ECO Newsletter

Climate justice requires a vibrant civil society and respect for civil rights and political freedoms — a principle that is explicitly reaffirmed in the Paris Agreement. There can be no sustainable development without the ability for individuals and organizations to speak up and exercise their right to freedom of expression, protest, and association.

While we may be spending the next two weeks in Sharm El-Sheik, a resort town designed for entertainment, we are not oblivious to the repression and threats that our brothers and sisters face every day in Egypt and around the world. Climate action requires that we call on world leaders to take measures to ensure our right to clean air, food, health, a healthy environment, and to life. We recognize that it is our responsibility to speak up and relay the political demands of those who could not be here. And, to demand freedom for all those behind bars for their political opinions. As one of our brothers currently in detention wrote: “unlike me, you have not yet been defeated.” We will not censor ourselves in exchange for the privilege to be here. We stand in solidarity with those deprived of liberty.

For the credibility of this process, it is imperative that heads of States and governments participating in the COP also speak up on these issues and formally recognize the close inherent relationship between human rights and climate justice.
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Dear Leaders, have you forgotten where COP27 is happening? Let ECO remind you that this is an African COP. Africa is experiencing the dangerous impacts of climate change which disproportionately affect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. And this will not be slowing down in the near future.

Heads of state coming to Sharm El-Sheikh must reaffirm, build on and deliver with urgency their commitments and promises. ECO reminds governments to be united in preventing the devastating climate crisis from spiraling out of control. Governments must respond to the adaptation needs of communities and ecosystems currently bearing the brunt of the climate breakdown.

Adaptation is the key to survive and thrive. The adaptation gap report’s title says it all – too little, too slow.  So, we must align our adaptation actions with science now. At COP27, we want Parties to:

• Commit to ensure at least a 50% share of pre-2025 finance for adaptation and agree on a roadmap for at least doubling adaptation finance. This must be majority grants with the remainder highly concessional.
• Define key elements and framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation, including a political announcement on the means of implementation for adaptation.
• Ensure that the Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh (GlaSS) work programme is closely linked to other crucial policy processes, such as the Global Stocktake and the New Collective Quantified Goal.

Welcome to Sharm el Sheikh, World Leaders!

You probably land in Egypt with a very clear idea of what is at stake for this 27th edition. And here is a crucial point: If not, don’t worry ECO has got your back : a strong and fair decision on Loss & Damage finance is nothing less than a litmus test for international climate negotiations.

You’d probably answer that “the question is now formally on the agenda”. You’d probably add “it has never been the case before”. It is indeed unprecedented. This would never have been possible without all the tremendous work in elevating demands that civil society and developing countries delegations have pushed for decades, asking for fair assistance for climate victims. 

Now let’s talk about that agenda item. Developed countries: everyone saw your old tactics in the meeting rooms in the final 36 hours before the beginning of COP27, trying to weaken the final decision and delay (again) action on providing meaningful loss and damage finance. ECO also took note of your relentless efforts to  exclude liability and compensation from the agenda item. That too is quite familiar.

So yes, funding arrangements for Loss and Damage are now on the agenda, but the risk is real that we end up with an empty shell once again.
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We all know Egyptians love football. They are proud of their national team. And their country’s star player? Why of course it’s the team captain – Mohamed Salah, goal scoring phenomenon and international superstar.

Why are we talking about football, you ask? Well, as the saying goes, football is a game of two halves. And so is the Global Stocktake. The first half is the technical dialogue, which informs the second half: the political discussion. COP27 sits between these two halves. It’s the halftime break of the GST, exactly halfway between when it began back at COP26 in Glasgow twelve months ago and when it will end next year in Dubai at COP28.

A halftime break in football is a key turning point in the match. It’s when the captain can rouse their team to fight harder and to score more goals. For the GST, the goals aren’t balls at the back of the net. The goals are won if we can shift the UNFCCC into ‘crisis implementation’ mode and away from a business-as-usual forum that is stuck in divisive politics and negotiations. The goals are if the GST can commit all Parties to further action, including: enhanced and rights-based NDCs, phase out of all fossil fuels by 2050, accelerate concrete action to protect and restore ecosystems, and concretely step up finance, including for adaptation and loss and damage at the scale needed.
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Dear delegates, do you know the meme where angry customers left a message of disappointment after not being served at a restaurant? ECO is pretty sure you don’t want to be that restaurant. 
Meaning that the pledges you made must be implemented and  trust rebuilt after  all your broken promises.

