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50 lives lost in Sudan’s heatwave hell: The world’s shameful silence
The news from Sudan is nothing short of horror. Today, we must confront the tragic tale of more than 50 Sudanese people, in their desperate attempt to cross the Northern border, have died from merciless heatwaves. So severe was the damage done to the bodies that reports confirmed some bodies had skin peeled off due to severe dehydration. Survivors have reported to news outlets that “dozens in the desert have no water” and that “entire families died due to high temperatures and the deceased were left behind.”
This grim reality underscores the brutal intersection of war, famine, and now deadly heat waves; none of which, of course, are the brainchild of the innocent civilians now left to roast in the Saharan sun. Sudan has tragically morphed into a sort of twisted playground for regional powers. These powers exploit Sudan’s chaos, digging for gold to fund their energy transitions and staking claims on arable land, all while millions of Sudanese people are left to wilt and wither.
More than 10 million people have been displaced within Sudan due to ongoing conflict, the largest displacement on earth, and over 15,000 are dead. Those displaced face violence and hunger, and now they are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather.
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Climate Action without a pulse: ACE in the hole or just another card in the climate deck?
In the labyrinthine world of climate negotiations, where high stakes, higher temperatures, and the highest level of bureaucratic flair converge, there sits an unassuming champion— the Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE). Yes, ACE, that often overlooked yet curiously potent alphabet soup that promises to educate, engage, and empower. But does it? Or is it merely another decorative card in the climate action deck?
Let’s cut through the smog. ACE should be the heartbeat of climate strategy, pulsing through education, public awareness, and, dare we say, actual participation. But as our high-flying delegates debate the fate of our planet, ACE often finds itself shuffled to the bottom of the deck, peeked at with interest but rarely played with the gusto it deserves.
This year, amidst coffee-fueled side chats and a proactive ACE Dialogue, a revelation seemed to dawn—of course at glacial pace—that without funding and firm commitments, ACE is like a solar panel under a shade tree: optimistically placed but disappointingly underutilized. Funding is where the lofty ambitions meet the road, yet here we are, watching as financial disparities are glossed over with all the enthusiasm of a mandatory safety demonstration.
In a world where ‘engagement’ too often means ticking boxes and where ‘public participation’ looks suspiciously like an echo chamber, ACE’s potential for real, systemic change is being stifled.
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Dear Mitigation Work Programme negotiators
ECO addresses this informal summary of complaints to you:
You have been negotiating now for ten days. You have exchanged views on the dialogues, whether to have inf infs, how to interpret complementarity, and so on. Many views diverged. Others converged. This discussion may not have mitigated anything or been programmatic, but it was certainly work. A lot of work.
On Wednesday morning, the co-facilitators attempted to capture Parties’ views in an informal note. In that sense, ECO wants to thank AILAC and South Korea, for reminding Parties on Tuesday how these informal notes feed into the process.
However, throughout yesterday, sessions disappeared from CCTV mysteriously. ECO learned that some usual suspects actively prevented this informal note from being introduced to the room. Although ECO definitely would have preferred a draft text, in its absence the informal note could have provided some basis to resume negotiations.
Then, when everyone finally got into the room, certain countries accused the co-facilitators’ summary of being illegitimate – even after Secretariat lawyers provided legal advice that co-facilitators can prepare informal documents of their own motion.
ECO is disappointed to witness this level of mistrust and lack of transparency in the MWP space. Some called it a “toxic space”; at first ECO was confused, but now totally gets it.
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Remember me? I’m that fund you created not so long ago
Today is the last day of the negotiations in Bonn, and I’ve been feeling left out. Last year, you were hyped about creating me – the Loss & Damage Fund – but you seem to have left me behind in the Expo City of Dubai. My second board meeting is around the corner, but some of you don’t even want to invite me to the new climate finance goal. What am I, if I’m not climate finance?
Yes, we urgently need to mitigate and adapt, but what about the communities that are already facing climate impacts because of your decades of burning fossil fuels and failing to provide finance to developing countries? I’m here to help them respond, rebuild, recover, and keep their heads above water – literally.
The third and final Glasgow Dialogue made me hopeful for some recognition, and you did raise many important points: making me directly accessible to communities, gender-responsive, and human rights-based. You talked about my relationships with the WIM and the Santiago Network – as Facebook would say: “it’s complicated”. But now that the Glasgow Dialogue is over, there is no new space available to discuss how I will grow and develop? And how am I even going to exist, if I’m not funded at scale to meet the needs of communities and countries?
