COP28 UAE — a UN climate change initiative you probably never heard of

Why did Tedros tweet about a plant-based diet?

There's been much discussion about animals contributing to greenhouse gases and climate change, including factory-farmed livestock raised for food.[1] So it might not be surprising that the WHO director general, terrorist Tedros Ghebreyesus, would claim that food systems are harming the planet and in order to save 8 million lives per year we need to switch to more diversified and plant-based diets.

Wide Awake Media tweeted Tedros's speech (in the section "A diet your government's agreed to?" below) to that affect, asking who elected him to dictate which agriculture and diets are permissible. While that is a valid point, he completely missed the director general's mention of the impetus for his speech, the COP28 UAE declaration on health and the over 130 countries which have signed on to its Declaration on Climate and Health.[2] Tedros said,

WHO is committed to supporting countries to develop and implement policies to improve diets and fight climate change. I'm therefore very pleased that over 130 countries have signed the COP28 UAE declaration on climate and health  together we can protect and promote the health of both people and planet.

While we are still trying to wrap our heads around the constantly updated Agenda 2030, the amended IHRs, the Pandemic Treaty, and other committees of "elites" trying to impose more restrictions on the global populace, we find that something called COP28, held in the UAE, is moving the climate agenda forward. COP28 is the 28th conference of the Conference of Parties. According to McKinsey and Company, "The Conference of Parties (COP) is an annual meeting where United Nations member states convene to assess progress in dealing with climate change and make a plan for climate action within the guidelines of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)." The first COP was held in 1995.

COP decisions can have global authority: in the UN system, powerful countries like the United States and Russia have the same voting rights as tiny island nations like Vanuatu or São Tomé and Príncipe. Plus, decisions can be made only by consensus. UN member states send representatives to participate in the negotiations. Observer organizations also send delegates, and industry representatives and lobbyists attend as well.

Climate solutions for every part of life

The following image is page 5 of the COP28 UAE Consensus 14 day summary. It reviews the consensus achievements during the 14 day conference held in December 2023 for transitioning away from all fossil fuels, ambitious economy-wide emission reduction targets, increasing renewables and energy efficiency, significantly scale adaptation finance, reform global financial architecture, an agreement to operationalize Loss and Damage, and food systems transformation and health. It is apparent that they have left no area of life untouched, although not all countries signed on to all the declarations and pledges.

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Money, money, money, and more money

It's easy to believe that it is more about money than concern for the people, since each of these initiatives requires billions of dollars of financing. In the section "People, Nature, Lives, and Livelihoods," page 17 of the summary, we learn that companies, philanthropies, and finance providers committed to help finance these initiatives — $3.2 billion for major-regenerative agriculture and climate-food innovation initiatives and a first tranche of $2.9 billion for climate and health solutions.

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Indigenous Peoples deserve money, too

Even Indigenous People were part of the conference, with a Thematic Day dedicated to Energy and Industry, Just Transition, and Indigenous Peoples. The conference called for an increase in money flows to support them.

Building upon the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP), COP28 called for better recognition and increased finance flows for Indigenous Peoples to support their stewardship of nature, biodiversity and territorial and planetary health.

This included a roundtable on Indigenous Peoples’ Direct Access to Finance.

As part of the Business and Philanthropy Forum, the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions and the Ford Foundation co-hosted a roundtable on Indigenous Peoples’ Direct Access to Finance. It included announcements and commitments from the Forest Tenure Funders Group and the Global Environment Facility to explore the issue of direct access mechanisms for GEF Biodiversity IP Fund, as well as new finance commitments from philanthropy and public and private partners.

One must ask how altruistic this beneficence towards Indigenous People (who live in 90 different countries) actually is. According to the World Bank,

"While Indigenous Peoples own, occupy, or use a quarter of the world’s surface area. Indigenous Peoples conserve 80 percent of the world´s remaining biodiversity and recent studies reveal that forestlands under collective IP and local community stewardship hold at least one quarter of all tropical and subtropical forest above-ground carbon They hold vital ancestral knowledge and expertise on how to adapt, mitigate, and reduce climate and disaster risks." (Emphasis added.)

The World Bank has also tied the poverty and exclusion experienced by many of the world's Indigenous Peoples to COVID-19 and WHO/WEF One Health Ideologies and Sustainable Development Goals ideologies.

This legacy of inequality and exclusion has made Indigenous Peoples more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and natural hazards, including to disease outbreaks such as COVID-19.

. . .

. . . reducing the multidimensional aspects of poverty while contributing to sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

. . .

This threatens cultural survival and vital knowledge systems – loss in these areas increasing risks of fragility, biodiversity loss, and degraded One Health (or ecological and animal health) systems which threaten the ecosystem services upon which we all depend. (Emphases added.)

‍But will it help them?

Australia

Money provided to Indigenous Australians hasn't seemed to have made much difference in the lives of those it was meant to help, possibly because it was not provided to lift people up, but rather to address the effects of poverty, as Assoc. Prof. Nicholas Biddle wrote for The Conversation.

We are spending more than we would like on reacting to disadvantage (for example, A$4.1 billion on “public order and safety”) compared to activities that reduce disadvantage (for example, only A$1.3 billion on tertiary education or A$411 million on early childhood education).

However, they have no way of knowing if the money they are providing them is making any difference.

What we still don’t know (and can’t extrapolate from this report) is whether the money we are spending on Indigenous Australians is having any positive impact whatsoever. This report certainly doesn’t provide the data or the level of policy rigour to answer that much more important question. Emphases added.)

Canada

The same holds true for Canada's Indigenous Peoples, the First Nations. As with Australia, money is not the problem; how it is used is, as Fraser Institute senior Fellow Thomas Flanagan wrote. The money is not going to the people themselves nor is it being used in ways that will make improvements in their lives.

. . . these trends mean that far more money is being spent in the name of Indigenous peoples than we’ve seen for 25 years — though the majority of spending goes to civil servants and consultants, not Indigenous people themselves.

. . .

As with clean water and education, more money may be helpful in some ways, but inadequate funding is not the root of the problem.

How do we know this? Because if better-funded government programs were the answer to Indigenous poverty, we would have seen the results by now. Between 1981 and 2016, the latest year for comparable data, Ottawa multiplied total federal spending on Indigenous programming by more than four times yet the gap between First Nations and other Canadian communities in the average Community Well-Being Index, which measures the well-being of individual Canadian communities, barely budged. In 1981, the gap was 19.5 points on a scale of zero to 100. In 2016, it was 19.1. (Emphases added.)

A diet your government's agreed to?

When listening to Tedros explain the single dietary solution he has in mind for the entire world's population in order to save the planet, understand that he didn't come up with this on his own. Your government was most likely a part of COP28 UAE that is the basis of his declaration.

> And what about the Indigenous Peoples? Will they be required to ditch their ancestral diets for money?

> There seems to be more here than meets the eye.

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