Mongabay @ COP16/CBD: Cities are climate solution leaders: Interview with Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson

Gregor Robertson served as the mayor of Vancouver in Canada for 10 years, earning an international reputation for leading efforts to reduce city carbon emissions through energy efficiency and by creating green economy jobs. He now leads global coalitions of mayors and governors who advocate for more resources for subnational entities to carry out climate action as national governments continue to fall short. Photo by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

This story came about on my second day in Cali, Colombia, as I scrambled to find stories at my first UN summit on biodiversity. Late morning, I stopped in the large plenary hall where I knew there was a daylong session on the role of cities and states — subnational entities — in conservation and climate action.

By luck, I entered as one of the panelists was talking about the work that had been accomplished in his city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I asked an event organizer who was speaking and she told me: Gregor Robertson. I looked him up on my phone, and up came a long list of impressive credentials as a former mayor and current leader of two large subnational coalitions on the issues being discussed from the stage. I waited until the panel concluded, introduced myself to Robertson and asked if he had time for an interview.

My idea at the time is what became this story: a Mongabay Q&A. Late afternoon, Robertson joined me in the media center where I was set up and answered my questions for about 45 minutes. His enthusiasm for the role that subnational entities are already playing in climate action and conservation was immediately evident. So was his frustration with the lack of action by national governments who control much of the finances that enables these urgent local efforts to take place.

The interview became, as my editor Glenn Scherer wrote to me after he completed his edits, “The first really sensible, and doable climate solution story I’ve read in awhile.” The story was published just as another UN climate summit, COP29, was wrapping up in a corrupt petrostate and predictably, failing once again to meet the urgency of the moment in this ongoing climate crisis.

I took this photo in Amsterdam after covering COP26, the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. The city is this interesting paradox — a place with more bicycles than people (1.2 million vs 821,000) — but also one that burns more wood (largely from North Carolina and the US Southeast forests) than coal for energy. It made a nice complement to my interview with Robertson and ran with the Q&A.

Mongabay: COP29: With public climate finance shortfall, is investment capital a way forward?

The 29th United Nations climate summit was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, or COP29, the third consecutive major oil producer to host the international meeting of 196 nations. In each, the fossil fuel industry presence has been larger than most nations, and their influence far greater than the small, vulnerable nations suffering the most from climate impacts. Photo by David Akana/Mongabay

Between 2014 and 2021, I traveled to cover seven UN climate summits. I considered traveling to Azerbaijan for my eighth, but opted instead to cover my first UN biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia. I was, however, asked by Mongabay editors to write a pre-story for COP29. I agreed. Because the overriding issue in Baku will be identifying the trillions needed for climate action (transition to renewable energy, low-carbon transportation, forest and wetlands protections, paying vulnerable nations for loss and damage), this story focuses exclusively on the issue of finance.

I was fortunate in Colombia to meet two experts in finance who agreed to be primary sources for my story: Andrew Deutz of World Wildlife Fund and Valerie Hickey of the World Bank. Deutz connected me with another exceptionally good source, economist Barbara Buchner with the Climate Policy Initiative.

The story hinges in large part on this reality: the wealthy nations of the G-20 have year after year failed to come close to meeting their promises of contributing billions of dollars to a range of COP-approved funds for climate action. For example, about $116 billion has been mobilized from wealthy nations, but the need is estimated at $2 trillion. Thus, the question becomes whether independent financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, plus a host of private investment houses will step in and fill the gap, or at least some of it. Some experts say the money is there if institutions can secure a modest return on investment; critics howl that loans and investments only serve to burden poor countries — entirely blameless in the climate crisis — with more debt. My story explains the issues and opportunities.

Mongabay: U.S. policy experts confident of future climate action despite Trump election

The once and future president of the United States continues to mock climate science as if it’s fashion not reality.

No single president U.S. history, just Donald Trump, did more to undermine the trajectory of conservation, forest and species protections, clear air and clean water regulations, and most critically of all, climate action connected to promoting zero-carbon renewable energy while reducing fossil fuel burning during his first term in office. Remarkably, but not surprisingly, none of those issues was discussed much at all during the chaotic, and for Democrats, truncated campaign for the presidency in 2024.

