ECO Newsletter

In the final years of negotiations for the new climate agreement, it’s still not clear if it will include the fastest growing emissions sources—international aviation and shipping, also known as bunker fuels.

CO2 emissions from international shipping and aviation were about 950 MT and 705 MT respectively in 2012; combined they account for as much emissions as Germany, the sixth largest emitting country. When indirect effects are taken into account, the impact could already be approaching 10% of global climate forcing. In the almost 2 decades since the ICAO and IMO started discussing greenhouse gases, little concrete action has materialised, and scarily these emissions are on course to double or even treble by 2030. If emissions from these sectors are not addressed effectively by 2050, bunker emissions could swell to account for a quarter of all emissions. Such high emissions from the international transport sector would make it all but impossible to limit aggregate global warming to less than 2ºC as it would place an impossible emission reduction burden on other sectors.

IMO and ICAO discussions have seen limited progress.

Carbon neutral growth from 2020 is the most ambitious goal that the aviation sector has proposed, allowing emissions to grow to 2020 and then offsetting growth beyond that.
... Read more ...

Sunday’s opening negotiations concentrated on adding missing elements, and today it’s up to the adaptation negotiators to continue that work. Given the climate crisis that we face, sustainable development and poverty eradication will only be possible if all countries step up their adaptation efforts.

There is great value in having a country-driven process that requires regular updates on adaptation contributions from all countries, as well as a process that takes stock of progress already made and remaining challenges. And don’t forget all good things agreed in the Cancun Adaptation Framework, such as the list of adaptation activities in paragraph 14 of the CAF.

Adaptation action everywhere should follow key principles, such as promoting gender equality and the fulfilment of human rights, being participatory and taking into account the needs of particularly vulnerable people, communities and ecosystems. 

ECO believes that agreeing on a strategic global vision—a global goal for adaptation—would be instrumental in triggering more adaptation action everywhere. This in turn builds the resilience of communities and ecosystems for the long term. The global goal for adaptation should reflect the relationship between the level of mitigation ambition and consequent adaptation needs due to projected climate change impacts and costs. The global goal for adaptation should also include an objective for public finance support for adaptation in developing countries.
... Read more ...

The dust from COP20 has (barely) settled and now with just 10 months left before COP21 in Paris, Parties need to come together on the way forward to the 2015 agreement.

In Geneva, Parties will start from where they left off the draft negotiating text that is annexed to the Lima Call for Climate Action decision. The current draft has many options on most issues, some of them highly divergent.

There are several key issues that need to be grappled with if we are to get a robust and ambitious post-2020 agreement in December. One of the most difficult is coming to a shared understanding of CBDR&RC (differentiation). This is at the heart of many of the divergent areas, and the differences were just papered over with the last-minute compromise of language in Lima. ECO believes that the earlier Parties attempt to move towards a common understanding on this issue, the easier it will become for the negotiations to make progress towards an ambitious outcome.

The need for a clear and transparent review mechanism within the Paris agreement is another issue. Even though there was no agreement in Lima to conduct a review of the first round of INDCs, an institutionalised review mechanism that not only assesses progress, but also enables countries to plug the ambition gap, is key to the environmental integrity of the agreement.
... Read more ...

Career coaches assert that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear goal for what you want to achieve, then develop a pathway to get you there.

Today’s negotiations on the long term goal of the Paris agreement are, therefore, critical to help define our ultimate objective. That is: to reduce carbon emissions to zero and achieve a 100% renewable-powered world by 2050.

To have a likely chance to remain within the maximum 2°C warming threshold, the IPCC has provided us with a carbon budget of 1000 gigatonnes (CO2eq). That’s it. It’s all we can spend until we achieve the magic zero by 2050. If current trends continue, we’ll have spent a full third of it by 2020.

A growing number of companies, have endorsed staying within this carbon budget, recognising that the benefits of action far outweigh the costs of climate impacts. Unilever’s CEO is just one of many calling for zero emissions by 2050.

The good news is that economics, as well as climate considerations, are already defining the end of the fossil era. China’s 2014 decline in coal use shows that with political determination and strong targets and measures, the world’s highest emitting country can peak their coal use well before 2020.
... Read more ...

