What’s in the wording of the COP 30 negotiations?

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Speaker 1 Hello, welcome to BBC Inside Science from the BBC World Service with me, Tom Whipple.

Speaker 1 This This week, as negotiators in Brazil wrangle the last bits of their agreement, what actually happens at the climate summit?

Speaker 1 Anyone in Central Asia right now can probably tell you how extreme climate change feels, as our global science analyst, Roland Pease, will be bringing us the latest on the mechanisms behind Iran's current record-breaking drought.

Speaker 1 But how do we know when a new record in climate, water shortages, or even sport is expected to break?

Speaker 1 Now, in a day, or maybe two days, or possibly on past form, three days, exhausted and sleep-deprived negotiators from 200-ish countries will produce and agree on a document in the Brazilian jungle, and it will say something.

Speaker 1 Another climate conference, the 30th, will come to an end. As we approach the final stretch, what are the negotiators actually doing?

Speaker 1 We speak to COP veteran Camilla Bourne, former advisor to COP26 President Alec Sharma. But first, BBC climate and science correspondent Georgina Ranard is there in the jungle.
Hi, Georgina.

Speaker 1 How are you?

Speaker 6 Hi, Tom. I'm okay.

Speaker 1 How's it going? Is it hectic?

Speaker 6 Yeah, it is quite chaotic. I mean, these things always are.

Speaker 1 Well, we can hear the birds in the background, which gives us some nice atmosphere. And you've been at this COP for the last two weeks.

Speaker 1 You know, we have to ask, what is the point?

Speaker 1 What will success look like if they get this document out? and what will failure look like? Why are you all there?

Speaker 6 Me, you, and some of the other journalists have asked ourselves that.

Speaker 6 It's actually a really confusing cough, and I think most people here would probably agree with me. Basically,

Speaker 6 the Paris Treaty, which is the landmark deal signed 10 years ago that laid out how the world will tackle climate change, it's a legal document. But basically,

Speaker 6 they've negotiated it all, they've finished it.

Speaker 6 It took a few years, but they've now agreed on the major things.

Speaker 6 So, loss and damage, which was about countries that historically caused climate change, giving money to countries that did little to cause it.

Speaker 6 They've figured out how to do that. They've agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, and they've agreed on climate finance.

Speaker 6 So, the question has become at this COP, if you're not negotiating anything because you'd agreed it all, what is this actually for?

Speaker 6 But the idea is that countries would actually lay out how to deliver on all those promises rather than negotiate new ones. But the problem is that's made it quite unfocused.

Speaker 6 And so that they're making sort of tons of little agreements rather than a big bang, which is what we've become used to as a COP.

Speaker 6 And I think at the end of the day, COP will be remembered for being here, really, in Brazil. Yesterday, President Lula came to the conference and gave an address, lots of crowds around him.

Speaker 6 And he said, as he would, but he called it the best COP ever because people were truly present and represented. And he said it had the largest number of indigenous people and of civil society.

Speaker 6 So, in a way, I think for Brazil,

Speaker 6 the success has been showcasing this participation and that they have a lot of solutions already underway in Brazil.

Speaker 6 And that actually, globally, although we've still got a long way to tackle climate change, we're much further forward than we were even five or ten years ago.

Speaker 1 Fabulous. Thank you very much indeed, Georgina.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Good to chat.

Speaker 1 Now, we at Inside Science note with concern the continued carbon output of the world. We resolve to address the serious barriers to implementing change.

Speaker 1 We welcome the continued tweeting of interesting birds in the Brazilian jungle. Is that the right language?

Speaker 1 Or should we note with strong concern, decide to address and express appreciation of the flappiness of the birds? Much of the real action in the conference happens over a text.

Speaker 1 A document wrangled out by 200 countries is approaching completion.

Speaker 1 The negotiators are meeting in corridors, forming alliances and arguing over the precise words to choose from, yes, the UN's list of verbs. What's it like?

Speaker 1 Camilla Bourne, former advisor to the COP twenty-six President, spoke to us earlier.

Speaker 7 First of all, let's not discount the protests, the trade fair piece of the puzzle, plus leaders turning up.

