Category: Previous Issues Articles

Koronivia is a long way from Katowice, but progress on the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA) at COP24 is well within reach.

Every farmer knows that success depends on maximizing the time avail-able within the growing season. This means knowing the landscape with-in which you are working, assembling the resources you need to do your work, and planting and harvesting according to a clearly structured plan.

The same applies to the KJWA.

In order to make the most of the short negotiating season available here, ECO suggests Parties consider the following ways of bringing clarity to the work ahead of them:

1. Ask the Secretariat to undertake a mapping of the work of the Constituted Bodies, and a review of available means of implementation – both financial and non-financial. This will allow Parties to identify and discuss existing gaps related to each of the workshop topics.
2. Ask the Secretariat to simultaneously undertake a review of available means of implementation, both financial and non-financial.
3. Agree that a key deliverable of the KJWA could be criteria or guidance for NDCs, GCF, Adaptation Fund & Constituted Bodies, to ensure they reach five overarching objectives: food security, adaptation, absolute and equitable emission reductions, ecosystem integrity and gender responsiveness.

... Read more ...

Brazil, the birthplace of UNFCCC and a so far trusted broker of the Paris Agreement negotiations, is about to become one of the world’s climate rogues. All thanks to president-elect Jair Bolsonaro and his set of very peculiar ideas about climate change and the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro is not even in power yet and has already embarrassed Brazilian delegates here in Katowice by backtracking on hosting COP25 less than 10 days before the start of COP24. It’s, for sure, a shame, but let’s stay positive and keep an eye on the silver linings: can you imagine a COP President who thinks global warming is nothing but a Marxist plot to transfer power to China? No, you haven’t read it wrong, and those are Ernesto Araújo, the incoming Brazilian Foreign minister, words.

Even if Bolsonaro doesn’t follow the steps of his BFF Donald Trump and keeps Brazil in the Paris deal, his grand vision for the Amazon is gut-wrenching: drop deforestation control, open up Indigenous lands for agribusiness and mining, scrap protected areas and crack down on activists, just for good measure.

The cost for the climate would be nothing short of catastrophic: deforestation has already increased by 32% between August and November.
... Read more ...

If Fred told you that he was paying $500 towards helping Ginger with re-pairs to her home, you may tend to think that Fred was a really generous guy. But, if you found out that Fred had run his truck into Ginger’s house, you might be slightly less convinced of Fred’s generosity. If you then found out that Fred was drunk at the time this event occurred, and that it wasn’t even the first time that Fred had drunkenly driven into Ginger’s house, in fact he was a serial offender, you might be even more disin-clined to see it from Fred’s perspective. And THEN you found out that Fred’s damage to Ginger’s house this time was way more than $500, plus the damage in the past, well suddenly the real Fred is revealed. It gets even worse, this $500 payment is already being counted towards Fred’s child support payments. Now Fred looks like the real dickhead he is.

This is a tortured analogy of the situation with the Warsaw International Mechanism’s (WIM) for Loss and Damage planned technical paper on sources of finance for loss and damage – rich countries are going to get to double count their aid, humanitarian and adaptation finance, in fact any money they think seems to vaguely smell of ‘loss and damage’, without any assessment of actual loss and damage occurring or the needs of vulnerable countries.
... Read more ...

ECO has a full meal waiting for you just here: we have some good news, some bad news, and to finish, a paradox.

The good news is that our host, Poland, has finally ratified the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol. Together with the Cook Islands, Guinea-Bissau, St. Lucia, Togo, Tonga, and Uruguay, the other recent ratifiers, this brings the total number of ratifications up to 122.

The bad news, however, is that this is not yet enough: in order for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (KP2) to enter into force 22 more countries are needed.

And that’s where the paradox comes in. We find well over 22 ratification candidates among some of the countries and groups which most frequently raise the issue of the urgent need for Doha ratification and pre-2020 action. Even Qatar, the birthplace of the Doha Amendment at COP18, has not ratified it yet. What signal does that send to future hosts and presidencies?

It is worth noting that KP2 entry into force will make it possible to hold developed countries to their pre-2020 commitments, and that failure to ratify and implement the KP2 sets a worrying precedent for the Paris Agreement. It’s been six years, Parties.
... Read more ...

