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Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost will be attending COP21 in Paris as part of the Bristol city-wide team, including the Mayor of Bristol, representatives from Bristol City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. He will be writing blogs during COP21, reflecting on what is happening in Paris, especially in the Paris and Bristol co-hosted Cities and Regions Pavilion, and also on the conclusion to Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital.  Follow #UoBGreen and #COP21 for live updates from the University of Bristol. Part 1

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The interactive Bristol Data Dome had opened on 18 Nov, the first in the UK and part of the rollout of Bristol Is Open.  The City’s Sustainable Education programme launched, and the Shaun the Sheep app that underpins it won the ‘App with a Purpose’ prize.  Bristol City Council launched its own Energy Company, only the second in the UK.  George Ferguson gave his annual lecture in the Wills Memorial Building, at which he announced his ambition for an up to £1 billion investment in a citywide urban retrofit to increase energy efficiency and tackle fuel poverty (a plan partially based on our mini-Stern review of Bristol as a Low Carbon City).  And of course, we are headed to COP21, where Bristol will co-host the Cities and Regions Pavilion with Paris. I started pondering this opening blog, the first in our Bristol at COP21 series, on Friday morning, while walking from the St Werburgh’s Community Centre back to the University.

It was a reflective walk. The  previous evening, Bristol’s COP21 team met at Brunel House to talk logistics, covering everything from travel, to security, to the main messages Bristol would want to share with the rest of the world.  All of this had come at the end of a whirlwind month of events and announcements.  In November, we had already hosted George Marshall and Jonathan Porritt (with the National Union of Journalists and Festival of Ideas), celebrated our fifth birthday, and discussed what we will achieve in the next five years with our new VC and in a rapidly transforming university.  The previous week had seen the Festival of the Future City, at which we presented some of our findings from the year on Bristol’s climate challenges, its future resiliency, its nature and connection to the countryside, and the new governance and financial structures needed to achieve transformative change.

And despite all of these announcements and achievements, the year feels incomplete.  The meeting in St Werburgh’s, co-sponsored by ourselves and some great partners, thoughtfully examined whether the Green Capital project had really engaged all of our citizens, from all perspectives and all walks of life. The answer to that was complex and we will be exploring that more during 2016 as the conversation continues.  But there was an overall consensus that much had been achieved but much more could have been achieved.  It seems a common opinion as 2015 races towards its conclusion in Paris.

This is something that sometimes frustrates me about my adopted city but that ultimately I love – and is perhaps what I love most about it. No matter how much we achieve, we argue about how we could have done better.  Or more.  Or faster. I’ve seen this tension between satisfaction and ambition exemplified on a large scale by Andrew Garrad, co-founder of Garrad Hassan now part of DNV-GL, Chair of the Bristol 2015 Company and member of the Cabot Institute’s Advisory Board. He has spent 35 years in the wind industry; in one sentence he can celebrate the success of UK renewables, which in 20 years have become central to the UK’s energy mix, and then pivot to regret that he has not been able to push even further.

Bristol is the least complacent place I have ever lived, sometimes exhausting but always exhilarating.

I am concluding this first blog on Sunday night, having just returned from the Climate March, which drew thousands of people on a cold, wet and windy day.  And at which people sang songs, chanted, cheered – but also debated and argued and demanded more innovation and more action.  My abiding memory of the Climate March will be listening to the smart, informed and passionate debates among members of the Bristol Youth Council about the future of their party.

Rich and Hayley Shaw (Cabot Institute Manager and Climate Hero) at March for Climate in Bristol.

That edginess and ambition is exactly what the whole planet needs as we tackle the profound challenges not just of climate change but the sustainable use of the resources on which we depend. No matter what happens in Paris, complacency must not be accepted and it will not be accepted in Bristol.

