ECO Newsletter

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?).
... Read more ...

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.
... Read more ...

In case you forgot, ECO wants to remind you: the ocean, covering 70 per cent of our planet’s surface, drives global weather systems and the climate, and is the world’s largest long-term store of biological carbon. It is sucking up 20 to 30 per cent of global emissions and absorbing over 90 per cent of human-made heat. We would be cooking without it. But the ocean isn’t just a climate saviour, it is also a climate victim: marine species and ecosystems are suffering from climate change-driven rises in water temperature and from ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems, home to about 30 per cent of the oceans biodiversity, are one of the first global ecosystems at risk of being almost wiped out. They face a 70 to 90 per cent loss at 1.5°C global temperature increase. 

ECO is surprised that, despite its enormous contribution to life and climate regulation on the planet, the ocean is still considered a side-event of the climate negotiations. The “Blue COP” in Madrid in 2019 was a first step to change that, resulting in the SBSTA holding a first of its kind Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue in 2020. 

Now, at COP26, is the time to turn this initial exchange into an annual dialogue that improves coordination of ocean-related discussions already taking place under the UNFCCC, e.g.
... Read more ...

ECO was awaiting yesterday’s Open Dialogue with excitement. After all, this is a key event to “enable admitted NGO constituencies to have an open dialogue with Parties” as mandated in (FCCC/SBI/2017/7).

However, after arriving ECO had to look in the dictionary to make sure that dialogue indeed means the kind of conversation that is carried out by more than one person…as in the opposite of a monologue.

For the first hour, only observers spoke, as no party was present in the room. The European Union eventually found its way to the room for a quick intervention in the end. ECO waited patiently for the presidency of COP27, Egypt. Or any other Parties for that matter.  Maybe delegates lost their venue map and could not find the room…or maybe delegates got their fingers stuck in a bowling ball or their goldfish fell sick – ECO assumes there must have been good reasons why only the UK and the EU showed up.

That’s why all nine constituencies jointly request to repeat the meeting in week two of COP26 – this time with an actual presence from Parties. ECO looks forward to a real dialogue.

India, what happened to your “cooperative and constructive” engagement on Article 6? ECO hasn’t seen much of that lately, and was particularly struck by your comments yesterday. It’s as if you carefully read all of our previous articles and decided to promote the exact opposite of what ECO recommended.

First, you proposed to bracket (aka: delete) references to Human Rights and sustainable development in the establishment of the sustainable development mechanism! ECO would find this grotesquely funny if it wasn’t also very concerning and sad. With this, India aligned itself with Iran as the only two countries taking the floor to criticise the inclusion of Human Rights in Article 6.

ECO also heard India say that cancelling credits to deliver an overall reduction in emissions was “illogical”. But what is illogical is the idea that a mechanism, which operates as a zero-sum game, can actually increase overall ambition. Without cancellation, Article 6 will not make a meaningful contribution to climate action. It seems India supports a 100 per cent cancellation on ambition.

Additionally, it sounded as if India was promoting a review of the concept of additionality, except that, unlike many others who have contributed to this discussion, they actually seem to support weaker additionality rules compared to the Kyoto Protocol era.
... Read more ...

The Koronivia family has gathered many times in the last years, in person and online. Through nearly a dozen workshops we have spent time together sharing recipes, listening to experts ranging from smallholder farmers to IPCC scientists, and cooking up real solutions to feed the world and cool the planet. We’re so close to serving up a truly amazing meal of delicious, resilient and gender-responsive agroecological solutions that shift us away from polluting, industrialised farming systems. It’s starting to smell delicious!

But oh no! There are crashing sounds in the kitchen. Will this delicious meal end up on the floor, and will we be served with an empty pot? After all these years of effort?

ECO knows that when it comes to issues of agriculture, considerations of equity must be central. Adaptation is key to future food security. Efforts to reduce emissions in agriculture are essential to limit warming to 1.5°C and avert runaway climate breakdown. Parties must target the biggest and most historically responsible polluters, and not put the burden on those that have done the least to cause the climate crisis and who are already experiencing severe impacts. Navigating this pathway may be tricky, but it’s not impossible. ECO thinks that most chefs in the Koronivia kitchen would agree that we need to change large-scale polluting factory farming systems, while protecting smallholder pastoralist systems.
... Read more ...

If you’re squeezing through the corridors of COP26 or eternally queuing in the rain to get in (“come prepared with appropriate gear”), odds are that you’ve heard a lot of Portuguese these days. In fact, Brazil has the biggest national delegation in Glasgow: a stunning 479 people. That’s roughly twice as much as the host country, the UK. ECO smelled stale açaí in that number, so we did some further digging into the list. What we have found was that many of those precious pink badges are dangling from very strange necks.

Among Brazilian “party” or “party overflow” delegates there are members of agribusiness lobby organizations (9), industry lobby organizations (6), business (25), spin doctors (8) hired to showcase “the real Brazil” (sic) in Glasgow, and even a bartender (which might actually explain why their positions on Article 6 sound so much like drunk talk).

And while young indigenous activist Txai Suruí, the only Brazilian voice in the Leaders’ Summit, had to search far and wide for an accreditation to attend the conference, the first ladies of four states and one major city were happily added to the delegation bandwagon. Brazil really likes its double counting: one for the husband, one for the wife.
... Read more ...