Type: IOCR

At the 27th Session of the Conference of Parties (COP27), this year’s UN climate summit, the Mangrove Alliance for Climate (MAC) was launched with India as a partner.

Mangrove Alliance for Climate (MAC)

• An initiative led by the UAE and Indonesia, the MAC includes India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Japan, and Spain.
• It seeks to educate and spread awareness worldwide on the role of mangroves in curbing global warming and its potential as a solution for climate change.
• Under MAC, UAE intends to plant 3 million mangroves in the next two months, in keeping with UAE’s COP26 pledge of planting 100 million mangroves by 2030.

Working of MAC

• MAC would work on a voluntary basis. It means that there are no real checks and balances to hold members accountable.
• Instead, the parties will decide their own commitments and deadlines regarding planting and restoring mangroves.
• The members will also share expertise and support each other in researching, managing and protecting coastal areas.

Why protect mangroves?

• Infrastructure projects — industrial expansion, shifting coastlines, coastal erosion and storms, have resulted in a significant decrease in mangrove habitats.
• Between 2010 and 2020, around 600 sq km of mangroves were lost of which more than 62% was due to direct human impacts, the Global Mangrove Alliance said in its 2022 report.

Importance of mangroves

• Biodiversity: Mangrove forests — consisting of trees and shrub that live in intertidal water in coastal areas — host diverse marine life.
• Fishing grounds: They also support a rich food web, with molluscs and algae-filled substrate acting as a breeding ground for small fish, mud crabs and shrimps, thus providing a livelihood to local artisanal fishers.
• Carbon sinks: Equally importantly, they act as effective carbon stores, holding up to four times the amount of carbon as other forested ecosystems.
• Cyclone buffers: When Cyclone Amphan struck West Bengal in May, its effects were largely mitigated by the Sundarbans flanking its coasts along the Bay of Bengal.

Threats to Mangroves

• Anthropogenic activities: They are a major threat to the mangroves. Urbanization, industrialization and the accompanying discharge of industrial effluents, domestic sewage and pesticide residues from agricultural lands threaten these fragile ecosystems.
• Saltpan and aquaculture: This causes huge damage to the mangroves. Shrimp farming alone destroyed 35,000 hectares of mangroves worldwide.
• Destruction for farming: 40% of mangroves on the west coast has been converted into farmlands and other settlements in just 3 decades.
• Sea-level rise: This is another challenge to these mangroves- especially on the Bay of Bengal coast.

Mangroves in India

• India holds around 3 percent of South Asia’s mangrove population.
• Besides the Sundarbans in West Bengal, the Andaman region, the Kutch and Jamnagar areas in Gujarat too have substantial mangrove cover.

How can India benefit from MAC?

• India is home to one of the largest remaining areas of mangroves in the world — the Sundarbans.
• It has years of expertise in restoration of mangrove cover that can be used to aid global measures in this direction.
• The move is in line with India’s goal to increase its carbon sink.

Try this PYQ:

Q.Which one of the following is the correct sequence of ecosystems in the order of decreasing productivity?

(a) Oceans, lakes, grasslands, mangroves

(b) Mangroves, oceans, grasslands, lakes

(c) Mangroves, grasslands, lakes, oceans

(d) Oceans, mangroves, lakes, grasslands

 

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The US has unveiled a new carbon offset scheme called Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA) for climate finance.

Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA)

• ETA is carbon offset plan that will allow companies to fund clean energy projects in developing countries and gain carbon credits that they can then use to meet their own climate goals.
• The plan will be developed by the US along with the Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.
• It would receive inputs from public and private
• The concept is to put the carbon market to work, deploy capital otherwise undeployable, and speed up the transition from dirty to clean power.

Benefits of ETA

• It may be good for renewable energy projects for sure and for those coal plants that are very old and unviable and which India wishes to shut down.
• The scheme comes at a time when there is growing mistrust among developing countries about developed nations failing to deliver on climate finance commitments.

Limitations of ETA

• The proposed initiative would be insufficient to make up for the lack of funding from rich countries.
• What developing countries need is predictable finance – not offset markets.
• The proposed initiative cannot make up for the US’s failure to provide its fair share of climate finance – an estimated $40 billion of the unmet goal of $100 billion a year.

Conclusion

• ETA appears to be a substitute for deep decarbonization needed within the US and other industrialized countries.
• For developing countries like India, the first priority would be to meet their own targets and not provide offsets for reductions in developed nations.

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The port city of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt is hosting the 27th edition of the UN-Conference of Parties (UN-COP).

Quick recap

• Last year, PM Modi, at the 26th edition of the COP in Glasgow, Scotland, committed to India becoming net-zero, or in effect carbon neutral, by 2070 along with Panchamrita
• Environment Minister will be leading the Indian delegation to COP-27 in Egypt.
• India is determined to press developed countries into making good their unfulfilled commitment to deliver $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 and every year thereafter till 2025.

Conference of Parties (CoP): A Backgrounder

• The CoP comes under the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention (UNFCCC) which was formed in 1994.
• The UNFCCC was established to work towards “stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
• It laid out a list of responsibilities for the member states which included:

1. Formulating measures to mitigate climate change
2. Cooperating in preparing for adaptation to the impact of climate change
3. Promoting education, training and public awareness related to climate change

• The UNFCCC has 198 parties including India, China and the USA. COP members have been meeting every year since 1995.

COP1 to COP25: Key takeaways

• COP1: The first conference was held in 1995 in Berlin.
• COP3: It was held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, the famous Kyoto Protocol (wef 2005) was adopted. It commits the member states to pursue limitation or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
• COP8: India hosted the eighth COP in 2002 in New Delhi. It laid out several measures including, ‘strengthening of technology transfer… in all relevant sectors, including energy, transport and R&D,  and the strengthening of institutions for sustainable development.
• COP21: it is one of the most important that took place in 2015, in Paris, France. Here countries agreed to work together to ‘limit global warming to well below 2, preferably at 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.’

Significance of COP

• The event will see leaders from more than 190 countries, thousands of negotiators, researchers and citizens coming together to strengthen a global response to the threat of climate change.
• It is a pivotal movement for the world to come together and accelerate the climate action plan after several discussion.

Key agenda of the COP27

Ans. Loss and Damage Funding

• The term ‘Loss and Damage’ refers to the economic and non-economic impacts of climate change, including extreme events in countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.
• Rich countries, historically responsible for the climate crisis, have bullied poorer nations to protect polluters from paying up for climate damages.
• The term was brought up as a demand in 1991 by the island country of Vanuatu, which was representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

Try this PYQ:

Q.With reference to the Agreement at the UNFCCC Meeting in Paris in 2015, which of the following statements is/are correct?

1. The Agreement was signed by all the member countries of the UN and it will go into effect in 2017.
2. The Agreement aims to limit the greenhouse gas emissions so that the rise in average global temperature by the end of this century does not exceed 2 degree Centigrade or even 5 degree Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
3. Developed countries acknowledged their historical responsibility in global warming and committed to donate dollar 1000 billion a year from 2020 to help developing countries to cope with climate change.

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1 and 3 only

(b) 2 only

(c) 2 and 3 only

(d) 1, 2 and 3

 

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