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“Quantum” seems to be the hardest word
As ECO leaves SB60 seeing no progress achieved in the Ad Hoc Work Programme on the NCQG, here’s our sad, sad song to Parties…
(to the tune of Elton John’s ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word”…)
What do I got to do to make you fund me?
What do I got to do to make you care?
What do I do when TEDs just dodge me?
And in each and every session you’re not there
What do I do to make you want me?
What do I got to do to be heard?
What do I say when AHWP’s over?
Quantum seems to be the hardest word
It’s sad (so sad) so sad
It’s a sad sad situation
And it’s getting more and more absurd [it really is!]
It’s sad (so sad) so sad
Why can’t we talk it over [well in advance of COP29]?
Oh, it seems to me that the quantum seems to be the hardest word…
ECO thinks we need to urgently hear much, much more from developed countries about just how much the climate finance goal should actually be based on needs in developing countries. Over to you.
ECO mourns the loss of the visionary Klaus Töpfer
Monday afternoon the news spread that Klaus Töpfer has died at the age of 85. ECO mourns this loss and commemorates his achievements in a wide set of environmental policies. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Klaus Töpfer was Germany’s environment minister and drove forward some progressive policies on climate, circular economy, and waste. In Germany, he made particular headlines in 1988 when he swam across the Rhine River near Mainz, demonstrating its improved water quality after chemical accidents and fish die-offs.
From 1998 to 2006 Töpfer headed the UN Environment Programme and played a key role in lifting it out of a deep crisis into an organisation embracing a more comprehensive environmental perspective and more strongly integrating wider sustainable development considerations.
Töpfer was a strong advocate for environmental causes, often ahead of the discourse in a visionary manner, including the phase-out of nuclear energy after the Chernobyl catastrophe, and promoting renewable energy sources, as an early supporter of the founding of the International Renewable Energy Agency. As German housing minister, he framed the important support for low and zero-energy buildings (“Passive housing”) and worked closely with trade unions involved in buildings renovation to lower heat demand.
ECO remembers that his meetings with CSOs in numerous conferences in Bonn, but also worldwide, were famous, filled with insightful anecdotes and inspiring suggestions, often accompanied (or triggered) by good wine.
ECO 9, SB60, Bonn, June 2024 – #PAYUP Issue
Requiem for the Just Transition Work Programme
Today ECO is not in the mood for jokes or puns. In yesterday’s Contact Groups on the UAE Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP), it became clear that a handful of developed countries are trying to kill the potential of the JTWP to deliver justice for workers, for communities, for peoples and for countries that need support to accelerate their transformation.
As opposed to some delegates, ECO is not confused. ECO is angry. We were clearly getting somewhere after a constructive session on Monday night. And yet, instead of taking all that work and making genuine efforts to ensure the JTWP progresses towards concrete actions on just transition, countries might be leaving Bonn with little more than a procedural trick.
We will likely leave the SB60 with no summary from the dialogue, no process to streamline the activities and to ensure that we have the discussions we need to scale and speed up just transition, and no commitment to actually deliver on anything of substance. The world needs justice and equity and what we get is an empty procedural conclusion.
ECO wants to be clear with you, dear Parties. If you answer yes to more than one of these questions, then you are part of the problem:
- Have you argued that clarifying the modalities of the UAE JTWP is a renegotiation of COP28 outcomes?
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Don’t erase the past
It has come to ECO’s attention that some Parties think that a core principle of climate justice and international environmental law in general is merely an inconvenience that is no longer needed. Concretely, across multiple negotiating tracks, US negotiators have reportedly been striking any and all references to Common but Differentiated Responsibilities – and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC).
CBDR-RC is a bedrock principle of the Paris Agreement and has been a core part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change for more than thirty years. At its most basic level, CBDR-RC reflects the reality that the wealthy developed countries (aka the global north) are largely responsible for the climate crisis due to their outsized historical emissions and therefore must lead in taking actions to reduce carbon emissions, as well as the obligation to provide climate finance to developing countries. Global north countries have built their wealth off their fossil fuel-based industrial development.
There can be no justice in any climate negotiation outcome if references to CBDR-RC – and equity in general – are struck out or opposed by parties to the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Doing so sets a dangerous precedent that CBDR–RC is a thing of the past. When so many commitments and promises for climate justice have been broken, this is not only unjust – it is insulting.
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