Catégorie : Previous Issues Articles

Developed countries: do you often wonder how you can help vulnerable countries meet the mounting costs of climate change through loss and damage, given the fiscal challenges you’re facing at home?

Vulnerable countries: do you despair that the costs of loss and damage will never be met by anyone other than those suffering the impacts?

ECO understands that the answer to both of these questions could be addressed with the one proposal. Carbon Majors, or Carbon Criminals as some like to call them, the companies most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, ought to pay a levy on their fossil fuel extraction into the Warsaw international loss and damage mechanism.

The ground breaking report released last November by Rick Heede of Climate Accountability Institute attributed 3.5% of global fossil fuel emissions, since the industrial revolution began, to Chevron’s products, 3.2% to ExxonMobil, 3.1% to Saudi Aramco, 2.5% to BP, 2.2% to Gazprom and 2.1% to Shell.  Altogether, an astounding 63% of global emissions are attributable to the coal, oil and gas extracted, and cement manufactured, by just 90 Carbon Majors.

These mammoth fossil fuel entities have made trillions in profits (Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP each made more than US$20 billion last year) whilst their products caused climate change. 
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Even though the Secretariat and Parties keep saying that civil society plays a critical role in the negotiations, there’s very little they’re doing to help us participate effectively. The proposed cost recovery policy for side events and exhibits is a case in point. The following is the collective response on behalf of all non-governmental observer constituencies, which offers to work with the Secretariat and Parties to find a real and sustainable solution. Why not give us more than four days and an open and participatory process to do so?

STATEMENT REGARDING COST RECOVERY POLICY ON BEHALF OF ALL OBSERVER CONSTITUENCIES

7 June 2014

On behalf of the constituencies representing business and industry, research groups, indigenous peoples organisations, environmental groups, women and gender, trade unions, local government and municipal authorities, farmers and youth, we would like to express our concern regarding the policy on cost recovery announced in the Secretariat’s information note dated June 4th. This policy threatens to undermine the quality of observer participation in the UNFCCC process. 

From its beginning, the UNFCCC has recognised the value of observer participation, most recently during Thursday’s Article 6 dialogue on public participation. Within the SBI negotiations and workshops, numerous ministerial statements and today’s discussion, the Secretariat and Parties have repeatedly acknowledged the “crucial and integral” role of observers in and the value of our contributions to this process. 
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ECO realised, with much dismay, that yesterday’s article on “The Visionary Few” missed the important statement by Uganda’s minister on behalf of the LDCs. We are sorry for this oversight, but were excited to hear that the LDCs are taking IPCC science as seriously as environmental NGOs when talking about their long term mitigation goal where: “Total emissions need to reach zero between 2060 and 2080. This means we need urgent actions by all countries to reduce emissions.” Thank you minister, thank you LDCs, and welcome in the club of The Visionary Few.

ECO was jumping for joy during the ADP ministerial when some of the Parties and groups echoed CAN’s call for phasing out all fossil fuel emissions and phasing in a 100% renewable energy future, as early as possible, but no later than 2050.

Phasing-out fossil fuel emissions is of fundamental importance to secure the right to zero-carbon development for all – especially for those whose lives, homes and cultures will be at existential risk even at 1.5°C warming.

ECO is sure that you, Dear Reader, agree that this goal must be met in a way that secures the rights of the world’s poorest people to water, food, health and sustainable energy access, as well as the right of countries to fulfil those. Protecting these universal sustainable development human rights is the key challenge in a world that is desperately striving to drive carbon pollution down to zero in its bid to stave off the worst climate change impacts.

ECO suggests – and we know our friends agree – that full decarbonisation must include achieving 100% renewable and affordable Energy Access for All.

Replacing current energy systems everywhere with renewables by mid-century will be ambitious and challenging. But, quite frankly, the escalating costs of runaway climate impacts mean that not doing it would be even harder, particularly for the most vulnerable.
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Parties might be wondering about those empty seats in the recent ADP contact-group meetings and noted the absence of NGO observers.

ECO doesn’t want you to worry, NGOs were there…well, two of them, representing Climate Justice Now! and Climate Action Network. Both have been allotted a grand total of 2 (yes, that’s two) seats for the ADP contact-group meetings, on behalf of more than a thousand member organisations. Two (luckily very committed) note-takers have been there to observe, what will shape the future of everyone, what’s going on inside and reporting back to the rest of the world locked out of negotiations.

