Category: Previous Issues Articles

Ludwig is not only a fan of modern art, but also of the opera. While Ludwig enjoys watching the opera from the balcony, he didn’t bring his opera glasses to Bonn. Ludwig wonders why he and the rest of civil society must watch from the balcony when the floor seats remain largely empty. Did he miss the ticket sales? Ludwig wonders if it’s beca

use Parties would rather see banner drops than speak with him face to face.

With a generous two-minute intervention to provide substantive input on a total of 49 agenda items (about two seconds per item!), Ludwig wonders where he can learn to sing fast enough to squeeze in valuable input to enrich the negotiations and foster progress. Perhaps a more comfortable alternative would be to allow Ludwig and his friends to make more interventions addressing specific issues in contact groups.

Ludwig also worries that not everyone has a ticket to the opera, which should be shared by all. With so many empty seats, he hopes the box office can throw open its doors and offer more just members only ticket sales.

After 21 years of waiting and an almost doubling in growth of maritime greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, members of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) finally committed last month “to reduce the total annual GHG emissions by at least 50% by 2050 compared to 2008” while pursuing full decarbonisation in line with the Paris Agreement. The IMO’s submission to the Talanoa Dialogue (where’s yours, ICAO?!), is the first time the IMO and the shipping industry have bought in to serious mitigation target and formally recognised the shipping industry’s role and responsibility to help achieve the Paris temperature goals. Besides, the IMO’s 2050 target is an in-sector reduction commitment, and ECO acknowledges in-sector reductions as a crucial part of the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

 

Now that the self-congratulatory statements are over, it is time to get down to the hard work and agree on the emission reduction measures that will deliver the IMO’s belated “New Year’s resolution.” The IMO and its member states now need to decide not only how to cut GHGs but also how to address the impact of these cuts on the economies of developing countries, because the lion’s share of maritime emissions involve trade to, from or between them.
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In the GST negotiations, Parties have set themselves the task of better organizing their thoughts as currently captured in the co-facilitators’ informal document. One way of doing this would be through clarity on which issues should be dealt with in separate work streams, and which should be considered cross-cutting and thus should be dealt with under all work streams.

 

One clear example of this is means of implementation and support (MOI). ECO believes that MOI should not be siloed into its own workstream. MOI is issue-specific and therefore, MOI for mitigation must be looked at in the mitigation workstream, MOI for adaptation in adaptation, MOI for making financial flows consistent with climate resilience and low-GHG development in the financial flows workstream. Clearly, none of these issues can be considered in isolation from the MOI needed to enable them.

 

Best available science and equity (that’s equity between countries, not just procedural equity and other such things!) are other important cross-cutting issues. Each of the workstream issues has their own specific ways in which equity must be taken into account and it must therefore be present in each of these work streams.

 

Finally, while ECO thinks a dedicated workstream for Loss and Damage (L&D) could be a good idea to ensure that L&D is taken up by the GST, it may be a better idea to deal with it in a cross cutting manner as well.
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ECO, like all of you, wants a strong, robust, and flexible enhanced transparency framework.

 

One of the elements necessary for building a strong enhanced transparency framework is capacity building and the provision of support for it. A good number of programs, initiatives, and efforts currently exist to support developing country Parties prepare their national reports. As we transition to the enhanced transparency framework, capacity building support is essential to developing countries. Two current programs supporting developing countries in preparing their national reports are the Consultative Group of Experts (CGE) and the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT). Though, they both start with the letter C, they should not be confused!

 

CBIT was created only a couple of years ago and is now up-and-running. While, CGE has been in existence since 1999 and will expire soon, having been renewed for 2014-2018. As Parties debate renewing CGE, let us consider the form and function for each of them.

	CGE	CBIT
FORM	Consultative Group of Experts that assist developing countries with their reporting efforts under the convention.	Capacity Building Initiative Transparency is a fund focussed on country projects.
FUNCTION	Support the development of National Communications and BURs. This is done through international panels, webinars, trainings, training guides.

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Parties have started to develop roadmap and timeframe to take forward Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA). Parties surely need no reminder that climate action under the Paris Agreement will kick off in 2020, and that agriculture will be one of the key components for many countries’ NDCs in adaptation and mitigation. To ensure that climate action really meets the goal of feeding people sustainably in a warming world, without undermining the 4 pillars of food security or peoples’ rights, ECO proposes that Parties remember to develop guiding principles through parameters. Clear expected outcomes should be defined, to help keep the KJWA process on track with the ultimate goal of informing climate action and NDCs in agriculture.

 

Parties should now decide on a structure to frame the 3 years of the KJWA. This is how ECO pictures it:

Input to the KJWA process should be the core guiding principles, recognising food security, the vulnerability of agriculture and principles of the Paris Agreement preamble (food security, human rights including the rights of indigenous peoples, gender, ecosystem integrity, intergenerational equity, just transition and public participation). This should be agreed here at SB48, to orient the KJWA workshops and expert meetings.