Hospitals in dusty small towns. Young children lying on beds next to their mothers displaying familiar signs of severe malnutrition. Some survive, others don’t. Niger is one of the poorest countries on Earth with one of the highest rates of child mortality. This is a result of many factors, among them, endemic poverty, high population growth, and a lack of education on child nutrition. However, it is extreme weather and recurrent droughts in this vast arid strip of land that have continuously pushed communities over the edge, exasperating and making episodes like the ones described above more and more common. Niger is one of the countries that is most adversely affected by climate change. Rainy seasons have become much shorter and harder to predict, challenging communities to survive with lower quality, and quantities of food and water.

Climate change is not abstract for anyone here, it has become a harsh reality with real and concrete consequences on communities. When the rains don’t fall and changing seasons significantly impact crops and livestock, life becomes incredibly dire, especially for the most marginalized and vulnerable people of society.

But this is just one part of the story.

I see women and men in remote villages in Niger who are eager to use better technologies and improved, drought-resistant seeds.
... Read more ...

... Read more ...

... Read more ...

Today, Parties will get to hear both the urgency of the crisis as well as the feasibility of achieving a 1.5°C pathway straight from the horse’s (or in this case scientist’s) mouth at the SBSTA-IPCC special event on the SR1.5. While ECO does not want to steal the IPCC’s thunder, ECO did want to highlight a few key points from the report.

The scale of the task is clear: the world needs to halve CO2 emissions in little more than a decade and achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. This will mean a rapid phasing out of fossil fuels and a transition to a 100% renewable energy future. If the world were to follow the P1 pathway it would mean close to an 80% reduction in coal use below 2010 levels by 2030, with significant cuts in oil and gas are well. Time is of the essence for Parties to strengthen their NDCs and mid-century emission reduction development strategies, accordingly!

In terms of ECO’s question on how to respond to the SR1.5, ECO hopes that the SBSTA chair listens closely to the present by the IPCC and delivers as thorough a summary report as the Chair developed for the last SBSTA-IPCC special event held in May 2016. This report should feed into the Talanoa Dialogue and its outcome.

On Monday, the World Bank released news of its post-2020 climate action, to cover 2021-2025.

The announced USD$200 billion is good news. Quite a lot of zero-carbon resilient-infrastructure building good news, in fact, and the Bank has doubled its existing climate finance commitment. The World Bank (minus the IFC) has also committed to 50% for adaptation. Did other MDBs hear that?

Who could complain about the newly-pledged efforts to support 36GW of renewables and 1.5GW of energy efficiency savings? Or helping 100 cities decarbonize?

It’s just that the Bank has failed to actually state a climate target, or even how much carbon savings all that money will aim to achieve. It has not promised to end funding fossil fuel infrastructure completely, either directly or through intermediaries, although its prior announcement to stop funding upstream gas and oil remains a very positive step. This remains a gaping hole in the Bank’s stated climate ambition.

Perhaps the simplest way to set a climate-ambitious target would be to pledge, as civil society called on them to do at their October annual meeting, that the World Bank will make ALL of its portfolio lending compatible with 1.5°C.

And please remember in the midst of all the joy surrounding the new announcement, that most of the money from the banks are loans that must be paid back — by the world’s poorest countries.

Oh crap – that’s smoke. We ventured outside and were choked back inside by the acrid burn smell of fresh fire. Where was it? Nearby? In our neighbourhood? Fear took hold as the sky closed in.

The news spread fast; early that morning a fire had started near a town called Paradise, California. The fire became a storm of flames, whipping through dead and dying brush, spreading 110 metres per minute. We heard of people fighting to survive in rivers and ponds as flames leaped over their heads. Tales of people running for their lives, clothes on fire as firefighters fought to save them. Of lives lost and lives upended as California’s most destructive and deadliest wildfire destroyed over 611 square kilometres; roughly the size of 5 Katowices.

In the Bay Area, the air was so hazardous, schools were closed and over 8 million people were advised to stay indoors — especially the very young and very old. Protective masks sold out. The Paradise fire killed at least 88 people and destroyed more than 13,000 homes. Over 200 people are still missing and 1000s of refugees are camped out in tents, housed in emergency shelters, and living in their cars. More than 50,000 people were evacuated in a twelve-hour stretch of terror, bravery, confusion and turmoil that overwhelmed the evacuation and safety plans.
... Read more ...