In order for you to identify the CAN observer in the room, ECO has this handy photo for you, although, it probably wouldn’t have been hard to spot amongst all of the empty seats anyway…

ECO finds this to be extremely unfortunate, to say the least. Space constraints have been cited as the reason, and civil society participation has been downsized to fit within the designated space. ECO believes it should work the other way round: the space should be sized according to the overall need, which includes civil society participants just as much electricity, bathrooms, the stale sandwiches and over-priced coffee required for talks to function effectively.
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On the eve of the finance discussion in the ADP today, ECO has been hearing a common refrain in the hallways of the Maritim: “What could countries possibly put in the INDCs on finance (and isn’t it better to just drop the whole idea)?”.

Of course, the INDCs are not the only place in the 2015 agreement to discuss finance commitments. Parties can express collective commitments, aggregate levels and burden-sharing approaches in the agreement itself too. History has shown that aggregate targets aren’t enough, especially when they’re vague and full of loopholes. Individual countries have to commit to concrete actions that reflect their share of global efforts to stay below 2°C.

ECO will count some of the ways this can be done:

1. Developed countries and others with high capability and responsibilities could come right out and commit themselves to a concrete level of climate finance for the period in question. Most countries routinely deal with all sorts of long-term commitments as part of their budgeting process, so why not do this in the context of responding to a planetary emergency?
2. They could make commitments to the Green Climate Fund, either absolute levels, or a commitment to continue scaling up beyond a certain level in 2020.

Stressed out from the negotiations?

Looking to mingle with fellow conference goers in a relaxed environment?

Join us tonight…

The Security/CAN party kicks off tonight from 2100 in the Maritim’s Rôtisserie – Restaurant & Terrace.

All conference badge wearers welcome!

Tuesday saw a draft text was released on what information Parties will be required to include in the announcement of their initial post-2020 contributions, and the process to review these for adequacy and equity.  Much detail is still needed, but ECO welcomes this draft as a good development. Way to go Parties! Please continue to work at this speed!

As Parties ruminate over this text, ECO thought it should mention few points.

On the information needed

The annex is a positive start about the upfront information requirements for the Nationally Determined Contributions. The overarching objective is that the proposed contributions by countries should be quantifiable, comprehensible, comparable and reproducible. For developed countries, this process should be straightforward and it’s already possible to start filling in some of the required detail –like a common base year of 1990; that the commitment will be an economy-wide absolute reduction and so on. There cannot be any backtracking from the Kyoto Protocol approach of multi-year carbon budgets based on common metrics. This type of commitment should be expanded to a broader group of countries and should at least include all OECD countries. The mitigation component should also allow for the tabling of solution oriented contributions, particularly as countries move towards a 100% renewable future.
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Something revolutionary happened in the ADP ministerial yesterday even though most Parties repeated worn out positions, there were a visionary few that outlined a vision for Paris in line with what science demands!

First, the Marshall Islands, supported by Grenada, noted the “need to fully decarbonise our economies by the middle of century”. AILAC entertained the notion of “possibly [going] carbon neutral”by mid-century to stay below 2°C, while Norway said “we need to approach zero net emissions by the middle of the century”. The Netherlands, Germany and others made similar comments. Clearly, some governments have taken the findings of the IPCC’s AR5 to heart (or was it ECO’s opening article on Wednesday on the need to phase out all fossil fuels by 2050 and phase in 100% renewables?). Over the coming days – and in those UN Climate Summit statements! – ECO looks forward to hearing more countries outlining their vision for a fossil-free world.

It is necessary to turn this vision into concrete action. Countries like Norway need to drop their double-standards on climate action and get the state-owned company, Statoil, to leave fossil fuels in the ground.   All countries need to increase their efforts pre- and post-2020. However, ECO was really excited to hear China say it would table its proposed post-2020 contribution by the March 2015 deadline.
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ECO hopes that a fresh breeze of air in Bonn will give the Chinese delegation a break from Beijing’s filthy air, and perhaps a fresh perspective on the negotiations.

Last year, 92% of China’s cities failed to meet national air quality standards.The government has since mandated provinces to curb coal consumption, the biggest source of air pollution, in particular of PM2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 mm in diameter). A number of provinces have put forward specific coal control measures and some have even pledged to reduce absolute consumption by 2017. The aggregate of these provincial measures will reduce the country’s coal consumption by 655 million tonnes from a business as usual scenario by 2020.

ECO knows that there are significant co-benefits between addressing air pollution and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past decade, China’s coal burning has accounted for half of the world’s CO₂ emission growth. Slashing coal power generation will not only be good for the Chinese people, but also for the global community.

Provincial cuts to coal-based power generation will translate to roughly 1,300 million tonnes of emissions reductions, equivalent to the combined total annual emissions of Australia and Canada. If China delivers on these plans with a full implementation and by expanding its coal caps to broader regions, then its emissions pathway will be almost in line with the IEA’s 2°C scenario.
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