Speaker 7 That is now and more than ever a really, really important part of the COP, so absolutely don't discount that.

Speaker 7 We wouldn't have things like the Paris Agreement, which has effectively organized the world around net zero as an idea of how we want to organize our economies if we didn't have negotiations.

Speaker 7 And the Den Life and Negotiator starts very early in the morning.

Speaker 7 You have to be in all sorts of group coordination meetings where you're saying, Are we aligning our positions in different ways on different topics that we're going to be discussing?

Speaker 7 And then you go through a whole series of different negotiating meetings. There's a lot that happens in the corridors.
Bilaterals are really important.

Speaker 7 So that's countries talking to one another, trying to work out positions, and also talking to some of the non-governmental actors as well.

Speaker 7 They become really important for sort of getting some of the stories out there that perhaps the negotiators themselves don't want to say out loud to each other, but they need someone to be putting it out there.

Speaker 7 So a negotiator's day is certainly starts very early, runs very late, and it's quite a grueling process and a lot of speaking in code.

Speaker 7 But ultimately, what they're doing is trying to defend the outcomes that they want their country to benefit from. And so that's what they're going to negotiations to achieve.

Speaker 1 I've got in front of me a UN document, Common Verbs Used in Operative Paragraphs. I'm sure you're familiar with it.

Speaker 1 It's an exciting text. And it's got the list.
It's got affirms, calls for, calls on, considers, also considers, down to notes and also notes and underlines.

Speaker 1 Do all of these things mean different things?

Speaker 1 These are some of the things people are familiar with.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so they do. So

Speaker 7 the most stringent word you can have is decides. Like, wow, you've really decided now.
And, you know, I always kind of do the toddler test when I think about the words.

Speaker 7 I'm like, how would a toddler respond to a decision rather than a noting of something? And I think that's quite helpful. It's quite intuitive, really thinking about it.

Speaker 7 But when those words are written down, it's about statement of intent.

Speaker 7 So it is very important because it is the statement of intent of the majority of countries and economies and everything coming together and saying, this is where we see the future.

Speaker 7 But that doesn't mean that if you have a weaker word, that's what it's going to be for the rest of eternity.

Speaker 7 And, you know, if I come back to the terminology around kind of net zero or moving away from fossil fuels, there were particular words that were used in the Paris Agreement, but it's a very long convoluted sentence.

Speaker 7 It wasn't a focus on net zero or focus on moving away from fossil fuels, but then that has come from that. So they're very important, those words.

Speaker 7 They help governments decide what they're going to do, but you know, it's not the last hurrah, I would say.

Speaker 7 Another big thing that negotiators are trying to achieve is sometimes they want to set precedent. So for example, I was involved with COP26.

Speaker 7 We thought we'd try our luck and see if we could get coal included.

Speaker 7 You would think perhaps at a climate negotiations, you talk about fossil fuels, you talk about what you do with the future of electricity. No, not really.

Speaker 7 It's much more of a, let's set the direction for how we bring emissions down and then countries make their own choices.

Speaker 7 So we had this conversation about coal and we did set a precedent and it was included in negotiated outcome. But it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 7 COP26 means the 26th COP negotiations and it was only at that point that we mentioned the first fossil fuel and that was coal.

Speaker 1 And so is this a depressing process? Do you feel the sort of joy of international diplomacy where the world is getting things done? Or do you think this is not merely a horseby committee?

Speaker 1 It's a sort of the committee's 200 countries big and they've all got different things. And at the end of it, we're just ending up with these kind of bland acronyms.

Speaker 7 So it's a good challenge. I guess I feel very hopeful from the UN process.
And that's because UN process, however infuriating it can be, much better than countries fighting with one another.

Speaker 7 And I remember that the Paris Agreement set this precedent of net zero. And that is what the global economy is organizing towards now.

Speaker 7 Sometimes the names fall out of vogue, but everyone is moving towards that clean, modern electric tech, and that's where the future is.

Speaker 7 So you can say from that that the Paris Agreement achieved us going in that direction.