In an election that was suppose to be razor thin but ended up being far less so, American voters decided among many other things that the candidate who still insists climate change is a hoax (residents of Asheville, North Carolina, word like a word with Trump) is the candidate they want back in charge of federal environmental policy. They did so even as he demanded a quid pro quo from US oil barons to fund his campaigns with billions in return for unrestrained drilling and extraction permits. He also vowed once again to remove the United States from the historic Paris Agreement, the only country on earth to do so.

Meeting the urgency of the moment, this story was published on the day it was written: three says after the US election; three days before the start of the COP29, the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan (just north of Iran). In it, two U.S. government experts on climate policy shared during an global virtual press conference what they think the impact of another four years of Trump policies on climate and the environment will be on the U.S. and the world. The fact that they believe it will be less impactful than before is in itself an indictment of a miserable U.S. record of leadership amid the worst crisis humanity has ever collectively faced — accelerating climate change and global warming.

Uncontrollable wildfires in California and across Canada are a deadly reality of worsening climate change, not a political hoax.

Mongabay: COP16 biodiversity meeting recap: Progress made, but finance lags

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at COP16 on Oct. 30: “Human activities have already altered three-quarters of Earth’s land surface and two-thirds of its waters. And no country, rich or poor, is immune to this devastation,” he said. “To survive, humanity must make peace with nature. We must transform our economic models — shifting our production and consumption to nature-positive practices. Renewable energy, sustainable supply chains and zero-waste policies are not optional. They must become the default option for both governments and businesses.” Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

This wrap up story from Cali, Colombia — an overview of the outcomes, good and bad, from the 16th United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (COP16) — started coming together on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, my last day at the summit. I focused on a half-dozen or so major issues, interviewed about that many sources one-on-one, attended several press conferences and generally took in the mood of the penultimate day of the two-week meeting.

By Saturday, November 2, after COP16 was gaveled to a premature close, the press releases started rolling in, as did WhatsApp messages from a variety of sources eager to weigh in with final thoughts. One comment from an event I covered days earlier stuck with me: delegates at this biodiversity COP need to celebrate positive outcomes, not simply wallow, however appropriately, in all the measures falling short.

“You can’t rally a constituency around dread and fear,” said Valerie Hickey, global director for the World Bank’s division on environment, natural resources and oceans.

So in consultation with my editor, I organized this story around highlighting what went right and almost- right before describing critical items that fell demoralizingly short. I ended by giving voice to an 27-year-old Indigenous woman from Chile — a courageous and outspoken advocate for human rights and the environment — whom I met by chance on a crowded shuttle bus one evening.

There were some legitimately promising outcomes from Cali, two of which center on regenerating pools of funding for conservation efforts throughout the tropical world. But overall, as one NGO leader from England put it: “The pace of COP16 negotiations did not reflect the urgency of the crisis we are facing.”

True enough, but the progress made is still welcomed. The problem is, so much more is needed in a vanishingly short amount of time to, at best, slow the rate of climate calamities and biodiversity extinctions around the world.

In the plenary hall, delegates from 177 nations debated the language and intent of the principles and rules guiding the global protection of forests, oceans and biodiversity. The meeting ended abruptly on Saturday, Nov. 2, when too many delegates had to leave to catch flights as COP16 ran past its designated end time. Negotiations are to resume at an unspecified date in Bangkok. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Mongabay: COP16/CBD: ‘A fund unlike any other’ will pay tropical nations to save forests

COP16 President Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s minister of the environment (center, in black), introduced an hour-long discussion on October 28 of a new, novel form of conservation finance being called TFFF, for Tropical Forest Forever Facility. She was joined by (from left), Jochen Flasbarth, Germany’s state secretary in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development; Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of the environment; Nik Nazmi bin Nik Ahmad, Maylaysia’s minister of natural resources; and Razan Al Mubarak, managing director of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

This story, easily my most upbeat and best read of the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, came about as some good stories do: serendipity. Saturday, October 26, I was leaving after a second full day of scrambling, only partially successfully, for another substantive story. It was dark and I had not quite gotten the flow and content of this conference. At a vehicle area lined with taxis, I asked a woman standing behind me how I might get a ride back into in Cali, some 10 miles, away. Generously, she invited me to share her Uber. Her name was Frances Price with WWF-International (it turns out we had met years ago at a climate summit, but neither of us remembered). Like most everyone else at the conference, she knew Mongabay. So I told her I needed to identify more high-impact stories to pursue.

