Category: Previous Issues Articles

Like a bad magician, the UK government desperately wants people to look the other way as it tries to pull off a clumsy trick with one hand while doing something completely different with the other. Everybody can see the sleight of hand for what it is: blatant hypocrisy, “a do-as we say, not as we do, and please look over there”.

Despite being hosts of this COP their desperate push for fossil fuel projects continues. Projects are proposed that don’t have a future and damage the planet when nobody can argue with the clear, science-based need to reduce emissions. Yes, we need to keep 1.5°C alive but how can we pursue that critical path when our words and actions are so lacking in alignment?

Friends of the Earth put out a report a few days before COP showing how the UK government is still addicted to fossil fuels here and elsewhere in the world with 40 new oil, gas, and coal projects in the pipeline before 2025. And these projects are just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath them lie more prospective oil, gas and coal developments that will completely scupper the UK’s climate efforts unless the government rapidly changes direction. 
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29 countries and institutions, including the United States, Canada, Mali and Costa Rica, have joined a United Kingdom-led commitment to end direct international public finance for unabated coal, oil and gas by the end of 2022 and instead prioritize a clean energy transition. After a wave of commitments to end international coal finance, this is the first international political commitment that also addresses public finance for oil and gas. 

Since the initial announcement on November 4th, the initiative has snowballed, with the Netherlands, El Salvador and Germany signing on this week. Together the signatories represent at least US$21.7 billion a year in influential and often preferential public finance for fossil fuels for 2018-2020. This is a massive portion of the $63b a year in known G20 and Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) finance for fossil fuels. 

Shifting public finance for energy out of all fossil fuels and into clean energy is an urgent task. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that to limit global warming to 1.5°C, this year needs to mark the end of new investments in not just coal, but also new oil and gas supply. Yet, G20 and MDB public finance for fossil fuels is currently 2.5 times their support for renewable energy, which averages $26b per year.
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As we get into week 2, we continue to hear about the importance of Article 6. But ECO remains concerned that as Parties get bogged down in the technical details (which are important and ECO is happy to discuss them), they are forgetting about what’s really important and ultimately what it’s all about: people, a healthy planet and the ambition needed to keep warming below 1.5°C. 

Never fear, ECO is here to remind you. People and nature around the world have been negatively impacted by previous market mechanisms and seen their lands destroyed or taken without consent. Do you really want Paris Agreement implementation associated with human rights violations? Now is the time to take steps to prevent harm: By guaranteeing rights-based safeguards in the article 6 text; through meaningful participation and consultation with those impacted (including women, communities, workers, youth, persons with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples – don’t forget about FPIC … we could go on); and ensure there is an independent mechanism to redress potential harms. Rights-based and inclusive climate action is better climate action. And that includes at this COP. ECO has seen it work.   

ECO hears you say that this COP is about enabling us to stay on a path to 1.5°C.
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen the disastrous effects of systemic neglect of disabled people. 

We are overwhelmingly overrepresented in Covid-19 deaths, yet many countries have engaged in discriminatory medical triage protocols that treat disabled lives as acceptable losses. This clearly devalues our lives, as does many countries’ premature return to “normal” (including the hosting of  this COP), well before it was safe for disabled and immuno-compromised people. 

Climate breakdown, like Covid-19, compounds existing inequities, disproportionately harming the one billion disabled people on the planet. This is especially true for our disabled communities who are multiply marginalised, and live on the frontlines of both climate change and eco-ableism. 

Many disabled people are still imprisoned in institutions, including the 12 residents of an assisted living facility, who were among the victims of the flash flooding in the Ahrweiler district of Western Germany as recently as July 2021. This is one of many instances demonstrating that when disasters hit, disabled people are literally left behind.

Those of us who are also Indigenous understand first-hand how the colonial and extractive drivers of climate breakdown have stolen and damaged our lands, undermined our cultural practices, and left our communities behind across almost every societal development indicator. 
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Over the past week and half, Parties have been negotiating the terms of Article 6 and still struggle to agree on human rights language. In our opening statement, the IIPFCC, represented by Taily Terena, called on Parties to ensure that “Article 6 upholds human rights, and specifically, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, and leads to real emissions reductions.” 

However, as we enter into week two, the hangover from COP25 still plagues Article 6, as our rights pop up and disappear on the whim of Parties in a political game of Whack-a-Mole. 

Article 6 has direct implications on communities – from land grabs to our rights to consultation and participation. There are growing concerns that without rights safeguards Article 6 would do little to substantially reduce emissions – something that many of our communities simply cannot afford to wait for. We need to ensure that we not only find ways to agree on mechanisms for reducing emissions, but that this happens swiftly and with the guidance of Indigenous Peoples who are already safeguarding 80% of the world’s biodiversity.  