Speaker 7 Having said that, now that we have that Paris Agreement and we have a lot of the rules around how we're going to deliver over time from that sort of process perspective, there is less to negotiate.

Speaker 7 So it is now much more focused on delivery, getting things done. And getting things done happens in communities, happens in countries, happens in regions.

Speaker 7 It's much less about happening through negotiating different kinds of text. So, it's a very hopeful process.
It sets us on track for a better future, in my opinion, and we're moving in that direction.

Speaker 7 But a lot of what we need to do next, yes, we need that kind of support from the institutions working to help us deliver over time.

Speaker 7 But a lot of the real delivery happens at home, and that's where the really exciting stuff is now, in many ways.

Speaker 1 So, is the negotiating room just not what it was? Is it not as important? You mentioned that all this other stuff going on is more important

Speaker 1 than it used to be. Has the balance changed?

Speaker 7 So, you know, for a long time, we were working towards setting a direction so that people would go away and do things.

Speaker 7 And so it was a piece of the puzzle, but it was a very small puzzle and it was a very big anchor piece of it. Now the puzzle is way bigger.
It still remains an anchor piece.

Speaker 7 But I think sometimes we think, oh, this UN climate thing is going to save the world. Of course it's not.
It's just a meeting, right?

Speaker 7 It's a meeting that can do its job as a meeting and it can help accelerate all of the other things that happen. And those have become much more important because that's where the reality is.

Speaker 7 You know, it's not just about the piece of paper, it's about what the piece of paper achieves.

Speaker 1 That's Camilla Bourne, formerly climate advisor to the COP26 president. A reminder: you're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service.

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Speaker 1 Now, here's our global science guy, Roland Pease, with a look at a real-world climate effect happening now.

Speaker 8 While staying with the climate, another country that is suffering from drought is Iran, which faces its worst drought in decades. The drought has left the country's reservoirs at an all-time low.

Speaker 1 For most of us, Iran's water crisis loomed into the headlines in only the past few weeks with warnings that the dams had run dry and the capital city might need to be evacuated.

Speaker 1 For Iranians, this crisis has been building since 2020 as year after year the seasonal rains have failed to deliver.

Speaker 1 But look at the technical literature and you see that this crisis has been looming for decades, not because of the weather, but because of mismanagement.

Speaker 1 Among those issuing the warnings, Iranian-born Amir Agakuchak, professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. If you look at the trends and patterns in lakes and reservoirs around the country, and also groundwater levels, all of them show a downward trend.

Speaker 3 When you look at input to the system, which is rainfall, we see a lot of variability. But rainfall is not going down as much as we see downward trend in groundwater resources and lakes and reservoirs.

Speaker 3 That's why we think this problem has a very strong human component.

Speaker 1 Madi Motag, another Iranian expert based at the Earth Sciences Center GFZ in Potsdam, agrees.

Speaker 9 Actually, drought is not a serious problem in Iran. Iran has an arid and semi-arid climate.
So this drought period has always been in the history of Iran.

Speaker 9 So yes, it causes partly a problem for the management of water resources. However, you know, there are other factors that exacerbate and worsen the impact of the drought.

Speaker 9 You see, over the last 40 years, so there has been a lot of development for agriculture which has relied on groundwater resources.

Speaker 9 However, over the last 40 years, this important water resource has been exploited a lot

Speaker 9 and as a result, the level of the groundwater has decreased a lot over the whole country.

Speaker 3 That's correct. We have this significant problem of overextraction of groundwater resources.
And in just about 15 years, the country has lost about 73 square kilometers of groundwater.

Speaker 3 Lost means water that was taken out but was never replaced by nature.

Speaker 3 Even northern Iran, where you get a lot of rainfall, still we see the same pattern, even in wet areas.

Speaker 1 In fact, underground aquifers supply over half of Iran's water needs. And as the water is aggressively pumped out, the surface collapses.
It sinks so much indeed, it can be seen from space.

Speaker 1 Madi Motak tracks this pumping with satellite data.

Speaker 9 The rates are alarming. For example, in parts of Tehran, the capital of Iran, it reaches to around 20-30 centimeters per year.