Right there, though I didn’t know it yet, she gave me the best story I would cover in eight days, and the most read and talked about: the now-organizing Tropical Forest Forever Facility, or TFFF. With finance promises barely registering the necessary funds for forest, ocean and biodiversity protection, this novel mechanism — an investment fund akin to how banks invest deposits and pay interest — promises to be “a game changer” in forest conservation. Fran had a WWF comms person send me background stories via WhatsApp and I started up the learning curve. On Monday, I was among the very few journalists who covered a high-profile event in the Colombian pavilion attended by some of the most influential people at COP16, including the president of the meeting, Susana Muhamed.

My story explains how the planned $125 billion fund could work; how investors will be repaid; how 70 tropical countries will be paid, year after year, if they keep their native forests standing. The story posted Wednesday, October 30, and started attracting readers. Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Butler summarized the story on LinkedIn and it drew some 750 engagements from around the world. Rhett sent me an email saying he had wanted to see a story on TFFF for six months, and was glad to finally have one on our news site. I wish I could say it was my plan all along. It wasn’t. But I’ll take that kind of luck any day while on a challenging assignment in covering a sprawling international meeting like COP16.

The Colombian pavilion, the host country’s centrally located meeting place during COP16, was filled to overflowing for the TFFF event in which the new funding tool for forest conservation was showcased. I arrived early and managed to grab a prime seat. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Action against forest biomass subsidies gains momentum at COP16/CBD

Barry Gardiner is a Labour Party member of the British Parliament who has been speaking out against public subsidies for forest biomass energy in the United Kingdom for more than a decade. He spoke at a side event at COP16 and showed a photo of the cooling towers at Drax, a UK energy company that is one of the world’s single-largest consumers of wood pellets for energy. The company has received roughly $9 billion in subsidies over the years from British taxpayers. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

In this story from Cali, Colombia, my second from the United Nations biodiversity summit (COP16), I draw a sharp distinction between this meeting and the four UN climate meetings I’ve covered since I began reporting in 2018 on the issues related to forest biomass for energy.

The difference is stark. Climate meetings to my questions? Don’t ask. This biodiversity meeting to my questions? Let me show you in the text where bioenergy is discussed.

Aside from interviewing forest campaigners, including two new sources from India and South Korea, I include again in this second story earlier reporting on Target 18 and comments made by Barry Gardiner. The British member of parliament has argued against the billions that has subsidized Drax’s burning of US and Canadian wood pellets in place of coal in its enormous energy plant in central England.

“The company has claimed almost $9 billion from British taxpayers to support its biomass energy generation since 2012, even though burning wood pellets for power generation releases more emissions per unit of electricity generated than burning gas or coal,” Gardiner says in my story. “That’s $9 billion in public money spent making our air pollution and our carbon emissions worse. More than that, Drax has been responsible for destroying some of the most precious old-growth, virgin forests in Canada, where some of the pellets come from.”

My COP16 wrap-up story details whether or not the text on biomass plantations remained in the final document. During negotiations, Souparna Lahiri, my source from India, told me Brazil argued adamantly to remove the language (Brazil is beginning to provide wood for pellet production) but somewhat remarkably, the European Union, which is dependent on wood pellets as a “renewable energy” source to replace coal, did not.

Souparna Lahiri, a climate campaigner with Global Forest Coalition in India, has been speaking out against forest biomass for energy on various panels at COP16 and tracking the language in a key summit document pertaining to issues related to bioenergy. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Mongabay: COP16/CBD — Global biodiversity financiers strategize at COP16 to end ‘perverse subsidies’

The 16th United Nations biodiversity summit, called COP16, is being held in Cali, Colombia, near the country’s mountainous Pacific coast. The motto for the meeting is also its goal: Paz con la Naturaleza — Peace with Nature. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Since 2014, I’ve covered seven of the last nice United Nations climate summits, the last one in Glasgow, Scotland, during the pandemic, in 2021. In 2024, I decided against traveling to Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29, and go south instead, to Cali, Columbia, to cover my first UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the 16th such biennial Conference of the Parties. I’m glad I did.

