Monthly Archive: March 2014
See you in Bonn, with your homework done!
ECO hopes that the climate gets what it needs in 2014, a year of ambition as we delivered a good draft text for Paris. After this year’s first UNFCCC meeting, it’s clear that much more effort will be needed for 2014 to be a success. Below a few things ECO hopes delegates will focus on as they return home from Bonn and prepare for the next session back here in June.
In Workstream 2, you have identified the significant potential of renewables and energy efficiency to help close the gigatonne gap. ECO suggests you now turn to concrete additional actions you can take to realise that potential and present them at the next session. You should also think about which decisions you can take at the end of the year to ensure that existing UNFCCC institutions, such as the Climate Technology Centre and Network and, the Green Climate Fund support those efforts.
Another piece of homework is to accelerate the preparation of your nationally determined contributions and to prepare concrete proposals on the information requirements for such proposals.
After all the frustration expressed over the slow progress towards the 2015 outcome, ECO is confident that negotiations under the shiny new Contact Group will get off to a flying start at the June session.
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An open letter from ECO
Dear developed countries, and other Parties,
With all this talk of reviews and ratcheting during Bonn, ECO would like to strongly remind developed country Parties that the first opportunity to in fact test these mechanisms would be during the forthcoming session in June. With the KP and ADP Ministerial’s looming large, ECO wants to send a take-home message to all developed countries: now is your moment to demonstrate that developed countries are going to show leadership through presenting more ambitious pledges, both emission reductions and finance. This does not only apply to KP parties; ECO strongly urges the US, New Zealand, Japan, Russia and Canada to step up to the plate and start walking the talk by presenting comparable ambitious commitments as well.
If developed countries fail to capture this important political moment, there could be serious implications for a new agreement in 2015. There is no logic to developed countries demanding more from developing countries when they have thus far been unwilling to fulfil their own responsibilities. The ambition gap is large. It needs to be filled. The best way for this to happen is through the ratcheting up of existing emission reduction and financial commitments from developed countries.
ECO supports the efforts to look at other concrete actions, such as scaled up renewable energy and energy efficiency actions, that can help close the gigatonne gap.
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2015 Agreement lost and damaged without adaptation?
ECO has noted with pleasure that this week many Parties provided their initial views on the role of adaptation and loss and damage in the 2015 agreement. There’s no doubt whatsoever that these two elements are integral to the 2015 agreement. The agreement simply cannot ignore the growing evidence of how increasingly severe climate change impacts are eroding hard-won development gains due to the massive mitigation and adaptation gaps.
However, ECO is concerned about some Parties’ views that characterise adaptation as a national responsibility. How can it be acceptable to shift the burden of dealing with the impacts of irresponsible consumption and production in some countries to the most vulnerable without offering any support?
For ECO, climate change 101 is pretty simple:
- 1 x lack of mitigation = required support for adaptation.
- 2 x lack of mitigation = 2 x required support for adaptation + loss and damage.
The links between mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage are as obvious as basic math. And here is another more frightening equation:
- ∑ All current mitigation efforts = >4℃ warming.
Or for those not mathematically inclined, the total sum of all current mitigation efforts will still lead to more than 4℃ of warming.
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Post-2020 contributions — information needed!
ECO appreciates the efforts made by several countries in their submissions this month to address the issue of the types of information Parties should submit with their initial post-2020 nationally determined mitigation contributions. A paper launched this week by the World Resources Institute outlines how this information could vary for countries whose contributions are in the form of economy-wide GHG mitigation goals, versus for those countries putting forward intensity-based or sectoral contributions, policy-based contributions, or contributions consisting of discrete projects or NAMAs.
Clarity and transparency of contributions is important to:
- Build confidence in the robustness of the economic, technological, and policy assumptions underlying the proposed national contributions;
- Enable comparison with other Parties;
- Improve the assessments of individual country and collective global emissions reductions resulting from the proposed contributions; and
- Foster a constructive dialogue amongst Parties on the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and how they translate into the level of ambition and effort undertaken by each Party.
ECO underlines the need for Parties to make substantial progress on this issue at the next Bonn session in June, as many countries are already starting to prepare their national contributions. The earlier that Parties have clarity on what information is going to be expected of them, the better.