 But guess what? To address Loss and Damage, people have not been waiting for 30 minutes but for over 30 years. It’s been that long since the small island states brought the issue of Loss and Damage to the international negotiations. Rich nations did just enough to be able to say that they would not completely abandon them, some technical assistance here, some dialogue there, but never has the issue been addressed properly.

 After 30 years of inaction,  this COP, on African soil, after witnessing one of the warmest years in one of the most vulnerable regions of the world, it is time to finally deliver on Loss and Damage. COP27 must set up a Loss and Damage Finance Facility to coordinate information on the needs to address Loss and Damage and provide the financing mechanism to address it.

Pay up for loss and damage now. As in any restaurant, someone will have to pay, and ECO recommends innovative finance with a subsequent process to map this out.
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As COP27 launches, ECO takes this opportunity to remind our dear readers that climate justice is indistinguishable from human rights.  Climate impacts affect many rights – the rights to health, livelihoods and decent work, adequate housing, and ultimately the right to life itself. But there can be no progress towards equitable and fair solutions to the climate crisis unless civil society – and that means people everywhere – has space for speaking up, protesting and joining together with others to do so.  In the lexicon of human rights, that’s the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association and public participation. These are fundamental and inalienable rights set out after the devastation of WWII, drafted by people from all regions, political and religious beliefs and accepted as legal obligations which states must abide by.

But what we see is all too many countries locking up people who speak their minds or who go out in the street to protest. This is not acceptable wherever it happens, and civil society stands together in solidarity with our imprisoned, harassed, and threatened sisters and brothers who are trying to create a better world and have suffered as a result.  We are watching and we demand an end to these practices.
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When we last met at the very ambition-less SBs to discuss how to deliver ambition through the vehicle of the Mitigation Work Program (MWP),we were not in a good place.

In Bonn and in the 5 months since then, ECO has noticed something quite strange: it seems that instead of focusing on ways to narrow the massive ambition and implementation gap, Parties have been playing at the broken telephone game.

For those who don’t know, the game is quite easy: The first player conveys a message to the second player, who then repeats the message to the third player, and so on. The last player on the line then has to announce out loud the message they heard to the entire group.

So, in the MWP telephone chain, Science is the first player putting forward the message, a very clear message: We are not on track. We have just received the NDC Synthesis and Emissions Gap reports, which have painted a very stark warning to the world. The remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5°C is shrinking and we are on a trajectory for as much as a 2.8°C warmer world.  Our total emissions in 2030 are currently on track to be approximately the same as in 2019, but instead we need to be cutting emissions by 8 per cent a year to be in line with science and the Paris Agreement.
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There’s no escaping the hard science on 1.5°C at this COP27. On the contrary.

On Monday morning delegates will be presented with a chrystal clear set of key fundamentals on 1.5°C, as the co-chairs of the Structured Expert Dialogue on the long-term goal will present their Synthesis Report.

Their findings include the following:

• At 1.1 °C warming, the world is already experiencing extreme climate change
• Achieving the long-term global goal without overshooting the 1.5°C limit is imperative in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. It would reduce the risk of crossing tipping points and triggering potentially irreversible changes in the climate system.
• Climate impacts and risks, including risk of irreversible impacts, increase with every increment of warming.
• It is still possible to achieve the long-term global goal of 1.5°C with immediate and sustained emission reductions.
• Rapidly falling costs of renewable energy present new opportunities for pre-2030 emission reductions.
• The window of opportunity to achieve climate-resilient development is rapidly closing
• The world is not on track to achieve the long-term global goal
• Equity is key to achieving the long-term global goal.

Isn’t that a great list of reminders? Yup.

But as you know, ECO LOVES specificity and hates fossil fuels. So ECO would like to flag a couple of key messages that were underlined by experts at the dialogues, but which didn’t quite make it to the Synthesis Report:

• The IPCC, in the first SED meeting, emphasized that: “immediate rapid reduction in fossil fuel-based emissions is a prerequisite to climate-resilient development pathways”.