Despite running two days into overtime, Climate Negotiators at Madrid’s UNFCCC COP25 delivered a document which failed to agree on regulating carbon markets or address loss and damage reparations to the global south, those nations most severely impacted by the climate crisis.
The final declaration did require that decisions on reducing carbon emissions be established within the next year and that countries work harder to strengthen their goals for emissions as set forth in the Paris Agreement.
"Generally you can see that countries take the [landmark] Paris Agreement seriously, and a big number of countries want to move forward," Christoph Bals, policy director at NGO Germanwatch, told Al Jazeera.
However, Bals specifically targeted the US, Australia and Brazil for their policies which align with the fossil fuel industries. The battle over carbon markets, he said will be not only international but national.
"Never have I seen such a disconnect between what the science requires and what the climate negotiations are delivering in terms of meaningful action,” said Alden Meyer, strategy chief at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Most of the world's biggest emitting countries are missing in action and resisting calls to raise their ambition."
Kera Sherwood O’Regan of Indigenous Peoples Organizations expressed outrage over the failure to include “human rights and indigenous people's rights in Article Six [of the Paris agreement] when we know that market approaches have already directly harmed our communities. Our knowledge cannot be upheld if our rights are not upheld. You treat negotiations like a zero sum game where you make deals behind closed doors, trading off our rights for the profits of the very corporations who caused this problem in the first place. But you forget that we cannot negotiate with nature."
Tens of thousands participated in demonstrations at this year’s COP, more fervent and visible than in the past.
"Young people have demonstrated before at COPs but this last year the Fridays for Future movement has been even more of a driver," Amnesty International's climate change adviser Chiara Liguori told Al Jazeera.
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"What you're seeing right now is our collective expression of disappointment and disagreement with the wholesale sellout that these negotiations are bringing to people on the planet," the activist said. "Two weeks of negotiations but what do we have?"Al Jazeera