Category: Previous Issues Articles

ECO presents its compliments to all delegates of Parties, representatives of the media and of observer organizations.

The United Nations will commemoratethe 70th Anniversary of the adoption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the 10th December 2018.

On this occasion and to celebrate the progress achieved by Parties, we wish to invite you all to join thefestivities in Katowice, Poland, during COP24 by ensuring that human rights are respected, promoted and taken into consideration in climate action as outlined in the opening paragraphs of the Paris Agreement.

The Paris Agreement implementation guidelines offer an important tool to support and promote the efforts made by Parties to ensure that human rights serve as a basis for their implementation of effective and sustainable climate action, placing peoples and communities at the core of mitigation and adaptation action. COP24 is the occasion to remind the world of the importance of these norms.

COP24 will also finalize the operationalization of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform. This is a critical body to ensure that Indigenous Peoples’ participation is strengthened in the UNFCCC process and that traditional knowledge supports the implementation of the Paris Agreement in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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Delegates, take a deep breath and think about the moment the gable sounded and the Paris Agreement was decided. The applause, the recognition, the enthusiasm for action! All those pats on the back! You lapped it up – you had worked hard! Well, the Paris agreement was about past work … and future promise. And now is the future. Time to live up to your promises!

Each one of the Articles in the Paris Agreement was hard- fought and finely balanced. Including Article 8 – the one that some of you (US, EU, Australia) would, incredibly, rather forget. ECO says incredibly, because if the UN Convention on Climate Change is not about obligation and solidarity for vulnerable countries facing the worst impacts of climate change WHAT IS IT FOR, EXACTLY?

ECO hears some of you (US, EU, Australia) saying “we have the WIM, we’re done here” and ECO calls bullshit. It’s clear that your objective is to push it into a body that you keep under-funded and under-resourced, where your delegates block progress at every turn (how about two hours spent discussing whether it is possible for the ExCom to have a conversation with the IPCC authors and not allowing an outcome) in order to stop real progress on loss and damage.
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Dear Ministers, we are looking forward to seeing you at the Talanoa Dialogue in Katowice. While it will be freezing outside, Talanoa Dialogue will bring some much needed warmth and lots of dialogue to the process. ECO hears the incoming Polish Presidency has begun setting the stage – but plese be reminded, dear Ministers, the Talanoa Dialogue will only be as good as you and your contributions make it!

The combination of the urgent imperative of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5oC to reduce losses and damages by climate change, and the many opportunities for accelerated climate ambition, leave plenty of options to enhance your NDCs for the 2020 submission deadline.

The NDC revision process will be different for every country, involving national stakeholders in the discussion to identify the areas that can be enhanced, and you can kick this off by coming to the Talanoa Dialogue fully engaged to share experiences from your country, learn from others, and start building a process to revise your NDC by sharing experiences and learning from others. To help you prepare for a Talanoa Dialogue with a strong outcome, ECO has put together a small list of “do’s” and “don’ts”:

Do’s:
– Prepare before attending.
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While you deliberate on item 5: (section D.5,7 & 8) in the air-conditioned ESCAP conference centre, Where Are We?

We are on the front line of climate breakdown. As people of faith and people of conscience, we are struggling in our moral obligation to care for the poor and vulnerable, provide for our children and respect our inheritance.

We are facilitating Talanoa Dialogues in South Sudan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Mali, Niger, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Kenya.

The Fiji presidency has promised that these stories and suggestions will be put before the governments who are committed to the Paris Agreement as they draw up their new 5 year plans and promises for combatting climate change.

While you decide where to go for green curry after hours of negotiation, Where Do We Want To Go?

We want to see people stay in their homes, secure in their livelihoods, building for the future and ready and able to overcome the next set of shocks and disruption.

We want people to be listened to and their concerns and suggestions be acted upon.

We want people to be party to solutions with their insights and knowledge accumulated into national plans rather than their being planned for and told what todoandhowtodoit.
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In the corridors of the UN conference centre in Bangkok, ECO heard a widespread old mantra: “Finance is POLITICAL”. Well, yes, finance is political, as most of the issues you’re negotiating here are. Should it prevent Parties from progressing on the elements in the agenda, therefore putting at risk an ambitious overall outcome by Sunday? Clearly not. Is it an excuse for the EU to spend their time in rainy Bangkok hiding behind a toxic Umbrella? Hell no. Countries cannot leave Thailand without a clear pathway on finance from here to Katowice.

Speaking of political, Parties should actually think hard about how to elevate the finance question between now and Katowice, in order to find the much needed landing zones to set modalities to make climate finance predictable, define a new finance target by 2025 and adopt robust accounting rules for finance. Let ECO remind you that by December, you will have many opportunities to address climate finance at a high political level: you should use the IMF/World Bank annual meeting, the Pre- COP and G20 to send the right signals that finance will be taken seriously and progress by COP24.

