Category: Previous Issues Articles

We all know Egyptians love football. They are proud of their national team. And their country’s star player? Why of course it’s the team captain – Mohamed Salah, goal scoring phenomenon and international superstar.

Why are we talking about football, you ask? Well, as the saying goes, football is a game of two halves. And so is the Global Stocktake. The first half is the technical dialogue, which informs the second half: the political discussion. COP27 sits between these two halves. It’s the halftime break of the GST, exactly halfway between when it began back at COP26 in Glasgow twelve months ago and when it will end next year in Dubai at COP28.

A halftime break in football is a key turning point in the match. It’s when the captain can rouse their team to fight harder and to score more goals. For the GST, the goals aren’t balls at the back of the net. The goals are won if we can shift the UNFCCC into ‘crisis implementation’ mode and away from a business-as-usual forum that is stuck in divisive politics and negotiations. The goals are if the GST can commit all Parties to further action, including: enhanced and rights-based NDCs, phase out of all fossil fuels by 2050, accelerate concrete action to protect and restore ecosystems, and concretely step up finance, including for adaptation and loss and damage at the scale needed.
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Dear delegates, do you know the meme where angry customers left a message of disappointment after not being served at a restaurant? ECO is pretty sure you don’t want to be that restaurant. 
Meaning that the pledges you made must be implemented and  trust rebuilt after  all your broken promises.

 But guess what? To address Loss and Damage, people have not been waiting for 30 minutes but for over 30 years. It’s been that long since the small island states brought the issue of Loss and Damage to the international negotiations. Rich nations did just enough to be able to say that they would not completely abandon them, some technical assistance here, some dialogue there, but never has the issue been addressed properly.

 After 30 years of inaction,  this COP, on African soil, after witnessing one of the warmest years in one of the most vulnerable regions of the world, it is time to finally deliver on Loss and Damage. COP27 must set up a Loss and Damage Finance Facility to coordinate information on the needs to address Loss and Damage and provide the financing mechanism to address it.

Pay up for loss and damage now. As in any restaurant, someone will have to pay, and ECO recommends innovative finance with a subsequent process to map this out.
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As COP27 launches, ECO takes this opportunity to remind our dear readers that climate justice is indistinguishable from human rights.  Climate impacts affect many rights – the rights to health, livelihoods and decent work, adequate housing, and ultimately the right to life itself. But there can be no progress towards equitable and fair solutions to the climate crisis unless civil society – and that means people everywhere – has space for speaking up, protesting and joining together with others to do so.  In the lexicon of human rights, that’s the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association and public participation. These are fundamental and inalienable rights set out after the devastation of WWII, drafted by people from all regions, political and religious beliefs and accepted as legal obligations which states must abide by.

But what we see is all too many countries locking up people who speak their minds or who go out in the street to protest. This is not acceptable wherever it happens, and civil society stands together in solidarity with our imprisoned, harassed, and threatened sisters and brothers who are trying to create a better world and have suffered as a result.  We are watching and we demand an end to these practices.
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When we last met at the very ambition-less SBs to discuss how to deliver ambition through the vehicle of the Mitigation Work Program (MWP),we were not in a good place.

In Bonn and in the 5 months since then, ECO has noticed something quite strange: it seems that instead of focusing on ways to narrow the massive ambition and implementation gap, Parties have been playing at the broken telephone game.

For those who don’t know, the game is quite easy: The first player conveys a message to the second player, who then repeats the message to the third player, and so on. The last player on the line then has to announce out loud the message they heard to the entire group.

So, in the MWP telephone chain, Science is the first player putting forward the message, a very clear message: We are not on track. We have just received the NDC Synthesis and Emissions Gap reports, which have painted a very stark warning to the world. The remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5°C is shrinking and we are on a trajectory for as much as a 2.8°C warmer world.  Our total emissions in 2030 are currently on track to be approximately the same as in 2019, but instead we need to be cutting emissions by 8 per cent a year to be in line with science and the Paris Agreement.
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There’s no escaping the hard science on 1.5°C at this COP27. On the contrary.

On Monday morning delegates will be presented with a chrystal clear set of key fundamentals on 1.5°C, as the co-chairs of the Structured Expert Dialogue on the long-term goal will present their Synthesis Report.

Their findings include the following:

• At 1.1 °C warming, the world is already experiencing extreme climate change
• Achieving the long-term global goal without overshooting the 1.5°C limit is imperative in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. It would reduce the risk of crossing tipping points and triggering potentially irreversible changes in the climate system.
• Climate impacts and risks, including risk of irreversible impacts, increase with every increment of warming.
• It is still possible to achieve the long-term global goal of 1.5°C with immediate and sustained emission reductions.
• Rapidly falling costs of renewable energy present new opportunities for pre-2030 emission reductions.
• The window of opportunity to achieve climate-resilient development is rapidly closing
• The world is not on track to achieve the long-term global goal
• Equity is key to achieving the long-term global goal.

Isn’t that a great list of reminders? Yup.

But as you know, ECO LOVES specificity and hates fossil fuels. So ECO would like to flag a couple of key messages that were underlined by experts at the dialogues, but which didn’t quite make it to the Synthesis Report:

• The IPCC, in the first SED meeting, emphasized that: “immediate rapid reduction in fossil fuel-based emissions is a prerequisite to climate-resilient development pathways”.

