ECO Newsletter

World leaders came to Glasgow to kick off COP26 – a COP that needs to begin the decisive decade for climate action; a COP that must conclude with clear responses to the devastating messages from the recent IPCC report, the UNEP Gap report, the UNFCCC Synthesis report, the IEA 2050 scenario. These reports all clearly spell out the need to raise national ambition – urgently – to keep 1.5°C in reach.

Many leaders made hearteningly strong statements on the need to stay below 1.5°C. Some countries gave us hope – such as the ambitious 2030 clean energy announcement by India      and the strong calls, from many developing and climate vulnerable countries, to most capable to raise national targets and enhance implementation.      

Adding our voice to theirs, ECO echoes the Barbados Prime Minister’s question: when will Leaders  – especially of high-responsibility and capability countries – actually lead? We like hearing Leaders detail what they are doing today, tomorrow and before COP27 to raise national climate ambition and accelerate the implementation of climate action. These early actions shall not be forgotten over 2050 targets.

ECO now wonders how the leaders’ call for global climate ambition will translate to an ambition decision that leads the world to accelerated 1.5°C-compatible implementation.
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[Hooray we have a new Article 6 text, and it’s the feast of the [brackets][options] again. It’s [nearly] all there: from the most ambitious to the [ridiculous][scary].

ECO‘s jaw dropped in happy amazement when a search for the words “Human Rights” and “Rights of Indigenous Peoples” didn’t come up blank, but reality hit again when noticing all the brackets as well as their absence from activity design and the continuing failure to have an independent grievance mechanism. Remember, [Human Rights][rights language] should never have left this text in the first place.

It’s also getting a bit tiring to remind Parties that the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement are not one and the same, and that there’s no [place][role][possibility] for CERs to be carried over. No CERs can count towards a country’s first [or subsequent] NDC[s], even if [vintage][registration] cut-offs are put in place. 

Parties should stop counting brackets and start [ac]counting [for] emission reductions. Yes, we see all those [loopholes][jokes (we wish)][nonsensical propositions] in the text. Every credit must be accounted for, and that means applying corresponding adjustments for all credits, no [exception][excuses][”please look the other way while I fudge my emissions report”].

ECO urges Parties not to play games with baselines.
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The G20 Leaders’ summit in Rome over the weekend may well have been mistaken for the set of a well-known spaghetti western with their climate rendition of the good, the bad and the ugly. 

The Good

If the recovery from COVID-19 has taught us one thing, it’s that existential threats have no quick fix. So too is the case with climate change, which is why it was good to see in paragraph [24] of the communiqué a commitment to allocate “an ambitious share of the financial resources to mitigating and adapting to climate change and avoid harm to the climate and environment”. Reference was also made to the International Energy Agency’s Sustainable Recovery Tracker. Assessments like this contextualise the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in a given country’s transition to net-zero. In doing so they highlight the dividends investing in clean energy pays, as well as shine a light on the often dim picture of states still recalcitrant to take meaningful change. Recognition of the long-term climate impact of decisions made today was a demonstration of ‘good’ by the G20 Leaders. 

The Bad

If we have learnt anything over the past century and a half of fossil fuel exploration, development and consumption – it’s that humankind would have been far better to have left them in the ground.
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Hey Steven, what’s up? Do you remember the long nights? The wordplay? ECO remembers you – drafting articles to fill our pages, calling out climate inaction, doing what you knew best: speaking truth to power. Oh man, we had fun!

ECO is excited to see our old friend Steven Guilbeault is the newly appointed Environment and Climate Change Minister of so-called Canada. He is no stranger to the admittedly cold, austere, grey halls of COP.  ECO’s friend and a founder of Climate Action Network, chair of the board, and former editor of this very newsletter, for over 25 years Steven was collaborating in meeting rooms, demonstrating in action zones, and speaking up in interventions alongside other civil society comrades. This year, with the return of COP comes the return of a veteran of these negotiations  – this time, in a different position of power – one which brings with it many privileges, and many responsibilities. 