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Kicking coal – one court case at a time
So, an Italian judge, a Beijing provincial official, a London banker and an Australian firefighter walk into a bar… Sounds like the start of a bad joke doesn’t it? It is, and all of these people get that the continued use of coal would be the worst joke of all.
Earlier this week an Italian judge ordered two coal fired units of a power station to be shut down for allegedly exceeding emissions limits. The company is charged with environmental crimes and manslaughter for the premature deaths of over 400 people. Is this judgement a taste of things to come? Research findings have suggested European Union wide impacts of coal combustion amount to more than 18,200 premature deaths; about 8,500 new cases of chronic bronchitis; and over 4 million lost working days each year. The economic costs of the health impacts from coal combustion in Europe are estimated at up to €42.8 billion per year.
The “airpocalypse” gripping many Chinese cities and regions are further evidence of the direct health impacts of coal combustion. It has been estimated that the environmental and social costs of coal added up to more than 7% of China’s GDP in 2007. There can be no doubt that because of these health impacts, societal costs and contribution to the climate crisis, have seen Chinese province after Chinese province announce a cap on coal in recent months.
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Fair shares – the basics
Everybody always talks about equity, but no one ever does anything about it. In hoping that someday Parties might, ECO would like to present this quick cheat sheet.
It’s not true that “equity is in the eye of the beholder”. Sure, there’s a lot to disagree about, but the UNFCCC really does give us somewhere to stand. Three places, actually, for when all is said and done, the Convention affirms three high-level precepts: 1) Avoid dangerous climate change, 2) Divide the effort of doing so on the basis of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”, and 3) Protect “the right to sustainable development”. If it’s consistent with these 3 principles, it’s probably fair, or at least a fair enough start.
It’s CBDR+RC, not CBDR. Those last words in the second principle – “respective capabilities” – may be challenging, but they’re not any more challenging than “historical responsibility”. And in any case, they’re not going away anytime soon. Just because some Parties wish that the responsibility issue would simply fade away, that doesn’t mean that other Parties are being helpful by trying to push capabilities off the boat. Two wrongs, as they say, don’t make a right. Not even a development right.
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Close the gap: shift investments
Once the negotiations move into a contact group, ECO can only hope that delegates will see finance as a central pillar of the 2015 package. Developed countries must show a record of year-by-year increases and projections of their continued increase towards 2020. Finance is instrumental to low global emissions and climate resilient development. A failure here will scupper any hopes for a success in Paris.
South Africa has reminded everyone that the funding gap remains huge: trillions of investment dollars need to be shifted. All Parties, developed and developing, have parts to play in setting helpful policy frameworks and in adopting fiscal measures designed to make investors think about where their money is going.
Providing public finance will remain key too, such as support for adaptation in vital sectors like food production in poorer countries and mitigation in less developed countries. Parties will also have to leverage large volumes of private finance and shift investments much larger than the promised US$100 billion a year by 2020.
The debate over finance is part of the equity and adequacy debate. ECO suggests that the first pillar for developed countries is domestic emission cuts, and the second is the provisioning of finance. ECO can’t help but think that, when developed countries prepare initial offers for their nationally determined contributions, they would be well advised to keep the funding gap in mind, and ensure that their contributions are helping to close it.
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Domestic preparations for dirty oil prevention
Domestic preparations for intended nationally determined contributions may, at first glance, see an unpromising subject for an article. The issue couldn’t be more important though. The contributions that countries plan to submit, ahead of Paris, and the terms by which they’ll do so, remains firmly at the forefront of ECO’s mind. We’re quite sure that the same is true for many negotiators.
ECO could spend many pages outlining details of what countries should submit but for a change of pace, let’s talk about something that one particular country shouldn’t submit.
That’s right, we’re talking about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
As the US considers its plans to increase ambition, and as it moves (we hope) towards emissions reductions in line with the science, the only proper role for the Keystone XL pipeline is rejection.
But don’t just take ECO’s word for it. A new study by the financial analysts at the Carbon Tracker Initiative suggests that building the pipeline would incentivise growth in the Canadian tar sands production equivalent to the emissions from building some 46 new coal-fired power plants. Besides undermining American climate action, a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline would also mean substantial emission increases in Canada, moving the maple leaf even further away from the targets committed in Copenhagen.
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