As you, dear negotiators, tackle Section C of the elements paper today, ECO urges you to think not just about numbers and principles, but about people. There should be unifying language in the general, operational section of the draft agreement text that recognises the human dimensions of climate change. We suggest:

“Parties shall, in all climate change-related actions, respect, protect, promote and fulfil human rights for all”.

240 organisations endorsed this language in a submission to the ADP co-chairs yesterday. It’s also what each of the 76 independent experts of the UN Human Rights Council recommended in a joint statement to the UNFCCC Parties during COP20.

Looks familiar, right? Yes, yes, it’s a lot like what’s in the shared vision of the Cancun Agreements. Since Cancun, however, we have noticed that this reference hasn’t done the job of ensuring that rights are adequately considered in climate policies. This language in Section C will help ensure that these principles apply to all pillars of the Convention.

Today is the day to make sure it lives on in Paris!

Why, you ask? Well, we can’t escape the fact that climate change has human consequences. The lives and livelihoods of literally billions of people are riding on what comes out of this process, and this language is relevant to every element of the negotiating text.
... Read more ...

When ECO thinks of Switzerland we think of skiing, watches, neutrality, delicious chocolate and of course, the Environmental Integrity Group.

ECO appreciates that Switzerland negotiates as part of a group with the stated priority of “environmental integrity”, but we wonder about Switzerland’s own integrity when it comes to its domestic emissions and commitments?

During the Multilateral Assessment in Lima, Switzerland became very evasive when asked why it would not opt for a conditional target of negative 30% emission reductions by 2020. Perhaps it’s because the country, to date, has merely achieved stabilisation of its absolute emissions. Switzerland offers population growth as a cheesy excuse for this lack of ambition. However, there is much more that Switzerland can do—like instituting policies to switch its population off of high-emitting oil heating systems, reducing per capita car ownership, addressing the startling fact that that average Swiss citizen racks up double the annual air miles of people in neighbouring countries.

ECO hopes that Switzerland will admit it has been off piste when it comes to climate ambition, and demonstrate its integrity by delivering on its 2014 United Nations Climate Summit announcement that it will become carbon neutral.

Minister Doris Leuthard, who made that commitment in New York last September, is in a perfect position to deliver on it.
... Read more ...

As Lima enters the end game, ECO stresses that the INDCs and the associated upfront
information requirements are at the core of the COP20 decision. The minimum expectation of a Lima outcome (based on the core of the Warsaw mandate) is a requirement of solid information provided when the INDCs are communicated. This needs to go hand in hand with the decision on INDC scope and assessment. Let’s look in turn at these three parts of the INDCs.

The scope of the INDCs is at serious risk of being unbalanced. Mitigation and finance are the absolute must-have elements, but also Parties that want to put forward information about their adaptation activities should be encouraged to do so.  And Parties’ fair share should be considered as the sums of domestic action and provision of support.

Assessments of INDCs need to be structured so that Parties do not feel they are being asked for more than their fair share, or that others are not doing so.

Therefore, it is essential that the assessment is of the individual equity of the INDCs, along with assessment of the aggregate effort. Furthermore, assessment will be fair only if it is based on the principles of adequacy,
CBDR+RC and equitable access to sustainable development.
... Read more ...

Perhaps it’s not widely known, but ECO holds an honorary Ministerial post. And so it was pleasing to receive a letter from 85 civil society organizations from around the world calling for loss and damage to be recognized in the texts coming from Lima and in the 2015 Paris agreement.

The real Ministers, of course, also received the letter (but if not, we suggest checking your junk folder and your spam settings, or your staff may have put it in the reading file right behind the Daily Programme).

As the IPCC’s recent AR5 states, there are “limits to adaptation” at all levels of global average temperature increases including 1.5 and 2 °C. With the world still on a path to a 3° C increase and more, the impacts going
beyond those limits will become catastrophically worse.

The issue of loss and damage is a priority concern for vulnerable countries and for discerning Ministers (such as yours truly,
Minister ECO).

Vulnerable countries have not only done the least to contribute to the climate change crisis, they are also the ones suffering the greatest loss and the severest damage from its impacts.

An effective mechanism to provide financial and technical support to vulnerable developing countries and communities to address loss and damage is urgently needed.
... Read more ...