COP26 Glasgow Nov 2021

International COP: ‘Face the Future with the 10-Point Plan’.

We are witness to a planetary emergency, unprecedented in the history of modern civilisation.

In an inequitable world, some of us are more vulnerable to the breakdown in our Earth’s ecosystems and biosphere than others. In an inequitable world, some of us are more responsible for anthropogenic environmental destruction than others.

The current coronavirus pandemic is a foretaste and symptomatic of the consequences of human consumption overshooting our planetary boundaries. Time is running out.

We need zero net-loss of nature by 2030 (Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International).

It is time to face the future.

CBDCOP15 and COP26 (Glasgow, UK, Nov 2021) must hold the key to fundamental, equitable and legally binding measures to avert the cataclysm of our natural and human-modified world.

‘Face the Future with the 10-Point Plan’ is derived from the UK CEE Bill and proposes a blueprint of universal emergency measures that address the climate and ecology crises as a whole.

The Bill provides a framework and set of principles that proposes how the UK must play its equitable role by increasing its overall ambition to commit to significantly updated UNFCCC Nationally Determined Contributions.

So, what would the significance be if this ‘10-Point Plan’ were integrated in the Nationally Determined Contributions of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (signatories)-especially countries of the advanced economies and ratified at COP26?

This would -

• Commit signatory countries to binding carbon budgets that would give us a greater than 50/50 chance of meeting the most crucial goal of the Paris Agreement: to limit global warming preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels

• Commit signatory countries to enact imperative ecological measures, to drastically mitigate our global ecological footprint, The EU has stated that climate and biodiversity must be symbiotically addressed.

• Commit signatory countries to a fair and equitable pathway to restorative planetary health.

We’re are calling on activists, campaigners, civil societies, NGOs and all concerned citizens to be part of an historic campaign to engage with, lobby and publicise the need for our influencers/public figures/politicians and civil servants to sign up to these principles -

The ‘Face the Future 10-Point Plan’ -

Ensure that the UK contributes fairly to climate mitigation consistent with limiting global temperatures increase to 1.5°C (compared to average pre-industrial levels).

1. Ensure that UK takes full responsibility in accounting for its entire greenhouse gas footprint (consumption emissions, passenger international shipping, flights and land-based transport) domestically and internationally.

2. Ensure that UK primarily reduce its anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, to the point of cessation(zero), at energy source

3. Ensure that Dioxide Removal deployment may only be considered with proven efficacy and stringent safeguarding against any negative impacts on all ecosystems

4. Ensure the circumscribed conditions for Carbon Dioxide Removal for proposed carbon offsetting only when all alternative carbon neutral approaches have been primarily pursued. Negative emissions technologies must not be factored into prospective mitigation pathways as a substitute for societal decarbonisation.

5. Ensure that UK abides by annual national carbon budgets and in enacting the transition to a carbon neutral economy the burden must not fall on the poorest in society.

6. Ensure that UK restores and regenerates its habitats by implementing robust measures to protect and enhance the variety, abundance and health of soils and biodiversity in both rural and urban/human-modified ecosystems and in so doing, enriches natural carbon sinks.

7. Ensure that UK implements conditions that protect health and resilience of ecosystems along both domestic and UK global supply chains (incl. extraction of natural resources, land degradation, pollution and waste), and thus mitigate the UK’s ecological footprint.

8. Ensure that commissioned independent bodies create benchmark standards to robustly evaluate the progress of UK climate mitigation and ecological protection and restoration pathways.

9. Ensure that the strategy and solutions to enact this law are thoroughly democratic: a citizens’ assembly - randomly selected but representative sample of UK population- to work alongside your government, under the scrutiny of Parliament.