Speaker 1 Per year? Yes, yes.

Speaker 9 And also in other parts, like, for example, Mashad in northeast Iran, or or in Rafsanjan in the center of Iran it reaches rates higher 40 centimeter per year.

Speaker 1 I mean that's that's incredible this is the surface sinking you know by a meter or so every three years and that suggests that there's a huge amount of water being taken out in that case I presume.

Speaker 9 Yes, at least I would say at least this is a minimum at least around 2 billion cubic meters annually.

Speaker 9 And nearly half of this amount actually occurs in irrigated farmlands.

Speaker 1 Which have massively expanded in recent decades because of population growth and, says Amir Agukuchak, through economic choices forced on the country by its political isolation.

Speaker 3 Obviously, there is this short-term drought dimension, but the bigger problem is the way the country has invested in growth and development.

Speaker 3 One reason that they are investing in agriculture is because they don't have a lot of other options because of

Speaker 3 fighting the West and sanctions. They cannot grow industry, they cannot grow commerce.
So agriculture is almost the only thing left.

Speaker 3 So they keep investing, they keep growing the agriculture sector, and it adds to water problems.

Speaker 1 The most visible example of which is the recent death of the massive isolated salt lake Urmia in the country's northwest, once the second largest saline wetland in the world, 150 kilometers long and 50 wide.

Speaker 1 As rivers flowing into it have been dammed and diverted for irrigation, and despite emergency conservation measures, it has shrunk and shrunk until this year it effectively died.

Speaker 3 I was there a long time ago. I think it was 1998.
I was still an undergraduate student.

Speaker 1 Amir Agakuchak again.

Speaker 3 And at that time, Lake was super healthy. The environment, the tourism at that time was great around the lake area.
There was no sign of shrinkage at that time.

Speaker 3 So, it's really hard to believe that that gigantic source of water is just not there anymore. But, one

Speaker 3 important aspect about this specific lake, right?

Speaker 3 This is an hypersaline area. So, if the lake disappears completely, and it is almost gone already, more than 95% or so is gone, this

Speaker 3 salt lake bed is now exposed to wind forces.

Speaker 3 And because of that, a lot of dust is getting into the atmosphere and this salt is going to in the long run ruin all the agricultural lands around the lake you know salt is not good for soil around the lake we have fertile lands that slowly will lose their fertility because of salt deposition So this is a major environmental problem.

Speaker 3 And of course, there's human health aspect, salt in the atmosphere, we know it's really bad for all kinds of respiratory problems, even eye problems.

Speaker 3 All kinds of health issues are related to dust in the atmosphere.

Speaker 1 If the drought continues or climate change makes matters worse, Iran will keep turning to the already depleted aquifers. But how long they will last is unknowable, says Madi Mutag.

Speaker 9 No, we don't know how much left, but the future is not very actually promising. There is a limit to this ecological sustainability of the Iran and also the water system in Iran.

Speaker 1 Is there any sign that water usage is being controlled?

Speaker 9 I mean, there have been some efforts, however, it has not been successful. I mean, the government does not have

Speaker 9 any means to control this over-exploitation of groundwater resources. That's the big problem, especially under the current geopolitical situation.
You know, the means are very limited.

Speaker 3 There is no long-term solution. That's what hurts me basically.
As scientists, as engineers, we always ask what's the solution? What can we do to make the situation better?

Speaker 3 But no matter from what angle you look at the problem, my conclusion is that there is no long-term solution.

Speaker 3 And mainly because of politics of the country, I don't see there is any solution down the road.

Speaker 1 Amir Aga Kutrak on the bleak outlook for Iran as it faces a long-term water crisis. Thanks, Roland.

Speaker 1 Now, Cricket's Ashes series is about to begin. Here we will be watching intently.

Speaker 1 Cricket is the queen of sports in our view because it can be best understood by calling upon the queen of sciences, maths. It is a statistics generating machine.

Speaker 1 Yet are those statistics getting less interesting? Does it feel like records are, unlike England's bales, tumbling less often? Mathematician Kit Yates is here.

Speaker 1 This is what you'd expect intuitively, isn't it? That it gets harder and harder to break records.

