Categoría: Previous Issues Articles

Crikey, Australia, you’re stinking up the Pacific! Why are you considering funding a mine that would sharply increase the country’s GHG emissions, endanger the already fragile Great Barrier Reef, and further impact the vulnerable Pacific Islands?!

Both the Australian Queensland state and the federal government have given approval for the Adani mine in the Galilee Basin. The only thing missing for this devious plan to come into effect is funding. Not to worry, Adani has applied for nearly US$1 billion in handouts from the government-backed Northern Australian Infrastructure Fund and are also seeking funding from Chinese banks!

Not only would funding this mine be catastrophic for at least four threatened species, several vulnerable habitats, and the Great Barrier Reef, it would also release heaps of emissions. The annual emissions from the Adani coal mine would be greater than the annual sum emissions of all 14 independent Pacific island countries.

Our second Fossil of the Day goes to Poland for obstructing negotiations and trying to subsidize coal, rather than phasing it out.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, Poland isn’t keen on the responsibility part.

The host of the next COP is trying to turn the EU’s flagship climate tool into the world’s largest coal subsidy scheme.
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ECO was pleased to hear the German environment minister announcing a new pledge of €50 million for the Adaptation Fund (and the development minister adding another €50m for the Least Developed Countries Fund). This has been a welcome signal on day 1 of the COP23 – and all the other rich countries now have nearly two weeks to contemplate if they follow suit.

What the minister did not mention in her opening speech is that the current government has slowed down renewable energy expansion and failed to agree on a phase-out plan for coal. This is at odds with the majority of the German population who favour a coal exit. Last Saturday, Bonn saw the largest climate march ever in Germany, with people demanding climate justice and a rapid coal phase-out. It may have slipped some delegates’ attention, but Bonn is not even 50km from the Rhineland coalfields, Europe’s largest source of carbon pollution with huge open-pit lignite mines and coal power stations.

In fact, German greenhouse gas emissions have not gone down for the past 8 years. Germany is going to miss its domestic 2020 reduction target of 40% compared to 1990 levels by a wide margin if the new government does not act decisively.
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ECO read the informal note prepared by COP22 and COP23 Presidencies on the features of the facilitate dialogue in 2018 (a.k.a “Talanoa Dialogue”) with great interest and believes that the note reflects rich consultations they had with Parties throughout the year. It can serve as a good start for discussion to finalize the “design” of the dialogue at this COP.

The dialogue will be the first opportunity for Parties to recognize the gap we have and to explore ways to ramp up their ambition.  The increase of ambition could take various forms but one thing is clear: the Dialogue has to inspire Parties to take concrete actions to put us back on the right track to achieve the Paris Agreement’s purpose.

ECO finds it a great idea to have both COP23 and COP24 Presidencies navigate the Dialogue.  We trust both presidencies to conduct the Dialogue in a “Talanoa” style, meaning, in an “inclusive, participatory and transparent” manner. We also welcome the fact that the note recognizes the role of non-Party Stakeholders in convening national, regional or global events as well as in preparing analytical and policy relevant inputs. There are still some issues to be resolved in the design but we also recognize that we do not have much time left till the end of this COP.
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ECO listened carefully to governments’ opening statements and is pleased to hear that adaptation is not forgotten. Ambitious adaptation is necessary for countries’ sustainable efforts to succeed despite the growing impacts of climate change, which are unavoidable. Contributions such as the 50 million Euros pledge for the Adaptation Fund by Germany on day 1 of COP 23 should inspire other developed countries to follow suit.

So, adaptation is crucial. However, as is often the case, adaptation is scattered across various agenda items and it is easy to lose sight of the full adaptation picture. That is why ECO is offering this handy guide:

• • Adaptation Fund (AF): The easy answer to the question of whether the AF shall serve the Paris Agreement is: YES! And Parties could agree on this answer here in Bonn, while sorting out remaining details in the next year.

• Adaptation Communications: Under the Paris Agreement, Parties should make progress on the guidance required in order to report what they have been doing on adaptation, outlining their plans for future actions, and informing the Global Stocktake. Just repeating what is already enshrined in the Paris Agreement is not enough. Parties have to say what they want in the adaptation communications, capture common points, sort out the differences and start to write down the draft guidelines!

We all know that strong NDCs require strong support, including technology development and transfer.

Given the capacity gaps in many developing countries, matching national needs and NDC priorities and assessing the often complex technological choices and trade-offs can be a challenge. With rapid changes in technologies, developing countries will need more timely and suitable support to fully implement their NDCs at the scope and scale necessary to be able to limit temperature increases to 1.5ºC.

Countries  need to ask their representatives at the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) and Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) to embrace the Technology Assessment and Horizon-Scanning.

It all starts with the recognition that all technologies are not equal when it comes to safety, impacts and efficacy. So before countries make their technology choices, there must be solid Technology Assessments to help them fully understand the risks, costs and benefits of the decisions they are making. That alone is a good start, but if we want to further increase ambition, we must do more.

