ECO Newsletter

This ECO article is directed at decision-makers at COP26. It has been co-created this week by 60 young people from all over the world, to make a unified call for climate justice. Most of us didn’t grow up speaking English and we had not met each other before. Yet in just four hours, we listened to each other, shared our experiences, and put together our vision for the future we want to inherit. If we can do this, decision makers can do it too.   

There is a Palauan proverb that says A klukuk a rkemei, which translates as ‘tomorrow is still to come’. It teaches young kids in Palau the importance of taking care of the future. Our actions today define what tomorrow looks like. Yet, these same children experience enormous loss and damage because of the current climate crisis they didn’t cause.  

We are 60 young people. We come from Burkina Faso, Burundi, Niger, the Central African Republic, Columbia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Belgium, and Spain. We come from diverse backgrounds, but all experience the devastating effects of the climate crisis, and are united in our demands for decision makers at COP-26. 

We demand that Loss and Damage be a priority at COP26 and a permanent theme in the COPs and intersessionals that follow.
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ECO still gets goosebumps listening over and over to Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley’s powerful intervention on Monday: “Failure to provide the critical finance, and that of loss and damage is measured, my friends, in lives and livelihoods in our communities. This is immoral and it is unjust”. 

She was not the only one to call on G7 and G20 countries to acknowledge and fulfill their responsibilities: heads of states and governments from Honduras, Kenya, and Antigua and Barbuda, among others, echoed her call to action. 

ECO hopes this is the very last time that these countries feel the need to deliver such desperate statements. Now is the time for Parties to show that they have heard the message and are ready to act. 

To do so, three things need to happen at COP26:

Firstly, ECO urges the establishment of a permanent agenda item on loss and damage for UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies. Indeed, despite being the third pillar of climate action recognised in the Paris Agreement (alongside adaptation and mitigation), loss and damage (L&D) is discussed under the UNFCCC negotiations only once a year, at the technical level, through the review of the WIM Executive Committee report to the COP.
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You’ll remember the adventures of Marty McFly travelling back in time. (Yes, ECO is talking about movies – long before Netflix took over our lives.) You’ll remember him struggling to return to his life and trying to fix the problems he had caused in the past. 

Well, at Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA), like McFly, we are also facing the past to imagine the future. We are chasing the objective of fixing the climate emergency caused in part by the food systems in place. 

A proverb says, “When you don’t know where you’re going, look where you came from”. We come from years of advocacy to make the UNFCCC recognise that agriculture is part of the problem but also part of the solution, which, in 2017 finally led to a COP decision on agriculture; and so the KJWA was born. Since then we’ve had discussion on manure, livestock, soil nutrients, socioeconomic dimensions and food security; 6 workshops (and 2 extra ones), 4 COPs and have come to the understanding that we work better when everyone is included and given a voice (YES, that means observers in the room). Now, after 4 years, Koronivia’s roadmap is coming to an end and a decision on its future is expected at this COP. 
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Today is Energy Day at COP26, and ECO is expecting to see that the ‘fossil fuels’ elephant in the climate room will be eclipsed by renewables all day long. 

For ECO, ‘Energy Day’ means one thing: a full transition to sustainable renewables. This means not only increasing the renewable energy supply but also thinking about energy efficiency, reducing overconsumption, sustainable use of renewable resources, a socially just transition, and ensuring energy access for all.  

What is often overlooked is that the richer parts of the world use far more energy than they actually need, and so emit the majority of global greenhouse emissions. In richer countries, we need to power down our energy consumption, but ‘powering down’ is more than energy efficiency. It means re-thinking what we actually need to use, and how we go about using it. ECO is not convinced that using a lot more energy makes anyone a lot happier.      

Renewable energy is far more equitably distributed than fossil fuels. For example, we can use the sun to heat buildings, to heat our water and to make electricity. Renewable energy is out there and with a good spread of technologies and the right infrastructure we can make renewable energy the norm, not the exception, and we can even overcome the problem of variable energy from the sun and the wind.               
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ECO loves to be pleasantly surprised. So yesterday was a winner. As discussions started on Article 6.2, we were pleasantly surprised to hear so much seeming support for the inclusion of human rights language in the text! It was great to hear so many Parties including AILAC, EIG, LDCs, LMDC, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Antigua & Barbuda, Ecuador … all voice their support (and if we forgot anyone, apologies, and we hope you all join). 

But the devil is in the details and those details are important. ECO stands ready to provide any help we can give to Parties to ensure the protection of human rights and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

We have some immediate suggestions for how to strengthen the language for human rights safeguards in the context of article 6.4. You can do this by including it in activity design and ensuring that consultation with local holders is in line with rights such as  Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent. These elements are critical to help prevent potential harms. Oh, and make the grievance mechanism – which communities can access to seek remedy if they are harmed – independent. That’s a big human rights point that can’t be forgotten! 
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Over the past two days, world leader after world leader took to the podium to boast about their climate action. 

Many spoke about the urgent need for greater action this decade to keep 1.5°C alive. 

Yet few of them pointed to ambition’s twin sibling – accountability.  

COP26 is a crucial moment to hold world leaders’ feet to the fire and start the process of scrutinising politicians’ commitments to climate action. In Glasgow, this begins with kickstarting the Global Stocktake (GST). 

ECO doesn’t need to remind you that in Paris, governments agreed that the GST would monitor collective progress of countries over time. This provides a periodic check-in, and indication on whether, how, and where ambition needs to be adjusted in order to make sure we meet all three Paris Agreement goals.

In other words, it ensures that the Paris Agreement is fulfilling its mandate to protect people from the impacts of climate change and support them to mitigate, adapt, and address loss and damage. It is the only way to reduce the climate risks to people and nature around the world.

The GST is a key guarantor of the Paris Agreement. It will be the process where Parties, in front of the global community, have to explain their efforts, or lack thereof.
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ECO is getting a little desperate in the transparency negotiations. Parties are continuing to repeat the same lines and positions they’ve shared since June 2019, and ECO isn’t completely sure if all Parties are eager to reach consensus on a robust set of decisions. Parties are still maneuvering over the structure of the texts rather than engaging on the technical aspects. ECO knows this can be part of the negotiating strategy, but it’s beyond time to move toward consensus. 

It is baffling that after all the work and time to get here to Glasgow, Parties spent an hour yesterday arguing over the difference in status between informal notes from the May-June virtual SB and notes prepared here in Glasgow. 

ECO knows the transparency negotiations are on very technical topics: tables, outlines, and training programs. But the enhanced transparency framework (ETF) is a central element of the Paris Agreement. The ETF will be how ECO knows whether we are on track to limit warming to 1.5°C. The ETF is how we know whether countries will meet the targets they have set out in their NDCs. The ETF is how we know whether countries meet the $100 billion per annum goal. The ETF will give us information about adaptation.
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