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Delegates, it has been three years since we met in Bonn! ECO knows you have been looking forward to a beautiful, picturesque walk by the Rhein and some beer garden visits at what might feel a little like a class reunion.

Yet, ECO is worried: If we want to keep 1.5°C within reach, the world has just about as much time as since your last gathering in Bonn – 3 years! – to return global emissions to below 2020 levels. At the same time, millions of people around the world are already suffering from the impacts of the climate crisis at 1.1°C of global warming. This happens even as all countries promised to strengthen their 2030 targets and agreed to phase-down unabated coal and phase-out fossil fuel subsidies. Yet they keep expanding their dependence on fossil fuels, further worsening climate impacts.

Six months after Glasgow COP26, hardly any country is coming forward with increased targets or new climate finance commitments. COP27 is meant to be the implementation COP. For ECO, this means that ministers MUST fulfill their promises and, frankly, to stop lying. ECO looked for a more diplomatic word but if leaders tell a story of action at COPs and a story of excuses at home we could not come up with one.
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Celebrating 50 years since the first UN conference on the environment, Kenya and Sweden, supported by UNEP, co-hosted last week Stockholm+50 – a UN conference on how to accelerate the 2030 agenda and the SDGs.

The Stockholm+50 key recommendations should guide negotiators in Bonn. Particularly Recommendation 3, which reads: “Adopt system wide change in the way our current economic system works to contribute to a healthy planet…  phase out of fossil fuels …and recognizing the need for financial and technical support towards a just transition.”

This is a significant step forward on the COP26 outcome, recognizing all fossil fuels and the need to phase-out and not just phase-down the leading cause of the climate crisis. Parties to the UNFCCC must redouble their efforts and ensure the need to phase-out fossil fuels and phase-up just transition action is included in the decision texts, embedding the conclusions of Stockholm+50 into the UNFCCC process.

In addition, the recommendations include the need to recognize and implement the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment – shining a light on the importance of rights-based thinking.

Colleagues in Stockholm were acutely aware of the implementation gap. They were clear that we must “strengthen national implementation of existing commitments for a healthy planet … including by … scaling-up capacity support and development, access to and financing for environmentally sound technologies.”
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If someone wanted to paint a picture of the disfunctions and failure of multilateralism in preventing a climatic disaster, they would find a target-rich environment in the global efforts to control emissions for international shipping and aviation.

Contrary to popular misconception, these emissions were not left out of the Paris Agreement. In fact, emissions from international transport are an integral part of Paris climate and emissions goals. So they must be fully included in the Global Stocktake, Article 6, and all other relevant provisions of the Paris Agreement.

What makes international shipping and aviation emissions distinctive is that they occur on trips between countries and often outside national boundaries, and for this reason have not, in most cases, been included in national targets or NDCs.

Such emissions are the focus of processes under other UN bodies –  International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for aviation and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) for shipping. But until now, these bodies have failed to align emissions with the Paris goals – especially to their fair share of global efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

Rather than setting an example for other sectors and putting in place measures to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve full decarbonization before mid-century, ICAO and the IMO have produced disappointing results.
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‘Transformation refers to a change in the fundamental attributes of natural and human systems’ (Source: IPCC AR6)

Everybody agrees that to deal with and respond to the climate crisis, there needs to be transformation in the systems that have led us to where we are now.

And that includes the UNFCCC. Twenty-eight years of business as usual has not gotten us very far.  The world faces warming of 2.4°C at the present trajectory. Addressing Loss & Damage has hardly got to the starting line and funding isn’t anywhere to be seen. Only now, after the strong intervention of the countries most affected, are we beginning to talk about a Global Goal for Adaptation.

But talk so far has produced little. To be serious about increasing resilience, building capacity and reducing vulnerability we must step away from the careful plodding language of diplomacy and start talking action. 

There are some good signs. COP26 set off the work programme for the Global Goal on Adaptation. At this weeks SBs the first workshop will be held. The time for a Global Stocktake is at hand and roundtables for that are also being held this week. That’s good. But there are no solid rules for workshops and roundtables.
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For the Paris Agreement’s implementation, mutual trust is a key ingredient. This holds true also with regard to commitments made by developed countries to provide climate finance to developing countries.

Now, ECO remembers well, that time last year when developed countries finally acknowledged that they had not kept their promise to ramp up climate finance to $100bn a year by 2020. A string of new pledges was to save the day for COP26, although developed countries estimated that, with those new pledges, they would reach the $100bn level three years late – in 2023.

Or will they? Among the pledges was Germany’s promise to increase climate finance budget allocations to six billion Euros a year by 2025 at the latest. Yet, federal budget negotiations for 2022 that just concluded, provide for almost no increases over 2021 planned levels of slightly above four billion Euros, and internal drafts for the 2023 budget would, as of now, even lead to a slight decrease. So, rather than gradually increasing climate finance towards the promised level for 2025, Germany, for now, looks at stagnating climate finance levels. 

 To be sure, ECO would perhaps not pick on Germany, one of the larger climate finance providers, if it were not for the SB56 taking place in Germany, and, more importantly, for Germany holding this year’s G7 presidency, putting the country under special scrutiny.
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