Categoría: Previous Issues Articles

Yesterday, the Climate Vulnerable Forum declaration sent a resounding call to make the 1.5°C target real. Today, we continue to focus on the reality of climate impacts. 

Developing countries are at risk of acute climate damage and enormous adaptation costs. The European Union has a major role to play in ensuring the Paris agreement is fair and strong on this crucial issue. The EU has traditionally been a bridge builder in the negotiations. The EU needs to put its engineering skills to work. The EU should work closely with CVF countries to build unity and improve climate ambition. 

That means ensuring the Paris outcome truly supports countries to be resilient to climate impacts. A long-term goal on adaptation and a commitment to setting 5-year quantified financial targets are core elements. Our global resilience depends on the long-term target we set, so decarbonisation by 2050, and rapidly increasing ambition until we get there, are essential. 

No one is immune to the impacts of climate change. EU citizens are already experiencing severe floods and heat waves. In the last 30 years, Europe has seen a 60% increase in extreme weather events. Even in the EU, the poorest suffer most. Global solidarity must start in Le Bourget–ECO is looking to the EU to bring us together.

If we don’t honestly and courageously deal with the differentiation challenge, we’re going to get a low ambition agreement. 

Self-differentiation is not good enough. Neither is political differentiation that reflects only power and negotiation games. In submitting their INDCs, developing countries have made the first move to progress beyond the Kyoto categories set out in 1992. Developed countries should acknowledge this shift and respond by constructively addressing differentiation in regard to mitigation, finance and transparency, to ensure an equitable agreement. 

We need a dynamic approach to differentiation that is sensitive to changing levels of development and capability. We need a robust agreement that equitably closes the mitigation and development gaps. That agreement must reflect specific differentiation in each element.

To be Fossil-worthy, you must be cowardly. You must shake with a limp wrist. So yesterday we didn’t give out a Fossil. We gave a Ray of the Day.  

Despite the name, we do not give Rays out every day. It’s only given when extraordinary things happen. Monday night at 6pm, there was a high level meeting of 43 nations from the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF). They made a bold, ambitious declaration to do something amazing. The CVF declared that they support a Paris Agreement that aims to achieve full decarbonisation of our economies, so they can run their countries on 100% renewable energy by 2050! In doing so, these countries have decided not to play the victim. They are showing the kind of leadership the rest of the world can learn from. They are leading the way in setting course for a safer world with only 1.5°C of global warming. This declaration is so big, so bold, that it makes lots of the other countries look like…fossils.

Let’s hear it for the countries of the Climate Vulnerable Forum!

A permanent Action Agenda building on the lessons of the Lima Paris Action Agenda could narrow the gap between current emissions trajectories and those required to limit global temperature rise to below 1.5°C.   

Some of the elements of such a permanent Action Agenda seem to be falling into place. Nobody disagrees about the importance of closing the gap or of identifying menus of good policy options that could be scaled up or replicated. Nobody disagrees about the benefits of involving non-state actors. There is a growing consensus that we need to appoint two high-level champions to facilitate the development of initiatives that help to close the gap.

However, it gets murkier from there. Though developed countries can and should launch unilateral and cooperative actions with their own resources, developing countries will require additional finance and technological support to take extra action. Yet some parties seem to think that this should not be discussed.

Similarly, it is clear that climate change impacts are increasing and that we need to develop additional initiatives to scale up adaptation actions. Yet, the fate of a Technical Examination Process for adaptation is still hotly debated, and here too some Parties do not want to discuss ways to increase support for adaptation.
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Yesterday’s Joint Contact Group on the 2013-2015 review saw Saudi Arabia–supported by its shadows Oman and China, attempt to block clear conclusions from ADP and COP’s two years of excellent work on the long-term goal. Worse, those countries are trying to prevent progress towards a COP decision on strengthening the limit for acceptable warming, which has its foundations in the robust climate science contained in the Structured Expert Dialogue (SED).

The SED found that the previously accepted ‘guardrail’ opinion, that 2°C of warming is safe, is inadequate. Now we know that the line of defence must be set lower. Yesterday, many countries–including the members of the Climate Vulnerables Forum–echoed that concept in an impressive declaration, calling for a warming limit of 1.5°C.

2°C of warming would result in catastrophic impacts on sensitive global ecosystems. Arctic sea-ice will disappear, glaciers will melt, and ocean acidification will destroy coral reef ecosystems. In other words: disaster for the climate and disaster for our planet.

The good news is the SED concluded that keeping warming well below 2°C is still possible through deep emission cuts. These cuts can be achieved through full decarbonisation of energy systems, along with scaling-up of low-carbon energy technologies by approximately 90% by 2050.
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