Speaker 10 Exactly. In a sport where we've sort of reached peak performance, so maybe, for example, like the long jump, which is just quite a pure sport.

Speaker 10 You run really fast and you have to jump as far as you can. You know, that record hasn't been broken for 35 years.
And it's only been broken once since 1968. That was back in 1991.

Speaker 10 So, you know, we've sort of reached peak long jump. And now the variations in those records that we're seeing are due to luck or to randomness, if you like.

Speaker 10 So maybe it's like the wind speed or how well the athletes slept, or the nerves, or how well the crowds used them on. So, we're effectively what we would call a stationary system.

Speaker 10 And then, to some extent, with those systems, I think we can think about cricket as also being quite stationary, where the variation is just caused through randomness, and that means it gets harder and harder to break records as time goes on.

Speaker 1 But there are some sports, and listeners will be thinking: well, you know, what about pole vault? There are some sports that seem to be non-stationary systems.

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely. So, some sports where maybe improvements in diet or technique or equipment make a real difference, we'll see records breaking more often than the mathematical theory would suggest.

Speaker 10 So Pol Vault's a classic example. You know, we've seen Armand Duplantis break 14 records over the last few years.

Speaker 10 He's come up with some small improvement in technique, which has allowed him to jump maybe, you know, 10, 15 centimetres higher than the previous record. But because in Pol Vault, you only...

Speaker 10 break the record by centimetre increments, you break the record and then you stop. You don't try and do 15 centimeters in one go.

Speaker 10 He's been able to break that record over and over and over again with this small increase in technique.

Speaker 1 Listeners might be thinking, why do I need to put maths to this?

Speaker 1 But one of the interesting things, once you do, you can start using it to find out quite useful things about things that are, I whisper this, actually useful.

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10 So you can come up with this curve of how often you would expect records to break in these stationary systems, but then you can flip that on its head and say, if I've got a set of records that are being broken and how often they're being broken, then I can go and say something about that system, whether it's stationary or not.

Speaker 10 And so the classic example is climate. This is what climate scientists actually do.

Speaker 10 If the climate is stationary and only changing due to these random fluctuations, if year on year the data is independent, then we would expect records to be breaking with a decreasing frequency.

Speaker 10 So if you take that rate at which the climate records are actually being broken and you divide by the theoretical rate that the math predicts they should be being broken if the climate was stationary, you come up with this thing called the record ratio.

Speaker 10 So if this record ratio is above one, then records are being broken more often than you'd expect. And if it's below one, they're being broken less often.

Speaker 10 And so, if you actually look at high-temperature records across the globe every year, then that record ratio at the moment is about six.

Speaker 10 So, records are being broken six times as often as you would expect if the climate were not changing.

Speaker 10 And similarly, for cold temperature records, so the record low temperatures, the record ratio is actually about half. So, those cold temperature records are breaking half as often as we would expect.

Speaker 10 So, these are both consistent with a climate which is warming.

Speaker 1 Great. Look, thank you very much.
And I didn't introduce you properly at the beginning.

Speaker 1 That is Kit Yates who is professor of mathematical biology and public engagement at the University of Bath and also an author. It's a pleasure, thanks for having me.
Kit, stay around.

Speaker 1 We're going to be going through our review of the week's papers. That's journal papers, not newspapers.

Speaker 1 Caroline Steele, what have you got? What's your first one?

Speaker 5 So I've got exciting news. Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that MOS can survive the harsh conditions of space.
So this paper was published in the journal iScience on November the 20th.

Speaker 5 So in March 2022, researchers sent hundreds of moss sporophytes, which is the reproductive structures that sort of encase spores on moss, to the International Space Station.

Speaker 5 And I've got a photo here in case you can't picture what they look like, because I definitely couldn't.

Speaker 1 So it looks a bit like, I guess, sort of crests. Yes, I thought.
Little crest sort of poking up, but I'd imagine a lot smaller.

Speaker 5 Yes, exactly. And so once this moss arrived at the ISS this the astronauts attached the moss to the outside of the ISS and then just basically left it on its own in space for nine months.