COP16 is a far smaller meeting than any of the climate COPs I’ve covered, with 23,000 attendees instead of the 50,000 in Glasgow and more than 100,000 in 2023 in Dubai. The venue outside of Cali felt spacious and easier to navigate. The pace was significantly less harried. The two media centers were conveniently located not far from the entrance, and the press conference room was nearby (the last several climate meetings seemed intent on locating journalists are far from their sources and press conference rooms as physically possible). Some drawbacks: fewer NGOs provided daily briefings of the day-before’s happenings and fewer contextual press conferences were held until the very end. This made it difficult for this newcomer to the CBD to get a handle on what was happening. But with some diligent (perhaps manic) sourcing, I moved up the learning curve and spotted stories I needed to pursue.

Here’s my first one, which I started reporting on before I left for Colombia: a daylong, side event that focused on a crucial element of the CBD agreement approved during COP15 (in Montreal in 2022) — a vow to identify the more than $1.7 trillion paid out in subsidies and tax breaks that actually harm and destroy forests, oceans and species ($650 billion to fossil fuel companies alone), and redirect that money to conservation initiatives. The morning session produced a clear and substantive panel discussion, with a keynote speech by a British member of parliament, Barry Gardiner. He has been pushing back for a decade against the UK subsides paid to Drax ($1 billion annually) to burn wood pellets largely from North Carolina. I’ve heard about him for years. It was a pleasure to finally hear him speak and talk with him afterwards. My first few days in Cali — the lush, friendly home of salsa dancing — proved a solid start to my week at COP16.

Barry Gardiner, a Labour Party member of the British Parliament since 1997, was the keynote speaker on Sunday, Oct. 27, at a daylong meeting to discuss concrete plans to phase out $1.7 trillion in global economic subsidies known to cause environmental damage around the world. The trick of course, will be getting it done. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Mongabay: New survey puts human face on pollution caused by U.S. wood pellet mills

A drone photo shows how close some residents in Gloster, Mississippi, live to the Drax Amite plant, which produces up to 525 million metric tons of wood pellets annually. Image by Nico Hopkins.

Covering an issue such as forest biomass for energy for as long as I have enables me to connect the dots with previous coverage. Earlier this year, I wrote two stories that connect to this one here.

The first in January discussed a new study that specifically identified the kind of air pollution produced by wood pellet plants and also how dangerous that pollution is to public health. The other a few months later described how forest campaigners had hosted Biden Administration officials at wood pellet plants in North and South Carolina to hear from community members whose lives are adversely effected by living near the plants.

This story connects those dots. A coalition of environmental and social justice groups combined to survey more than 300 households within a two-mile radius of five pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast to ask a series of questions. The result is what I describe as “a collective personal story of diminished quality of life and degraded health suffered by residents living near the mills.”

“I used to walk around a lot but stopped once the mill [opened],” a resident living near the Drax Amite plant in Mississippi told coalition interviewers. “I was recently given an asthma pump for breathing problems.” A resident near the Enviva Sampson plant said: “My eyes burn. I have mucus in my throat every morning when I wake up.”

In every story I write on this issue, I reach out to biomass industry spokespeople for a response. Typically, I don’t hear back. This time, I’m pleased to note, I received a response from both an industry trade group and a Drax spokesperson — both of whom discounted the survey and claimed they take the health of people in the communities in which they operate very seriously.

In this story, I also got my first opportunity to interview the Rev. Leo Woodberry of South Carolina, a longtime civil rights advocate now pushing back against what he sees as the public health hazards posed by pellet mills in the mostly poor, rural and minority places — environmental justice communities — in which they operate.