The purpose of Horizon-scanning is to mine relevant existing data to predict future climate technology advances, scales, needs and potential impacts, and then to identify the most promising mitigation, adaptation, and loss-and-damage remediation technologies to find environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive, and effective options on which countries can rely.
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ECO received an invitation a few days ago to make its travel to COP23 “climate neutral”, by calculating the emissions of round trip air travel in tonnes of CO2 and compensating them. We decided to look into it a bit more and we have come out with more questions than answers.

First, is the calculator giving a real idea of someone’s carbon footprint? The invite says the calculator produces “conservative estimates of the climate footprint in tonnes of CO2”, which would give the impression that all the pollution is covered. But then, it refers to another tool for “more accurate calculation”. Additionally, the footprint does not take into account the impacts of non-CO2 pollutants such as aerosols, contrail formation and nitrogen oxides, which the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated to have 2 to 4 times the climate impact of CO2 emissions alone.

Second, is there double counting? If passengers buy credits that are already counted towards meeting a country’s climate target, then the offset credit does not neutralize anything as the emission reductions were already planned elsewhere. The newest UN Environment Emissions Gap Report, points out that  in the case of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects initiated several years ago that have not sold their credits, the reductions might be included in the emissions trajectory a country commits to in its NDC.
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What a year 2017 has been! No region has been spared the increasingly intense and extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and as a result of climate change. Hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods, not to mention the superstorm that is the current US Administration. Fiji Prime Minister Bainimarama rightly said that when it comes to climate change, “we are all in the same canoe.”
 
If we don’t come together and act, things are only going to get worse. “Extreme” events could become the new normal. This year’s UN Environment Emissions Gap report finds that current NDCs will only reduce emissions by a third of what is required by 2030. Even with their full implementation, a temperature increase of at least 3ºC by 2100 is very likely. ECO first wrote, in 2010, that the next few years are crucial to closing this mitigation gap, and that it requires a sharp increase in mitigation ambition, climate finance flows, technology cooperation, and capacity building. Negotiators, do you hear us now?
 
To facilitate transformational change and limit warming in line with Article 2 of the Paris Agreement, making climate finance available on the ground is key. Climate change is going beyond the ability of people and ecosystems to adapt.
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As COP23 begins, there is a large (orange) elephant in the room. The Trump Administration has made the US the only country that has fully rebuffed the spirit of Paris — not only with threats of withdrawal but also renewed pledges to ramp up extraction of fossil fuels, and that’s not all. While the Administration is abandoning all sense of reason to eliminate climate policy (despite it being unclear whether those efforts will be successful), the resistance is active and fighting back, making positive progress well beyond the reach of the Trump Administration.

ECO’s here to help fill in the gaps and let you in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the US climate scene.

First, the bad and the ugly: the Trump Administration’s endless attacks on efforts to address climate change. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by fossil fuel shill Scott Pruitt, has proposed rescinding the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule aimed at drastically cutting carbon emissions from power plants, and the foundation of the US’s NDC.

There are a slew of other terrible things his administration has acted on. Reopening vehicle emission standards for review with the aim of weakening them? Check. Halting a review of public land coal mining royalties and inclusion of climate change into reviews of those projects?
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ECO wants to remind everyone that despite the somewhat familiar setting of Bonn, this is no normal round of climate change negotiations, it is historic.This is the first time that a Pacific Island Nation is leading a COP.  And ECO asks, who better to lead this process?

After all, Pacific Island nations are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The continuous burning of fossil fuels is leading to accelerated sea level rise; longer, more intense heat waves; and exacerbated natural disasters.  Yet, in the face of such menace, Pacific Islanders are standing together and saying to the world: “We are not drowning. We are fighting!”

This is the resounding message of the Pacific Climate Warriors, a network of Pacific Islanders fighting for climate justice, who yesterday joined with local communities and activists in the Ende Gelande action to confront Europe’s biggest source of CO2: the coal mines and power plants in Germany’s Rhineland. They stood in solidarity with thousands of people as part of a peaceful protest to shut down one of the world’s biggest lignite coal mines and demand an immediate coal phase-out — because these mines are still expanding and threatening the livelihoods of frontline communities around the world.
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While loss and damage has seemed all but forgotten at this SB, ECO expects the UNFCCC’s first Pacific island Presidency to inject COP23 with a strong dose of the reality of climate impacts, thus directing some much-needed attention towards L&D. Although there is no major decision on L&D for November, Fiji’s own extreme vulnerability to losses and damages should create a push for ambitious outcomes.

At least some L&D discussion will occur at COP23, when the Warsaw International Mechanism’s Executive Committee reports on its efforts to flesh out its five-year work plan. So here are a few suggestions on what needs to happen before COP23 to ensure progress on L&D befitting a Fiji Presidency.

First, Parties and non-state actors should actively engage in the drafting of the WIM’s five-year work plan, especially at October’s ExCom meeting. Usually, work plans are negotiated in technical bodies and then reported to the COP, but are not reopened to substantial revisions. Therefore, key issues, such as institutional arrangements and additional sources to provide financial support for loss and damage, must be addressed in the ExCom’s pre-COP draft. ECO will be carefully monitoring how Parties — especially wealthy countries that have resisted supporting L&D despite pledging to do so in Paris — contribute to the ExCom’s work.
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