Category: Previous Issues Articles

Rolling into week two of COP20, ECO extends a warm welcome to Ministers and reminds that essential to success in Lima is concrete progress on climate finance. And what better time to do so than at Tuesday’s High-level Ministerial Dialogue on climate finance? The Secretariat frames the Dialogue as a unique opportunity for Ministers to highlight that public finance is flowing and confirm their intention to scale it up.

Ahead of the event, however, there is a strong sense of malaise. Ambition is diminishing and the importance of defining pathways to reach 100 billion USD by 2020 is being set aside. So right here and now, let’s get down to business.

Tip number 1:  Draw up a roadmap to 2020

A 2020 finance roadmap is clearly essential to scaling up to reach the 100 billion level. This first step will reassure that public financial flows will not only continue but will also increase.

Tip number 2: Clarity and predictability

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: financial flows need to be predictable in order to engage climate action effectively. Not only that, countries need to be clear on what finance is public and what is not.

Tip number 3: Spell out the details

Further reassurance can be secured by clearly spelling out the sources of finance as well as the channels and instruments to be deployed.

There’s a lot of curiosity about the idea of a global goal on adaptation. As you know, ECO is all about clarity, so here’s our short guide to this important proposition.

The global goal on adaptation should build the resilience of people and ecosystems to the impacts of climate change. Actions towards the goal must also protect human rights and address inequality, both of which are key to achieving sustainable development.

The pathway for achieving the goal must be dynamic, taking into account rising temperature levels and impacts. The goal should contribute to minimising residual
impacts and loss and damage through scaled up adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

Here are key objectives for a global
adaptation goal:

1. Adequacy of financial and technical
resources. Adaptation is relevant to all countries, and all must develop adaptation strategies in order to deal with increasing climate impacts. However, it is the developing countries – and the most vulnerable countries in particular – that urgently need support through finance and appropriate technology. Developed nations must provide adequate and sustained support that complements the ongoing development and adaptation efforts of vulnerable developing countries. The scale of resources must be commensurate to the impacts of climate change.
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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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In June this year, the Santa Rita hydropower dam in Guatemala was approved under the Clean Development Mechanism despite grave concerns about human rights violations related to the project.

Communities in the Alta Verapaz region report that all those who were consulted on the project were actually the employees of the project. Attempts for consultation by those who are affected by the project were ignored by the company. Even worse, conflict resulted in violence including the death of two children. In
August, the company responded with a repressive
operation involving more than 1500 police officers forcing indigenous families to take refuge in the mountains.

A complaint from the communities was accepted by the IFC Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, who is planning an investigation in January 2015. The
financing banks are concerned and will investigate the situation in January 2015. But the CDM – intended to mobilise clean development – does not seem to be concerned.

To address this lack of safeguards, AOSIS, supported by Uganda, proposed to establish a CDM grievance mechanism to respond to issues of concern raised by stakeholders impacted by implemented projects. A grievance mechanism is the much needed step to start implementing the Cancun decision that Parties should fully respect human rights in all climate related
actions.
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Oh, what a horrible dream! The Saudi
delegation seem to be dreaming of a world made of men, only men . . . and a stream of pollution. Saturday’s fossil went to Saudi Arabia for speaking out strongly against the recognition of gender equality in the implementation process. The European Union also fell in disgrace for supporting the withdrawal of the language. Dear, oh dear!

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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