Categoria: Previous Issues Articles

Yesterday was a good day in that there was no official Fossil of the Day winner; though some would say Venezuela deserves at least an honourable mention for attempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

ECO completely gets that fossil fuel companies shouldn’t be influencing negotiations. Organisations making a business out of polling have no place here. That doesn’t mean that they should be lumped and grouped in with everyone else in civil society though!

We live in a world where the voice of the people counts—civil society can help governments truly understand the needs of the communities and support the development of effective, relevant climate solutions. Flush that dirty water down the drain but keep the baby safe, Venezuela.

ECO readers know that to keep warming to well below 1.5°C, we need to increase ambition before 2020. The good news is that there are countless opportunities for reducing emissions more quickly. Developed countries in particular have responsibility for increasing their ambition and providing the necessary support so these opportunities can be realised.

Marrakech needs to deliver an ambitious outcome on pre-2020 action—both on mitigation and means of implementation. The package should include progress on finance (particularly the roadmap to US$100 billion and outcomes from the High-Level Ministerial Dialogue on Long-Term Finance), strengthening of capacity building, a new framework for Global Climate Action, and meaningful outcomes from the Facilitative Dialogue on ambition and support (which should be reflected in a COP22 decision). ECO would like to remind delegates that the Facilitative Dialogue is not about congratulating yourselves on existing activities. The technical part should focus on identifying concrete ways to do more, individually and in collaboration, so that Ministers can agree on and announce new actions to close the pre-2020 gap next week.

Here are a few ideas ECO would like to suggest:

– Parties who have not yet ratified the Doha Amendments should; can you believe we still have to say this.
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In preparation for the high-level part of the Facilitative Dialogue on enhancing ambition and support taking place next Wednesday, ECO would like to raise the profile of the helpful guiding questions proposed by the Presidency. In particular, we would like to ask, what immediate domestic steps should countries take to raise overall ambition?

ECO wouldn’t be ECO without proposing concrete ideas for immediate domestic action. Before convening for the 2016 Dialogue, Parties should consider policies that: improve energy efficiency, for example in buildings, remove fossil fuel subsidies, price carbon emissions, scale up renewable energy procurement procedures, divest national pension plans and other public funds from fossil fuel companies, require financial institutions to report on investment in fossil fuels, retain and restore natural forests, improve agricultural practices, reduce wasteful consumption, in particular food waste, or subsidise public transport—and that’s just to name a few!

Developed countries must take lead by scaling up their own actions and support. In this context, accelerated ambition must mean no new fossil fuel infrastructure. Even the potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal in the world’s currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 2°C of warming.

Given the current lack of collective ambition, the Global Stocktake is a crucial tool to make a serious assessment of the Parties’ progress on meeting the objectives they all signed up to in Paris, and identify what still needs to be done. The Global Stocktake must gather momentum by ensuring broad ownership over its process and its conclusion.

ECO has identified one crucial feature of the stocktake: it must recognise not only information provided by Parties (through their reporting) and intergovernmental organisations such as the IPCC, but also information from other agencies and non-state actors, including research institutions and civil society. This inclusivity will build momentum by encouraging these institutions to close the knowledge gaps that currently exist in important stocktake areas, thus ensuring that the science that the Global Stocktake considers is really the best available.

Why would anyone want to exclude any useful information from this crucial process already so long before the first Stocktake in 2023? ECO has a hard time understanding why Parties would want to limit this scope, especially since they are deciding the modalities of a long-lasting regime.

While Parties negotiate key aspects of the Paris Agreement in the APA informals, only 2 representatives per constituency are allowed to enter each of these sessions. ECO reminds Parties that just 6 months ago, all Parties “reaffirmed the fundamental value of effective participation by observers in the intergovernmental process […] and acknowledged the need to further enhance effective engagement of observer organisations as the UNFCCC process moves forward into implementation and operationalisation of the Paris Agreement” (SBI conclusions on AIM). Surely this does not mean that 99% of observers should be left out in the cold.

Observer organisations represent a very broad range of perspectives and expertise which are essential to the success of negotiations. Their wealth of experience is completely obliterated by imposing such tight restrictions on their presence and participation.

Having spent months preparing for the conference, eventually getting a ticket to one negotiation is surely not enhanced participation, unless your baseline was no access at all

ECO knows there are better uses of everyone’s (ours and the secretariat’s) time, so we request that the secretariat complies with the commitment reiterated by Parties for effective participation, and call on Parties and the Presidency to end this new practice of keeping most observers out of the room.

