The pre-2020 issue is a waiting game where everyone loses. People who are vulnerable — as they face dangerous loss and damage from climate impacts. People and communities all over the world — whose recent development successes may be undone. Those employed in the fossil fuel industry — who need a just transition to real, alternative livelihoods.
And even the polluters, who are not yet acting and paying sufficiently, and for whom the price they must pay will only go up. After all, we know the conclusions of the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and we all know that the cost of action will increase as the problem itself grows (and pretending the report doesn’t exist won’t change it).
You didn’t think that just because we’re now 12.5 months away from the year 2020, that the issue of pre-2020 climate action would go away, did you? That you could wait it out, until we’re all safely in the era of Paris? That’s not going to happen, and so there’s even the High-Level part of the pre- 2020 stocktake taking place today.
ECO has suggestions for the many Ministers we hope will attend this event and engage in constructive discussions on how to close the pre-2020 ambition gap, and, in the process, build the trust we need for pre-2020 action by developed countries to work as a foundation of post-2020 engagement. This is particularly important considering the action we are expecting from developing countries under Paris.
Thus, please consider that while a case can be made that the financial target of mobilizing US$100 billion in finance by 2020 is on-track, according to the dodgy accounting of the OECD, there are still not enough signatories to the Doha Amendments to the Kyoto Protocol (you can look back to ECO last week for some of those paradoxes) and many countries are not on track to meet their 2020 mitigation targets. However, since the 2020 targets were first set and the iNDCs lodged, the world has changed in many interesting ways. Financial flows are being redirected, technology has been developed, non-state and sub-state actors are leading the way, and green innovation is part of the mainstream economy. These are making it easier for national governments to increase their ambition. Lastly, the pre-2020 stocktake will provide important input into the Talanoa Dialogue process, on the question of “Where are we?”.
ECO helpfully also has thoughts on what a COP24 outcome on pre-2020 could look like. To be balanced and ambitious, it must contain several points on enhancing pre- 2020 action, as part of a package also containing meaningful paragraphs on the IPCC report, Talanoa Dialogue, COP24 Finance Ministerial, and a reference to the 2019 UNSG summit. 1/CP.24 should welcome the outcome of today’s pre-2020 stocktake, and also recognize the critical shortfall in climate action in the pre-2020 period, and the need for scaled up finance and support. It should call for developed countries to urgently meet and exceed targets, and for all countries to work together on cooperative action, drawing inspiration from the likes of the International Solar Alliance and the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative. It should urge countries to ratify the Doha Amendment. It should recognize the role of non-state actors and bottom-up initiatives such as the Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action, the Global Climate Action Summit, as well as the UNFCCC’s technical examination processes (which ECO would like to remind you all, opened up the climate negotiations to discussions around how to actually increase climate action out there, in the sectors where we find the solutions).
