Catégorie : Previous Issues Articles

Au début de la seconde semaine de la COP20, ECO souhaite chaleureusement la bienvenue aux ministres et leur rappelle que l’essentiel pour réussir à Lima est de montrer des progrès sur la finance climatique. Et quelle meilleure opportunité que de faire ça lors de la séance interministérielle mardi ? Le Secrétariat considère la Séance comme une opportunité unique pour les Ministres de souligner que les financements publics abondent et de confirmer leur intention de les augmenter.
Néanmoins, dans l’attente, un certain malaise plane. Les ambitions sont en baisse et l’importance de définir des projections pour atteindre 100 milliards de $ en 2020 semble oubliée. Alors, ici et maintenant, parlons solutions.
Astuce 1 : Créer une feuille de route pour 2020
Une feuille de route financière à 2020 est l’évidence même pour atteindre l’objectif de 100Md$. Cette première étape doit montrer que les financements publics vont non seulement se maintenir, mais augmenter.
Astuce 2 : Simplicité et prévisibilité
Vous l’avez déjà entendu, mais disons-le une fois de plus : les flux financiers doivent être prévisibles pour encourager une action ambitieuse pour le climat. Sans oublier que les pays doivent dire clairement ce qui relève des financements publics ou non.
Astuce 3 : Soyez précis
Les sources de financement ainsi que les canaux et les instruments à déployer doivent être exprimés clairement pour renforcer la confiance.

L’idée d’un objectif mondial d’adaptation suscite beaucoup de curiosité. Puisqu’ECO incarne, comme vous le savez, la clarté, voici notre petit guide de cette résolution phare. L’objectif mondial d’adaptation vise à accroître la résilience des populations et des écosystèmes aux impacts des changements climatiques. Les mesures visant à atteindre cet objectif doivent également protéger les droits humains et combattre l’inégalité, qui sont tous deux essentiels à une perspective de développement durable. La voie choisie pour atteindre cet objectif doit être dynamique, prendre en compte la hausse des températures et ses impacts. Grâce à une adaptation et une réduction des risques de catastrophe plus étendues, l’objectif devrait contribuer à minimiser les impacts résiduels et les pertes et dommages.
Voici les principaux objectifs de l’objectif mondial d’adaptation :
1. Ressources financières et techniques suffisantes. L’adaptation est applicable à tous les pays et tous doivent développer des stratégies d’adaptation pour faire face à l’augmentation des risques climatiques. Toutefois, ce sont les pays en développement, et plus particulièrement les pays les plus vulnérables, qui ont désespérément besoin d’un soutien financier et technologique. Les pays développés doivent donc fournir un soutien durable et adapté pour venir compléter le développement constant et les efforts d’adaptation des pays en développement vulnérables.
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ECO observes that the critical missing piece of the technology transfer puzzle is technology assessment. And why? Because all kinds of technology, even those we generally like, carry some level of risk. But some are much riskier than others, and that’s the point.

Here’s a well known example. Decades ago, lead became a common additive to gasoline despite its known properties as a human toxin. Narrow commercial interests and inadequate assessment allowed the practice to become widespread. As a result a generation or more were exposed to airborne lead and experienced health effects because basic principles of technological assessment and precaution were ignored.

In pursuing technology deployment and innovation to address climate change, we should not sacrifice safety for expediency. While the exposure to lead impacted only those countries that allowed the lead additive, technologies that have global reach can impact us all.

Here’s what that means for innovative climate technologies. By mid-2013, 78 developing country Parties had prepared their Technology Needs Assessments (TNAs) reports and action plans including the technologies they need to address climate risks, and more are in the process of developing their TNAs.

This is a situation that demands technology assessment.

The first question that arises is where this should happen.
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Au mois de juin de cette année, le barrage hydroélectrique de Santa Rita a été approuvé dans le cadre d’un Mécanisme de Développement Propre malgré de graves préoccupations quant au respect des droits de l’homme.

Les communautés de la région de l’Alta Verapaz signalent que l’ensemble des individus consultés sur le projet était en fait des employés du projet. Les demandes de consultations émanant de ceux qui étaient touchés par le projet ont été ignorées par la société. Pire, ce conflit a donné lieu à la violence, et à la mort de deux enfants. En août, la compagnie a répondu par une opération de répression avec plus de 1 500 agents de police, forçant les familles autochtones à se réfugier dans les montagnes.

Une plainte déposée par les communautés locales devrait mener à une enquête en janvier 2015. Les banques de financement sont aussi concernées et étudieront la situation en janvier 2015. Mais les MDP, destinés à promouvoir un développement propre, ne se sent pas concerné.

Pour remédier à cette absence de garanties, le groupe AOSIS, soutenu par l’Ouganda, a proposé d’établir un mécanisme pour répondre aux préoccupations soulevées par ceux qui subissent les projets mis en œuvre. Ce mécanisme est indispensable pour commencer à appliquer la décision de Cancun selon laquelle les parties devraient respecter pleinement les droits de l’Homme dans toutes les actions liées au climat.
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Mais quel horrible rêve. La délégation saoudienne semble rêver d’un monde fait d’hommes, sulement d’hommes… et d’un nuage de pollution. Le Fossile du jour de samedi est revenu à l’Arabie Saoudite pour son positionnement fort contre la reconnaissance de l’égalité homme-femme dans les processus de mise en œuvre des négociations. L’UE est aussi tombée en disgrâce en soutenant le retrait de ces éléments.