 

At the end of the process, ECO hopes that the outcomes of the KJWA will include a set of guidelines for climate action in the agriculture sector, including NDCs.

 

ECO was pleasantly surprised with yesterday’s country announcements on long-term strategies (LTS) during the opening plenary session of the Talanoa Dialogue. AILAC and the EU both clearly marked LTS as solutions for tackling climate change. ECO believes such strategies allow countries to structure what they’re going to do to tackle climate and outline how they’re going to do it, and so are key tools in helping countries to break the “ambition ceiling”.

 

What was missing though, were details on country-progress on developing their LTS, implementing them, and beefing-up the associated shorter-term measures used to achieve them, namely the NDCs. Without this, countries were essentially making “feel-good” announcements that have no merit and provide no certainty on their commitment to de-carbonise.

 

Fear not though, ECO is happy to share some tips on how to develop and implement a robust LTS and thereby maximise your country’s ambition.

 

ECO strongly encourages all Parties to develop and implement economy-wide LTS that are consistent with achieving the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5°C and the Sustainable Development Goals. It is imperative that a LTS is ambitious, includes clear timelines for phasing out fossil fuels, is legally binding (to avoid them being dropped by any less ambitious future governments that may come) and is regularly reviewed and revised upwards for compatibility with achieving 1.5°C.
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Ludwig is well known to be a lover of modern art, especially of Andy Warhol, who famously said that “art is what you can get away with.” Consequently, he was delighted to see that Australia obviously sha

res this love; they clearly had this quote in mind during the global stocktake informals yesterday. However, equity is not whatever you can get away with. In the context of these negotiations, it always means equity between countries (think CBDRRC and national circumstances), and thus equity in process. Participation alone is not enough for us to consider the stocktake as being conducted “in the light of equity,” as mandated by the Paris Agreement.

The writing is on the wall – we need finance and (non-insurance) financial instruments to address loss and damage!

 

The COP has given the ExCom a clear mandate to use the Suva Expert Dialogue (SED) to work on enhancing finance (and other means of support) for vulnerable countries and communities.

 

Developing countries and experts were unanimous that we must find more money. Vulnerable people are currently facing “exploding risks” they didn’t create and are being left to pay for them. This must be reversed.

 

Various experts and representatives from Parties also noted with concern an excessive attention on insurance at the expense of stronger action on other, often cheaper, fairer and effective instruments. Labelling it a “magic” tool, as one expert from a developed country

called it, did obviously not match the perception of many in the room.

 

Developing countries continued to articulate their priorities: finance to be able to scale up instruments (e.g. through a such as a global solidarity fund) such as social protection schemes; relocation funds; reconstruction funds; alternative livelihood programmes; insurance premium subsidies to name few.

 

To deliver urgently needed resources we will need public contributions by developed country governments as well as the innovative sources of finance that many Parties and experts referred to – like a fair, equitable, polluter pays Climate Damages Tax, to raise the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary.
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While raising ambition has become the buzzword at the UNFCCC talks, ECO would like to encourage Parties to consider a more comprehensive definition of ambition. What if we measured successful climate action not only from a quantitative perspective (e.g.  measured in tons of greenhouse gases and Dollars for climate finance?), but also from a qualitative perspective (e.g. how has climate action contributed to respecting, promoting and considering human rights and related principles and obligations)? Effective implementation of the Paris Agreement requires a critical and cross-cutting element: putting people at the center of all climate decision-making and action.

 

At COP21, Parties committed to apply their respective rights-related obligations to their climate actions. This is monumental as literally all Parties to the UNFCCC are signatories to at least one international convention on human rights. Now that Parties are focusing on developing the Rulebook of the Paris Agreement which will have a long-term and decisive impact on the implementation of the Agreement, ECO would like to encourage them to reflect the full vision agreed on in Paris.

 

ECO is thrilled to hear that on Wednesday the European Union, supported by a number of other interventions, called for the inclusion of the various rights and associated elements from the Paris Agreement preamble into the set of recommended information for States to provide in their NDCs.
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ECO eagerly awaited the opening plenary of the Talanoa Dialogue yesterday, excited to see which climate champions would emerge. First off the blocks were the LDCs and AOSIS, both groups calling for the Talanoa Dialogue to result in enhanced ambition in the form of updated NDCs. AILAC likewise called for having updated NDCs by 2020, adding the importance of developing long-term strategies by 2020, as well that provide domestic roadmaps for the transformation that is required to fulfill the goals of the Paris Agreement. Props to the European Union for also emphasizing that this is an exercise focused on enhancing ambition and ensuring the relevance of long-term strategies to the ambition picture, and EIG for highlighting the key role the Talanoa Dialogue will play in raising ambition. ECO would love to hear more about what this means for your NDCs though. ECO welcomes that the Umbrella Group recognized that the Talanoa Dialogue is an exercise to inform NDCs, but being a bit more specific would help, don’t you think?

 

Thanks to South Africa for raising key questions about the outcome and process – how the transition will happen from the technical to the political phase, and what the outcome of the political phase would be.
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