While ECO expects you to arrive in Katowice with clear options to make climate finance a strong element of the Paris rulebook, we also hope you will make the best use of the high-level meetings you’ll have there.
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ECO wants to draw the attention of negotiators to the tens of thousands of people here in Bangkok and around the world taking part in more than 600 Rise for Climate actions this weekend. In more than 80 countries, communities are taking part in a range of creative, distributed local actions in cities, towns, institutions, universities, and places of worship to demonstrate the urgency of the climate crisis. We are emphasising the increasing impacts we are all experiencing, particularly in the most vulnerable regions, while simultaneously showcasing innovative community-led solutions to keep fossil fuels in the ground and accelerate the just transition to 100% renewable energy.

ECO isn’t here just to criticise the (pretty slow) progress of these negotiations per se. But perhaps negotiators would like to look long and hard at the motivation, energy and leadership that people from California to Colombia and Thailand to South Africa are demonstrating this weekend. We are seeing the largest ever climate march the US West Coast has ever seen, the first ever virtual mobilisation (with holograms!) taking place across Asia, groups in the UK and Germany pushing for more divestment, leaders in Australia, Colombia and Canada facing pressure for continuing to dig up fossil fuels, swathes of town-hall actions across the USA and France, and banks coming under fire in Tokyo for financing fossil fuels.
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ECO is pulling out the popcorn for the discussion on the transition away from Kyoto Protocol mechanisms today. The current Annex on the table is vague about where we are going and when, but it’s clearly on the minds of a large number of Parties, so we think it’ll spark some serious discussion.

We’re not saying the discussion will be easy, but we hope Parties will highlight where we’ve been and where we’re going – namely how we learn from the lessons of the past, while considering the urgencies of the present. Especially because things have gotten a lot more complicated with all countries having NDCs, the evolving framework of carbon accounting and corresponding adjustments, and the new offset market that will be created by aviation’s 2016 climate deal–the CORSIA.

One thing is clear: We don’t want a copy-and- paste of old tools. An automatic transition of CDM credits, or any KP credits for that matter, would destroy the credibility of the new system, undermine ambition and the environmental integrity of the Paris Agreement, and completely disregard the outstanding questions around the local impact of some these projects on communities and the environment.

We hope that parties will focus on the critical question at hand: What does a transition of Kyoto Protocol mechanisms mean?
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As hundreds of wet negotiators who walked back from the conference centre this week can attest to, we all prefer some sun and blue skies. But we are still far away from blue skies for the Paris Agreement Work Program (PAWP). True, some hard work from negotiators made a few clouds go away but there is still much work to be done. A few ominous grey storm clouds have appeared on the horizon (did anyone say NDC registry?).

With only three days left, ECO is happy to provide you with some thoughts on how to get nearer to blue skies for COP:

In the global stocktake negotiations, ECO is pleased to witness how the tool is being transformed into something startingtoresemble“atext.”Ofcourse,havingmanymutually exclusive options in the text means that Parties at some point need to engage with each other on how to resolve those divergences and ECO suggests that they should already use their time in Bangkok, perhaps sharing an umbrella or over some green curry, to try finding possible compromises. For example, how to ensure that Loss and Damage can be properly considered as a dedicated workstream? How to ensure meaningful participation by and input from observer organizations? Or, how can equity help the stocktake fulfil its purpose of increasing action, support and cooperation?
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Question: what happens when there is no longer a long- term? No, this is not a bleak pondering on where current emissions trajectories will lead us, although that is probably warranted.

Rather, we’re thinking about the long-term finance (LTF) work programme, which includes annual in-session workshops, biennial high-level ministerial dialogues on climate finance (mark your calendars: the next one is at COP 24!), and an annual COP decision where Parties have the opportunity to assess progress in climate financing, including issues of scaling up, balance, effectiveness and access.

ECO always found it somewhat bemusing that the long-term finance work program only runs until 2020. Elsewhere in the UNFCCC, and in general usage, there’s an understanding that long- term means at least mid-century, or beyond. But not in the weird and wonderful world of climate finance.

Anyway, here we are, two and a half years shy of the expiration of the LTF, and countries are understandably wondering: what comes next? This has particularly manifested itself in the negotiations on operationalizing Article 9.5. Developing countries are rightly wondering what will happen to the biennial, forward-looking communications on finance that contributor countries are required to submit by Article 9.5. Of course, 9.5 communications will be inputs to the Global Stocktake (GST ), but that only happens every five years, while these communications happen every two years.
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Technology transfer is vital if we are serious about limiting warming to 1.5°C. The technology framework was included in the Paris Agreement to provide guidance on technology as part of the means of implementation. The framework was meant to enhance the process of delivering technology to support transformational climate action.

Since Paris however, Parties have lost their ability to dream big and develop the technology framework that the world needs. During negotiations on the structure of the framework, one party said that everything being discussed was agreed as part of the technology mechanism created in Cancun! Isn’t the point of having the framework as part of the Paris Agreement a recognition that we need to do more? It is worth remembering that – as ECO has previously pointed out – the technology mechanism has been stymied by the lack of funding and struggled to get past the first stage of top down, gender-blind technology needs assessments.

The framework negotiations may have lots of text, but as far as progressing forward with true technology design, innovation and transfer, it still feels like we are stuck at square one. Parties have been happy to bog themselves down in rhetorical details, debating euphemisms of the framework ranging from skeletons to castles and closets, but have shied away from anything that can turn a needs assessment into a transformative plan of action with tangible results for the most climate vulnerable nations.
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