ECO became very dizzy from just flipping through the pages of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report launched yesterday: even with emission cuts to keep the world below 2°C, climate change adaptation is likely to cost developing countries $150 billion a year during 2025-2030 and could climb as high as $500 billion by 2050.

Put this against the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) estimates of $22-25 billion dollars in public finance for adaptation, of which a (pathetic?) $8 billion came as support from rich countries. It’s not only that far too little gets invested in securing food production, fighting water scarcity and protecting citizens from climate-related disasters. It’s also that the longer this gap is left unattended, the bigger the losses and damages from climate change will get over time.

ECO wonders if the high-level dialogue ministerial might be a great time to reflect on this gap and what steps need to be taken to close it. Obviously, the emerging call by developing countries for a roadmap that shows how developed countries will meet their promise to ramp up support to $100 billion a year by 2020 is a very first step to closing the adaptation finance gap. Showing this pathway would create the much-needed predictability and forward-looking transparency needed, especially by the particularly vulnerable developing countries, to enhance urgent adaptation action.
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ECO is troubled by recent revelations about bilateral finance for coal-fired power plants being counted towards climate finance obligations under Fast Start Finance.

ECO is also concerned that the Green Climate Fund Board has not explicitly ruled out the possibility that the GCF might fund fossil fuel projects. It seems painfully obvious that something called the Green Climate Fund should not support coal-fired power plants, but the experience of Fast Start Finance clearly shows that strict rules are needed.

In May, over 250 movements and organisations from developing countries – representing people bearing the brunt of climate impacts – wrote a letter to the GCF Board. This letter was also supported by 80 northern NGOs. The letter urged the Board to make it an explicit policy that GCF funds will not be used, directly or indirectly, for financing fossil fuel projects or programs.

ECO urges the COP, in its guidance to the GCF, to require the GCF’s Board to adopt an exclusion list that would prevent any Green Climate Fund money from supporting fossil fuels. The GCF’s mandate for supporting a “paradigm shift” leaves no room for it to support a continued global fossil fuel addiction.

ECO is delighted to announce that the ADP draft decision text now contains the option for a proposed amendment for paragraph 9, which would read: « decides that all parties shall communicate a nationally determined mitigation contribution for 2025 ».

This is exactly what ECO has been calling for, and the Marshall Islands was awarded the Ray of the Day yesterday for having tabled this text. ECO now urges all Parties to communicate their support for the proposal and affirm that they shall communicate an INDC for 2025.

AILAC also was positive in proposing a 2025 date, but with an indicative 2030 one alongside, as in Brazil’s proposal. ECO strongly welcomes their support for five-year commitment periods, and their concern to ensure that mitigation commitments are not locked in for the next 16 years, as sole 2030 commitments would do. However, there are concerns that once governments set a target, even if an ‘indicative’ one, it will become locked into the national psyche as the de facto actual target.

The 2°C temperature limit, for example, was an EU position going into the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and is based on IPCC Second Assessment Review science. Despite the science demanding ever more ambition, the EU has not shifted their position in nearly twenty years.
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Imagine a country hit by three of the world’s deadliest storms of the past three years and are about to face another typhoon. No this is not the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately this is not fiction.

Typhoon Hagupit is bearing down on the Philippines – smashing into the Eastern Samar province which was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) only one year ago. In 2012 Typhoon Bopha hit the Filipino island of Mindanao and in 2011 Tropical Storm Washi killed more than a thousand people and caused massive flooding. The Philippines has had the world’s deadliest storms of the past three years. We hope and pray that Hagupit will not fit in this category of terror. But such severe storms, and other forms of loss and damage, will be a more frequent occurrence as climate change worsens.

Delegates in Lima will face a devastating political storm if they fail the people of the Philippines, and other vulnerable people facing the worst impacts of climate change, and do not make progress on the operationalisation of Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage.

Two important elements — sufficient representation for vulnerable countries, and a subsidiary structure of a financial and technical facility for the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage – hang in the balance in the current SBSTA/SBI text.
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The ADP decision on INDCs will be the key to the Lima outcome. If Parties agree to solid information requirements and meaningful review mechanisms, then we’ll be on the road to success in Paris. But if Parties are not given the tools and guidance that they need to define strong, transparent, and equitable commitments, we’ll be on another road altogether, and ECO will not even speculate about its likely destination.

We need INDCs that are based on the three core equity principles of the Convention:

Adequacy: INDCs must be specified precisely, and expressible as an ambitious number of tons of mitigation. If this bottom-line information is not available, then it will be next to impossible to do even the most basic assessment of the INDCs. Including assessing if we’re on a pathway that will prevent dangerous climate change and limit global temperature increase to below 2°C that keeps the door to 1.5°C open.

CBDR+RC: INDCs must represent a level of effort that corresponds, at least roughly, to the national “fair share” of the country that tables it. This fair share is to be understood in terms of differentiated responsibility and respective capability, and every country should explain, in just these terms, why it considers its INDCs to meet the requirements of Article 3 of the Convention.
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