New Zealand's climate change minister says he has reassured Pacific countries who have not been able to make it to COP26 in Glasgow New Zealand that he will do his best to amplify their positions in the negotiations.
NZ Minister for Climate Change James Shaw Photo: Pool / Stuff / Robert Kitchin
Only four Pacific Island leaders were able to make it to the global climate conference in Glasgow because of international travel restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
James Shaw spoke with Koroi Hawkins on Pacific Waves
James Shaw said New Zealand had raised concerns with the UK government about the validity of COP26 if not enough countries were able to attend.
Shaw said he understands the Pacific's concerns about the lack of options for virtual participation in negotiations.
But he also said it would have been difficult, from the organisers' perspective, to organise meaningful participation virtually, given the bedlam of multiple meeting rooms, parallel negotiating events and break-away side meetings that are all part of the COP26 negotiations.
"We have sort of said: 'Look, we will do what we can to amplify the positions that your governments hold' - recognising that we can't speak on behalf of any other government than our own - but just to making sure that the kind of messages that are coming through from the Pacific are not missing from the table."
Reset Fiji Tourism event in Glasgow Photo: supplied
Shaw said Pacific leaders who are not able to vote virtually during the summit creates inequity.
He gave credit to the British, United Nations and other countries who have worked hard to ensure delegations are vaccinated and that they are supported through travel arrangements and quarantine.
However, Shaw said he understood the decision to be physically present at the event to participate and vote.
"There's actually only one vote that takes place and that's at the very end, when the agreement for that conference gets put on the table.
"The chair of the conference looks around the room and says, are there any objections? And then they bring down the gavel, and that's the country's last chance to object to the agreement," he said.
"I can see why they made the decision that they made, that it had to be in person because you have literally thousands of delegates from around the world from over 200 countries, and you have multiple negotiating rooms going on simultaneously, so there's up to 30 different rooms of negotiations happening.
"Those rooms range from a few dozen people to several hundred people and the agendas and the length and when they start and when they finish those negotiations can be quite fluid."
Shaw said the schedules generally run from 12 to 16 hours a day and then there are informal breakout rooms, which would be difficult to manage virtually.
Countries objecting to action on climate change
Shaw said the reason why there are several countries who have always objected to strong action on climate change is because they believe it threatens their economic interests.
Final preparations are made for the start of The Procedural Opening of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland Photo: AFP
"If we're going to stop climate change, it means that we need to phase out the use of fossil fuels incredibly quickly.
"For countries whose primary revenue source is the production and sale of fossil fuels, that's very threatening to them, and that's understandable."
New Zealand's climate change minister explained that his argument to those countries would be that if they use the revenues from fossil fuels, to diversify their economy and branch into other things, they would be in a much better position than most countries.
"However, most of them haven't done that, they've just kind of spent the money and focused on continuing to extract fossil fuels and to make money from fossil fuels.
"This makes things very difficult because at the other end of the extreme, you've got countries, particularly those in the Pacific and the Caribbean, whose very existence is threatened in the not too distant future by the effects of climate change," Shaw said.
Goal to stay within 1.5 degrees
Shaw said his goal for COP26 is he would like countries to upgrade their 2030 targets so that they are in line with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said a couple of years ago, which is the necessity to stay within 1.5 degrees.
US President Joe Biden (centre) joins other world leaders posing for a group photo at an evening reception to mark the opening day of COP26. Photo: AFP
"There's been a lot of progress on that and I think the assessment a few years ago is that the collective ambition of the world's governments added up to about three and a half to 4.2-degree world.
"That's just absolutely catastrophic," he said.
"Over the course of the last few years, there's been a lot of ambition raising and now the assessment is that that adds up to a 2.7-degree world, which is heading in the right direction.
"But 2.7 degree? Well, that's still quite a long way north of a 1.5-degree world.
"For me, it's time to knuckle down and really get to work here because we are running out of time," Shaw said.