The Rev. Leo Woodberry of Florence, South Carolina, has been raising awareness for years about quality of life and health problems he says are related to the wood pellet mills in the rural parts of his state. He is shown here in the community forest in Britton’s Neck, South Carolina. Image courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

Mongabay: Delay of EU Deforestation Regulation may ‘be excuse to gut law,’ activists fear

Deforestation for an oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

In June 2023, the European Union passed a law designed to reduced deforestation and forest degradation around the world caused by the commodities the member states import: coffee, soy, cattle, cocoa, palm oil, rubber and wood, included industrial-scale wood pellets. The law was to go into effect on January 1, 2025. My story covers a surprise decision by the European Commission, which makes legislative recommendations to the European Parliament, to delay the implementation of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) for 12 months.

Since the law was passed, a host of industries and countries, including the United States, have pushed back hard against the regulations, calling them onerous and demanding more time for implementation. The forest biomass industry, for example, wanted a 24-month delay. Forest advocates in the US and EU all decried the delay, as my story describes.

“I think the biggest threat from a delay is that it’s an excuse to gut the law by giving more time to already aggressive industry opposition,” Heather Hillaker, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in North Carolina, told me, summarizing the general concern of her international colleagues. “With climate change, every month matters when we’re trying to avoid [carbon] emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.”

Meanwhile, Austrian Christian Rakos, president of the World Bioenergy Association, wrote me in an email: “The traceability [requirement in the EUDR] is extremely difficult for sawmill byproducts which make up for more than half of U.S. pellet production. If sawdust is collected from several sawmills and then pelletized, how will you be able to tell from which forest plot pellets come? And what is the benefit of knowing if there is no deforestation in the entire fibre basket?”

Rakos and I met at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 and talked for two hours. His defense of the wood pellet industry is vigorous and, I believe, genuine. But I have seen from my own observations in North Carolina, and from the only source from within the industry to ever go public, that wood pellets are manufactured almost entirely by whole trees from native forests, not waste and residue, and that daily harvests for the 26 pellet mills in the US Southeast are effectively degrading intact forests and contributing to deforestation.

The Edenton, North Carolina, clear-cut. The biggest trees were harvested as timber, while other whole trees were chipped and trucked to an Enviva pellet mill, likely for export to Europe. Precisely how the EUDR will impact the forest biomass industry remains to be seen, though it asked the EU for a 24-month delay. Image courtesy of Bobby Amoroso.

Mongabay: Forest degradation releases 5 times more Amazon carbon than deforestation — Study

Tropical forests are subject to a range of disturbance types or degradation from small-scale mortality from natural processes affecting one or a few trees. This includes fire, flooding, landslides, selective logging or weather-related tree toppling. Image courtesy of K.C. Cushman.

This story came to me from tropical ecologist and Amazonian expert Miles Silman, my longtime friend and colleague at Wake Forest University, where we both teach. He made sure I got a copy of the study from which this story is based weeks before it was published.

In this pioneering research, made possible by intensive aerial lidar-driven data collection between 2016 and 2018, is a surprising finding: while deforestation gets all the attention from damaging the ecosystems services provided by the Amazon, forest degradation actually has a five-times greater impact on reducing the Amazon’s ability to store carbon and thus slow the rate of global warming.

“When countries report their forest and carbon changes, they mostly rely on deforestation because it’s much easier to see and quantify,” Ovidiu Csillik, lead author of the PNAS study who is formerly of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, told me in a phone interview. “But we’ve found that forest degradation is actually more important in terms of carbon loss.”

Imagine this: policymakers grab headlines and political capital by promising to curtail deforestation, as the new president of Brazil has done. That’s a good thing. But it turns out it’s more important to stave off or manage damage to tropical forests from flooding, landslides, wind disturbances, selective logging and road building. The reason: degraded land can often be rescued if action is taken soon enough; deforested land typically heralds an complete land-use change to ranching or farming.

While I had never met the lead author, Miles knows him because he joined the faculty at Wake Forest as a remote sensing expert in July 2024, a month before his study was published. I was clear with my editors at Mongabay about what could appear to be a conflict of interest; they agreed I should do the story and disclose the connection. That’s what we did. Also, this is my first story published on Mongabay’s newly updated and improved web site. All previous stories now show up in the new formatting.