and we need to harness that to make the impacts we want to see happen.
SPPGA: Were there unexpected insights that you gained at COP26?
A surprise to me was learning that only three countries have actually gone beyond net zero and achieved “carbon-negative” status, including the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, Suriname, and Panama. These are smaller countries. They use their forests to help achieve this goal.
Obama and other high level dignitaries were there but there was one negotiator – Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege – who really impressed me. The Marshall Islands will be one of the first to be swallowed up by projected sea level rise, so they are deep in the trenches of negotiating and got some but not all of what they wanted.
SPPGA: Is there anything following your participation in COP26 that we should know about?
my fellow UBC delegate members are currently writing a paper where we discuss what we found to be intriguing at COP26. that we expect to published in a respectable journal.
