Today ECO will tell you a story.
Eight billion people sitting together in one very big, but fragile boat that they all love very much. The boat – although still beautiful – was riddled with holes (GHG-emissions). Water had already flooded the living quarters of the people in the bottom deck. All the scientists on board warned in unison: “Unless the holes are repaired; the entire boat, everyone and everything on it will be wiped out!”. Unsurprisingly, the people on the boat were not happy about this.
Long, long ago (2015) in a faraway land (France) people from all parts of the boat gathered to find a solution. Once they agreed, they gave the solution a name: Article 2.
It contains three rules:
First rule (art 2.1a) is that everyone (according to CBRD-RC) will contribute to mending the holes in the boat (mitigation). Agreeing that all the holes must be mended before 2050 (art 4.1).
Second rule (art 2.1b) is that everyone would have to contribute to bailing the water already flooding the boat out (adaptation and L&D).
Third rule (art 2.1c) combining art 2.1c and 4.1, it simply says that everyone must stop drilling more f**ing holes in the boat!
The beauty of the third rule is that unlike the first two, its implementation doesn’t require climate finance. Ahh.. some parties say. Our concern is that if we implement art 2.1c some of the money that is directed away from fossil investments might be counted as “mobilised climate finance”, thus making even less climate finance available. ECO is dumbfounded.
When the third rule is finally implemented it will only tell private finance what not to invest in (fossil fuels). It does not tell investors what to invest in instead, a huge difference. When the investors themselves are making decisions, developed country parties can have no valid grounds to count the private financial flows as “mobilised”. To ensure full agreement on this issue, ECO recommends that a future article 2.1c agenda item should address this.
ECO hears a final objection to implementing article 2.1c. With skyrocketing energy prices, fossil extraction that was previously unsustainable and uneconomical now appears profitable. To those parties ECO can only repeat the third rule: everyone must stop drilling more f**ing holes in the boat!