Bristol was awarded the European Green Capital in part because we are ‘the City with a sense of fun’.  And Bristol is fun – and quirky and odd and artistic and brilliant. But it is also edgy and passionate and often proudly unsatisfied. We do not have all of the solutions, but we will never stop looking. That is the Bristol I will be taking with me to Paris.

Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost will be attending COP21 in Paris as part of the Bristol city-wide team, including the Mayor of Bristol, representatives from Bristol City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. He and other Cabot Institute members will be writing blogs during COP21, reflecting on what is happening in Paris, especially in the Paris and Bristol co-hosted Cities and Regions Pavilion, and also on the conclusion to Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital.  Follow #UoBGreen and #COP21 for live updates from the University of Bristol.  

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One of the most stunning developments in the climate negotiations of COP21 – perhaps of the entire 20 years of negotiations – has been the emergence of major push to raise the accord’s ambitions. 

After years of watering down language and creating flexible and non-binding targets, many of us anticipated that the pressure of compromise would weaken the COP21 accord. It might still be weakened in many respects.  And yet, in the past 72 hours, a group of 100 nations, including the European Union, the United States and dozens of developing nations, has emerged to propose the nearly unimaginable: to reduce the acceptable limit to human-caused global warming from 2C to 1.5C.

This has, for lack of a better word, stunned the scientific community.  Here in Paris, these raised ambitions resulted in applause and celebration – especially when they remained in place in the second draft circulated Wednesday.  But those of us who study climate change wonder whether this is possible.  Already this year, global warming reached 1C, and several more decimal places of warming are already baked into the system due to the slow response of the climate system. In short, there is some chance that our current 400 ppm CO2 is already enough to push the globe past 1.5C.

Ensuring even a 50:50 chance of staying below 1.5C will require urgent action – far more urgent than what nations have committed through their INDCs which will only limit warming to 2.7 to 3C.  In fact, it will almost certainly require achieving zero emissions, a complete cessation of all fossil fuel use, in the next several decades – and then negative emissions. We will have to capture and store carbon dioxide (CCS) either through biology  or technology; and as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, the UK has actually cancelled potential CCS projects.

Imagining a fossil fuel free world: Cycle powered charging stations at COP21.

It is laudable that countries want to push for a stronger global warming limit, but they must be honest about the distance between their ambitions and their policies.  By policies I mean not only the insufficient INDCs to which they are committing, but the actual policies back home to achieve them.  Many nations’ policies will help achieve 40% reductions – the low-hanging fruit – but are they really investing in the innovation and infrastructure to achieve a 100% reduction in any timeframe, let alone a timeframe to limit warming to 1.5C?  If 1.5C requires an almost complete decarbonisation with the next several decades, how can that be achieved when global shipping and aviation are not even in the current draft of the accord? 

Consequently, many of my colleagues around the globe are as stunned and confused about the political agenda as I am.  Are the politicians idealistic and naïve?  Out of touch with the science? Grandstanding?

I am cautious about jumping to conclusions.

The underlying politics are complex. Maybe the leaders are caught up in the moment.  More likely, they are caught up in their needs; this initiative has been led by small island states – especially Tony de Brum, Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands – and these nations do face an existential threat from 2C warming, and some even from 1.5C warming.  They have been demanding this increased ambition for over a decade; they are living on the sharp end of climate uncertainty (as we learned when hosting many of them last summer) and they know what is coming.

It is surprising that others have joined them.

If I had to guess, I think this change is designed to strengthen post-COP21 policy both internationally and domestically.  It could be related to putting stronger pressure on the ratcheting up process of the accord, the mechanism by which nations will impose more demanding targets on themselves.  It could also be related to enshrining more robust compensation for those nations that will be most impacted by climate change. Or it could also be the confidence-building statement that investors and businesses have been demanding all week long. It is too soon to say.

Nonetheless, there is a large disconnection between these targets and our commitments and between our commitments and our policies. I’d be more comfortable about a step-up in our targets, if these gaps were being more openly discussed.