As we enter this final leg of COP26 the IIPFCC calls Parties to uphold their existing commitments under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).
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Would you come to COP without your badge? Would you leave your house without your keys? Or your mask? These are things that you do automatically, because they are required and necessary, and doing them should be part of your muscle memory, without thinking too much. The same applies for keeping 1.5°C within reach. You can’t do it without adequate resources, without it, you will fail. Logical, isn’t it? But so far, ECO is not convinced that this has been understood. Will we leave Glasgow without a clear sign that finance will flow? 

You don’t really need to think much to understand finance is the key, and without a Glasgow package that puts solidarity and prosperity — and the necessary resources — at its heart, we won’t be able to have a successful outcome. 

So, ECO wants to be clear. For this COP to have any kind of political relevance, the only way forward is a cover decision that recognizes and pushes to overcome, with firm commitments, the inadequacies of current finance provision, so as to adequately support adaptation finance, mitigation finance and loss and damage finance. Too much money is being wasted on subsidizing the dirty fossil fuels industry. Too little is being mobilized for delivery to where it matters most.
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On Sunday, the Presidency released a first draft of the proposed elements for the Cover Decision to be adopted at the end of the week. These decisions will provide the main political signal coming out of Glasgow and will therefore be essential in assessing whether the COP ends with a vision or a cover-up. This COP had a very clear mandate to take stock of the ambition gaps and deliver a credible pathway to address them. Ahead of the intensive consultations scheduled this week; ECO is pleased to share the following checklist of critical elements for these decisions: 

Science as the starting point: A credible COP outcome requires taking the science seriously, particularly as the IPCC is delivering its Sixth Assessment Report.

• Deletion of the reckless, scientifically discredited and outdated reference to 2ºC
• Reference to the importance of cumulative emissions are what counts to keeping warming below 1.5ºC
• Recognition of the essential role of ecosystem protection and restoration in achieving a 1.5ºC pathway alongside, not instead of, rapid fossil fuel phase-out.

Most striking missing element:  Fossil Fuels – Coal, gas and oil are the elephant in the room, and must finally be acknowledged; Parties cannot deliver the requisite ambition without ending production and support for fossil fuels.
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Dear EU ministers, welcome (back) to Glasgow! Many of you have been here with your heads of states and governments less than a week ago (or have stayed on). Entering the final days of COP26, a lot is at stake to achieve an outcome which advances a fair approach to Fair for 1.5°C, and as you know the EU will be critical in achieving this. While ECO does not know yet exactly which EU ministers will take up leading roles in ministerial consultations, we expect all of you to champion ambitious and fair climate action (and not just rhetoric). 

ECO welcomes that the High Ambition Coalition Leaders’ Statement, to which many European leaders signed up to, “recognises the need to increase resources for averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage.” From the many statements by climate vulnerable parties, loss and damage actions, side events, tweets and hallway conversations, ECO has learned in the first week that there is a huge need in particular for additional resources to “address” the occurring and escalating loss and damage. So the EU must champion, in support of most affected countries, people and areas, agreement of concrete steps here in Glasgow for providing new, additional and needs-based loss and damage finance and a system to deliver that finance to vulnerable developing countries, alongside a permanent agenda item on loss and damage, and the operationalisation of the Santiago Network. 
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If only it was all like Adaptation. As controversies rage around us, your ECO Adaptation correspondent sits in the calm of the sort of gentle, collaborative and determined consensus building that should characterise all climate negotiations. If only.

Adaptation is the quiet giant of the convention.  The Nairobi Work Programme, the Adaptation Fund, National Adaptation Plans, the Global Goal and the work of the Adaptation Committee to bring it all together carry on in multiple talks this week. 

That this is the first article dedicated to adaptation in seven issues of ECO indicates that things might be going pretty well 

Not that there aren’t challenges.  Parties will know that reporting on needs and progress on adaptation is difficult when there isn’t an agreed definition of adaptation. 

There are multiple difficulties – methodological, empirical, conceptual and political – in assessing the reduction of vulnerability and increase of adaptation capacity and resilience that are the Global Goals. 

And, as ever, poorer countries face insufficiency of resources and data to improve adaptation planning, and implementation obstructs everything. 

But these are challenges to be overcome, difficulties that can be resolved with some transformative thinking.

Why not measure countries’ progress by assessing the extent to which they have exercised the Global Commission’s Principles for Locally Led Adaptation, evidenced by participatory impact monitoring and evaluation?   
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