In closely listening to Parties’ discussion of adaptation communication under the APA, ECO thinks that adaptation communications are a key contributor to understanding and assessing progress—or lack thereof—towards the global goal on adaptation.

It would be helpful to develop guidance for streamlined communications to assist developing countries in managing their adaptation planning, monitoring challenges and reporting requirements. This should take into account the different roles of NDCs (forward looking), NAPs (as NDC implementation roadmaps) and national communications (backward looking) as well as synergies with the SDGs and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, where appropriate.

Given that the Paris Agreement includes key adaptation principles (Art. 7.5), countries should provide information on how they plan to apply these principles. This can facilitate learning across borders.

ECO thinks that addressing adaptation communications in a focused manner, as is currently happening in the APA under item 4, is an adequate approach that avoids a mix-up with the discussion about mitigation communication guidance. This promotes adaptation communication as independent and equally important.

Finally, it is legitimate for countries to use their NDCs on support needs to build sufficient adaptive capacity in light of expected levels of global warming. This could inform the global stocktake and other discussions on means of implementation, and open ways towards achieving sustainable development despite climate change impacts.

This is an unjust world, but the climate transition cannot not be. If we’re to have a real chance at the Paris temperature targets, we must avoid narrow nationalism and commit to equity. Yet, even after the Paris breakthrough, equity is treated as an irritant or a danger by even by some of our high level champions. several of whom are prone to railing against “burden sharing” and even “carbon budgets.”

ECO begs to differ, noting the Paris Agreement established a Global Stocktake process that is explicitly to be conducted “in the light of equity.” It would not be wise to conduct a first major assessment in 2018 (code name “facilitated dialogue”) of our various climate actions without considering equity.

Do we imagine that poor countries are going to develop strategies for decarbonisation—which have to be visionary and ambitious by their very nature—without substantial and predictable channels of support? And what about the need to face together the immense suffering and destruction that we hide with dry UNFCCC jargon? We need to start talking, with all due seriousness, of the equity challenges on this front.

This must be a just transition, or it won’t happen at all.

When it comes to how much our planet is warming, what counts is the cumulative emissions that we’ve pumped into the atmosphere. This is a matter of physics, not politics. In its 5th Assessment Report, the IPCC provided global carbon budgets—or the amount of carbon we could emit—and still hold global warming to certain temperatures. To have a 66% chance for staying below 1.5°C, we have now only some 200 gigatonnes of emissions left. If we accept a 50% chance, we have 350 gigatonnes.

Five years of current global annual emissions (38 gigatonnes of CO2 per year) would entirely consume the remaining carbon budget for a 66% chance of staying below 1.5°C . Accepting the higher budget for a 50% chance would give us 9 years.

To avoid blowing the 1.5°C carbon budget and give ourselves a chance for reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement, annual emissions need to go down steeply before 2020.

Australia! We’ve had our differences, but today you made ECO smile. Yesterday, we woke to the happy news that you ratified the Paris Agreement. And let’s face it, we all needed a bit of boost! For those who might be surprised, ECO notes that the move was welcomed by leading Australian businesses, investors, unions, and welfare and environment groups—all keen to see a proper integration of climate, energy and economic policy.

And in case it escaped your fellow Parties’ attention, ECO would like to spotlight that Australia found the best pairing since Vegemite on toast by ratifying the Doha Amendment of the Kyoto Protocol at the same time!

In the draft outcome for CMA1, the COP President is urging Parties who have not done so to ratify the Paris Agreement and the Doha Amendment as soon as possible. If you’re yet to do either: follow Australia’s example and ratify both at once.

Today’s Fossil of the Day goes to… the European Union for peddling biofuels! The EU has considerable economic and technological clout at its disposal to accelerate the just transition to 100% clean, renewable energy. Unfortunately, the EU is instead promoting biofuels in their SBSTA submission on agriculture.

The EU knows that biofuels are a false solution to climate change and do not provide the promised emissions reductions. The expansion of biofuels also drives illegal land-grabs, where small, family farmers are forced off their land, and increases food prices around the world.

Those most likely to be hurt by major biofuels expansions—poor farmers in developing countries—are also among the most vulnerable to climate change.

We can do better than replacing on extractive and exploitative fuel source with another. The EU needs to take a long, hard look at itself and commit to pursuing real change, not more false solutions.