Speaker 5 The moss was then brought back to Earth and shockingly the scientists were really surprised. It was found that 80% of the moss spores survived and were capable of reproducing.

Speaker 1 Why did they do it?

Speaker 5 Well it's all part of the kind of bigger picture of understanding how plants, fungi and animals survive or don't survive in space with the long-term goal of one day getting us humans off planet Earth and being able to live somewhere else.

Speaker 5 And I think we should just take a moment to appreciate how impressive this is. Like the conditions in space are so harsh.
So this moss survived in a vacuum.

Speaker 5 So there's no oxygen, there's no carbon dioxide, really extreme temperatures. When the moss was in sort of the path of the sunlight, the temperature would be about 150 degrees Celsius.

Speaker 5 When it's in the shade, it's about a minus 150 degrees Celsius. Really high levels of radiation.
You know, we humans would die within a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, in these conditions.

Speaker 1 Well, look, from space moss to something I think even weirder.

Speaker 5 Well, I've got coming up next coffee that has been passed through the gut and excreted out of the civet. Do you know what a civet is? Yes.

Speaker 5 So it's kind of a strange animal that looks like a cross between a leopard and a raccoon. I've got a tiny photo here to studio people.
It kind of looks like a cat, I would say, a raccoon slash cat.

Speaker 5 Cute nocturnal mammal. Have you tried civet coffee?

Speaker 1 I'm afraid I simply don't get paid enough, but as I understand, this is a real delicacy.

Speaker 5 That's the thing, yeah. So it costs, you can get it in various fancy coffee shops in Mayfair in London, and it's about £70 a glass.
Kit, you're...

Speaker 10 How, who discovered drinking coffee made of poo was a good idea?

Speaker 5 This is exactly what I wanted to know. And actually, there is a nice story behind it.
It's just a story. We can't prove that it happened.

Speaker 5 But the story goes that 300 years ago in Indonesia, the Dutch had sort of colonial rule and local farmers were instructed to farm coffee to be exported.

Speaker 5 And they were told, hey, don't you take any coffee beans and make your own coffee. You're not allowed to pick any for yourself.

Speaker 5 So they got around this by noticing whole coffee beans in civet poo, picking it out of the civet poo and making their own coffee. And after a while, this coffee became a delicacy.

Speaker 5 Some of the Dutch tried it and were like, wait, hang on a second. Your poo coffee is better than our coffee.
What's going on there?

Speaker 5 So for a long time there's been economic and scientific interest into why this coffee tastes so much better.

Speaker 5 But to learn how coffee beans are transformed whilst passing through the gut, scientists at Central University of Kerala in India collected coffee samples from normal beans and also peens.

Speaker 5 beans that have passed through civets from five different farms.

Speaker 5 They ran a ton of tests to look at key chemical compounds and basically they found that the total fat was significantly higher in the civet beans than those harvested from trees, while caffeine, protein and acid were lower.

Speaker 5 So the lower acidity is likely due to some fermentation during digestion.

Speaker 5 And the team suggests that the higher fat content is probably why civet coffee has such a unique aroma flavour profile and the lower level of protein probably makes it less bitter.

Speaker 5 So this is probably largely down to the civet's digestion process, but also they're likely better at picking ripe fruit and basically collecting preferable coffee beans.

Speaker 1 Does this mean that we can replicate it without a civet?

Speaker 5 Well that's exact that's the intention, the kind of the excitement. If we can eliminate the civet, which it would be great from two points of points of view.

Speaker 5 One, it will make the coffee much cheaper and more accessible. We might get it in the BBC canteen.

Speaker 5 Also, civets are now often kept in really bad conditions. They're sort of battery farmed.
So there's a lot of animal rights concerns around civet coffee.

Speaker 5 So if we can eliminate the civet from the civet coffee, that would be great for everyone, basically.

Speaker 1 Great. Well, and on that hopeful note,

Speaker 1 that is almost it from me. If you meet a goose, don't do anything I wouldn't do.

Speaker 1 It is goodbye from Caroline. Goodbye.
And goodbye from Kit. Goodbye.

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