Steven will no doubt recognize COP, but will COP and ECO recognise Steven? Will Guilbeault continue to be the champion of climate action and of civil society that ECO has known for so long? Will the man who once awarded Canada Fossil of the Day (more than once!)
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ECO followed with mathematical curiosity Brazil’s announcement of its new NDC target yesterday. There we found a stunning exercise of number-crunching that might earn the Brazilian environment minister a Fields Medal, a Nobel Prize – or, more likely, a Fossil of the Day. The Brazilian government, lo and behold, has discovered a way to increase ambition without cutting a single gram of carbon dioxide. 

The recipe to such an arithmetical tour de force involves, first of all, updating the first NDC in 2020 with a deliberate increase of 700 million tonnes of CO2e to emissions in the baseline year of 2005. Then, keeping the same percentage cut already applied as an indicative target back in 2015 – 43% by 2030. This will grant an extra 400 megatonnes to freely dump in the atmosphere while somehow still claiming to meet the target, and rendering the NDC a total fudge. That will result in getting sued for violating the Paris Agreement (this pesky piece of paper that says NDCs can only move in one direction, upwards) and being singled out by UNEP as the only G20 country to actually decrease ambition in its NDC update.

But worry not! Here comes the neat part: in Glasgow, before the eyes of the world, the baseline year emissions will be updated again, so in 2005 that remains a still lofty 400 million tonnes higher than the original NDC projection, and the percentage cut will be ratcheted up even further to 50% (who doesn’t love round numbers?).
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Six years after the Paris Agreement, Parties at COP26 must urgently agree on how to close the current mitigation gap to limit temperature rise to 1.5ºC. To keep the 1.5ºC goal in reach we need urgent, ambitious action BOTH to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible AND to preserve and restore natural ecosystems which are a major carbon sink. Crucially, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) are the custodians of much of the world’s precious biodiversity and, in the efforts to pursue 1.5ºC, their rights must be protected and their voices heard and centred. 

The IPCC AR6 report clearly highlights that land and ocean sinks have absorbed over half of our carbon emissions over the last decade, and warns that the climate crisis threatens the ability of ecosystems to act as carbon sinks and risks turning them into sources of emissions. Even if we immediately eliminated fossil fuels, the emissions from agriculture, increased deforestation, forest and land degradation, and other land use changes would severely hamper our chances of staying below 1.5°C.

Nature is not a new topic for Parties. In Madrid they underlined “the essential contribution of nature to addressing climate change and its impacts and the need to address climate change in an integrated manner” (1/CP.25, paragraph 15). 
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Yesterday, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon must have had Nelson Mandela’s words on her mind when she announced her country’s pledge to provide £1 million to respond to loss and damage. The money will come from the Scottish Government’s soon-to-be £6 million-a-year Climate Justice Fund, which to date has been focused on adaptation, and is to be used to help communities recover from and build resilience against climate-related events. This is the first developed country – ever – to make an explicit commitment to loss and damage finance. 

Of course, this is nowhere near sufficient to respond to the scale of loss and damage needs, which could range between US$290 billion and $580 billion annually by 2030, only for developing countries. Yet this small but strong political stance that Scotland, as a sub-state actor, is taking towards countries and people on the frontline of climate impacts, is a way of saying: we heard you, we bear a responsibility in this and we will not let you down. And it is also a message for other Western governments with much larger resources than Scotland: if small nations can do it, you can and MUST do it too.

Despite being anchored in the Paris agreement as the third pillar of climate action, loss and damage remains the “unwanted child” in the climate talks, as the AOSIS Chair bluntly but rightly said on Sunday.
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Negotiators here in Glasgow, and in Madrid, and in Katowice, and in Bonn, and in Marrakech have become obsessed with carbon markets. We get it. We know how attractive it is to pay others to do the work while someone else covers the costs. But in these dire circumstances, we need to sit down and talk about other ways to enhance ambition, and fast. Like, right here in Glasgow!

When it comes to talking about Article 6 and international cooperation, it’s always mitigation, mitigation, mitigation, and, markets, markets, markets. But what about those non-market approaches that are also included in Article 6? Yes, the stuff at the end of Article 6 that no one seems to see or want to talk about, but which could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – including for ecosystem conservation – through innovative approaches to finance including financial transaction taxes, taxes on the super rich, and levies on fossil fuel production and aviation. 

Let’s take a step back and take a quick gander at the Paris Agreement. Article 6 is about voluntary cooperation in the implementation of NDCs, to allow for higher ambition in mitigation and adaptation actions, and to promote sustainable development and environmental integrity.
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