ECO Newsletter

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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The negotiations for the Global Stocktake (GST) during COP26 are now over. Congratulations! This means we are beginning the first GST process. Now we are on our way to technical dialogues, submission phases, workshops, data analysis, output production…

So we still have a lot to do. And by “we”, ECO means all possible actors at the UNFCCC. Non-state actors have to submit inputs for the GST, as well as Parties. ECO supports the inclusion of civil society in the GST process. However, this means financial and technical support for all constituencies as well as developing countries to be able to be fully part of the process. But ECO will come back another day to this issue.

Today, ECO would like to talk about the guiding questions of the GST. Now, there are 43 guiding questions proposed by the SBSTA chair. ECO thanks the chair for this work. But we think several important topics and aspects of climate policies are still missing. 

Why is this important? To ECO, the main aim of the GST should be to protect the most vulnerable from the impacts of climate change. This can’t happen without an adequate consideration of adaptation and loss and damage and the protection of ecosystems, terrestrial and marine alike, as well as keeping the planet livable for youth and future generations.
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Can you be shocked and not surprised at the same time?

It’s one thing to hear the term “climate colonialism” and it’s another to see and feel it up close. It oozes out of every plenary, every action room, nearly every side event at this COP – and is propagated by governments, corporations, and I’m sorry to say, sometimes CAN-I alike.

The tragedy is not just the continued violence against Australian First Nations Peoples at this COP – the continuation of the colonial project reinforced by the almost complete marginalisation of our voices, as bad as that is. It’s seeing so many people working so hard to find a global solution to this existential problem, when we hold the wisdom and solutions if only others would lower their voices, step back, and give us a seat at the Australian Federal Government’s table, and lead.

My First Nations brothers and sisters from around the world occupy a crowded pavilion – a space so tiny and cramped it is emblematic of the marginalisation and disrespect awarded to First Nations voices. In this tiny room, harrowing story after story of dispossession, colonisation and desecration of Country is told. The stories are the same all over the world.
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Today, it is exactly 8 years ago that super-Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded, made landfall in the Philippines. As one of the deadliest Philippine typhoons on record, it killed at least 6,300 people in that country alone and led to economic damages of about US$2.2 billion in the country.

The reality of the climate crisis was pushed right into the negotiation rooms, when Filipino lead-negotiator Yeb Sano gave a very emotional speech, after his hometown was destroyed by the typhoon. He pledged to fast until climate talks showed real progress and called on Parties to “stop this madness”. It was a turning point in the UNFCCC negotiations on Loss and Damage, and we saw the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage established shortly after.

What has happened since 2013 in the real world? Science has proven beyond doubt that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change – but people on the ground don’t need scientific proof. They have felt the consequences of climate change first hand through record-breaking storms, floods, and heat waves. Climate change violates their human rights and creates a daily climate emergency for millions of people.
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The Gulf region is rich in fossil fuels, which have been the driver of its economy for decades. Fossil fuels therefore have a deep-rooted social license, and national fossil fuel companies are a source of national pride. Of course, this has contributed to climate denialism over the last three decades, despite the impacts that have heavily affected the region, from desertification and loss of biodiversity, to more frequent and intense heat waves, drought, and flash floods as well as significant impacts on agricultural yields and small farmers’ livelihoods. And these are only the tip of the iceberg, with more impacts predicted in coming decades.

Denial of the science is no longer possible for governments of the region, as awareness of the climate emergency is more deeply entrenched in the minds of the population and the impacts manifest in their lives so profoundly. Sadly, the Saudi government, which has been obstructive to climate negotiations since their onset, continues to be so. They are predicted to be the final bastion of oil production in the coming years, due to having the lowest extraction costs and “high quality” of oil, and over the last week they have reaffirmed their intent to delay the inevitable end of the era of oil as far as possible.
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Unlike the food options at the venue, the Glasgow initiatives include an astonishing array of new announcements to scale up forest and “nature” climate action. Yay! Amazing, right? But, hold on… doesn’t this sound familiar? 

Let ECO look back for a moment at all the forest climate initiatives of the last decades and see if they worked at all. Wait! Don’t get us wrong. ECO does so in the spirit of increasing understanding of the blockages, rules, and perverse incentives created by the UNFCCC system, and not because it doubts the good intentions of current or past initiatives.

Way back in 2007, at COP 14 in Bali, REDD+ was agreed and hailed as the new pathway to prevent deforestation and forest degradation and save the world’s great primary tropical forests. Well… it hasn’t.

In 2014 the New York Declaration on Forests announced an ambitious programme to “cut natural forest loss in half by 2020 and strive to end it by 2030”. But the first 5-year review expressed deep dismay that the initiative had failed to curb loss and damage to Earth’s irreplaceable primary tropical rainforests and that the annual rate of global deforestation had increased by 43%. 

And let’s not forget the 2018 Katowice declaration on “Forests for Climate” (what happened to that anyway?).
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In his opening remarks this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said «our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: Either we stop it — or it stops us».

ECO sees this as yet more evidence that the world needs to tackle fossil fuels head on.  The challenge is to do so in a fair way, rather than just crashing the economies of both fossil dependent and fossil-export dependent countries.  

That is where the new report of the Civil Society Equity Review, endorsed by more than 200 civil society organisations from around the world, comes in.  A Fair Shares Phase Out: A Civil Society Equity Review on an Equitable Global Phase Out of Fossil Fuels highlights the terrible truth driven home by the  Production Gap reports : we’re on track to produce more than twice as much fossil fuels as are compatible with 1.5°C. But it doesn’t stop there.  The report also shows that while wealthy country pledges fall far short of their “fair shares”, developing countries are, for the most part, making pledges that approximately correspond to their “fair share”.  

Developing countries, as it turns out, must do far more than their fair shares if we’re to stabilise the climate system.
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