ECO Newsletter

Well, after already delaying a year, it looks likely that the 6-year work-plan for the Forum on the Implementation Response Measures has stalled, though discussion continues, facilitated by a pair of Ministers. 

While it sounds nice to include “recalls the imperative for a just transition,” in the draft decision, let’s be honest, there is NO action in remembering something. That is just unacceptable. 

This round of negotiations started out promisingly as countries began to discuss issues related to a fair, equitable, and just transition from a dirty fossil-fuel energy economy to a 100% clean, renewable one. But, they also demonstrated how difficult and critical these issues are, particularly if countries want to ensure (as they should) that the transition protects the rights of Indigenous communities, workers and unions, youth, women and gender constituents, people with disabilities, frontline communities, and other structurally oppressed groups. 

A just transition – if done right – will jumpstart new social and economic development with a more resilient and democratic economy, while increasing climate ambition. It is, therefore, central to every country’s effort to decarbonize. Yet, equity and justice continue to be divorced from ambition goals, NDCs, finance, and other commitments, siloed inside one single forum.
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After a frustrating series of negotiations leading to bland compromises on unblocking funds for poor countries to make plans, a toothless criticism of the committee charged with ambition, and an unseemly struggle for control over the accounts, adaptation has been stranded at this COP.

The clue is in the name: climate change. When things change, we have to adapt to the new circumstances. What could be bigger than a change in the climate? Albert Einstein once described the environment as ‘everything that isn’t me’. Change that, and I have to adapt everything I think, plan, and do.

Of course, mitigation would be best. But, where we find ourselves today, adaptation has to happen. Millions of people are already faced with fundamental challenges: more frequent droughts, flooding, and storms threaten food security, ways of life, and basic rights. US$13.3 billion in adaptation finance is far below the $50b goal. The Adaptation Finance Gap report from 2016 tells us that adaptation costs could increase up to $300b by 2030.

Without a concerted effort by international institutions like the UN, adaptation will be a piecemeal effort with insufficient resources used inefficiently and ineffectively. The Global Commission on Adaptation is a start, but 1 year of action is certainly not enough.
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Right now, the youth of Australia are not being listened to by our government, even though the impacts of the climate crisis are here now. Sydney and regional NSW are blanketed with smoke from catastrophic bushfires, with fires all across the country, and air quality 11 times what are hazardous levels.

Yet our government is trying to use an accounting trick to get out of acting on the driver of these devastating fires, climate change. Energy Minister Angus Taylor has continuously made misleading claims about the government’s reduction in emissions. Taylor claims Australia will meet its targets 7 years ahead of schedule, which is untrue.

A meaningful global target for Australia would be at least a 45% reduction. Yet Australia’s target under the Paris Agreement is 26-28% by 2030, and net zero emissions by 2050. The Morrison government wants to count surplus emission reductions credits earned as Kyoto Credits. With these credits, Australia’s expected emissions reductions will be just 16% – not at all our fair share. We need to do something about this. We need to stop countries like Australia from being able to “cheat” their way out of real action on climate change.

Climate change is causing unprecedented drought and resulting in our bushland and forests drying out like never before, even in ancient World Heritage Listed rainforests that have never been subject to bushfire.
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The Ray of the Year goes to Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

CAN does not often award Rays of the Day; to receive such an award requires a significant step forward on climate action and these happen lamentably infrequently. However, there is a body that CAN has decided deserves not only a Ray of the Day, but Ray of the Year.

  The winner of this prestigious award is…the Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)!

  This award aims to recognize the amazing work of this Nobel Prize winning group of scientists. They produced three key reports in the past two years that provided the basis for all the work civil society is doing to pressure governments to accelerate climate action and decarbonize the economy. 

We applaud these scientists for providing the solid truth that we need to do more and we need to do it faster to save humanity and the planet fromm devastating climate change.

Finance for Loss and Damage = Essential COP25 Outcome

We came to COP25 in light of rising seas, heat and water stress, decreasing crop yields and fish stocks, spreading diseases, and increasingly frequent and severe floods, droughts and storms, which threaten the right to life, health, food, water and housing.  We came with the expectation that rich countries would take this problem seriously heeding the desperate calls of developing countries for new and additional finance for loss and damage.

ECO already indicated yesterday how inadequate current finance is: it is essential that COP25 agree on new sources of finance and a time-bound process to proactively explore these new sources of finance, and by COP26, agree to and implement a concrete plan to increase finance for loss and damage. 

Anything less than this would be an abject failure of rich countries at this COP. The obfuscating and delaying tactics of the US in particular are designed to ensure we get nothing. Other rich countries – the EU, Norway, New Zealand, Australia and Canada – must stand apart from the US. It is not acceptable to continue to hide behind this climate criminal.

ECO has plenty of ideas for new and innovative sources of finance that are «polluter pays» sources of finance including, for example, a climate damages tax on the fossil fuel industry, international aviation and maritime levies, and debt relief.
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Dear Ministers,

We, the so-called civil society that observes negotiations, would like to call your attention to the many gaps we need to close to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement on mitigation, adaptation/resilience, and support. ‘Gap’ is amongst the most spoken words in these negotiating halls, maybe no less than ambition. 

So which gaps is ECO talking about? 

They go by many names. We talk of the ‘emissions gap,’ the ‘ambition gap,’ and lately also the ‘commitment gap between what we say we will do and what we need to do to prevent dangerous levels of climate warming’ as the 2019 UNEP Gap Report puts it. 

But maybe the biggest gap this year is between the voices of the youth and people taking to the streets, and what you and your governments are doing to tackle the climate emergency. 

Here in Madrid ECO has sadly faced yet another gap: the civil society participation gap in these processes. One example is that we were not able to distribute our paper edition of ECO in the first week of COP25, at one point even outside the IFEMA. As a symptom of the shrinking space for civil society, globally, this is a cause for concern. 
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Last week the Global Carbon Project side event reminded us again how small the window is to avoid dangerous climate change.

The pressure to act and incorporate recent science to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) is rising. ECO is dismayed that Parties have not yet reached an agreement on the scope of the Second Periodical Review (SPR) working from 2020-2022. Without a decision on the scope, the FCCC would have no impressive science-based advisory body any more – and the science-policy interface of the Convention would be seriously damaged.

ECO fears that the science part of the SPR could become a victim in a political war on other important items like Pre-2020, and calls on ministers to find consensus and make a speedy decision at COP25 so that it will be possible to start the review next year.

As you know the SPR has to evaluate new climate science published since the First Periodic Review (e.g. IPCC three Special Reports) and to analyse all actions based on equity taken by all countries to reach the ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement and to formulate climate policy conclusions.

For ECO, it is helpful to be aware of the new CONSTRAIN report zeroes on the remaining carbon budget by Climate Analytics as well as projected surface warming rates over the next 20 years.
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Achieving environmental integrity in the implementation of Article 6 requires many things; but where to start? For ECO, environmental integrity is impossible to achieve without conservative baselines, set well below business-as-usual (BAU). And even these are necessary, but not sufficient elements. 

ECO is encouraged to see that the text forwarded to the COP Presidency included some principles for conservative baselines in Article 6.4.  However, ECO is concerned to see many of these foundational principles in brackets, and some key principles missing or muddled. Methodologies in the new Article 6 mechanism must require baselines that are well below business as usual. While “best available technology” is listed in the text, it is also important to take into account what is economically feasible without the mechanism, as well as what is legally required.  

Approaches based on projected or historical emissions are not appropriate for a conservative or ambitious benchmark.  ECO urges Parties to remember that historical emissions are how we got into this mess in the first place. We need to do better.  

As the economic, political, and technological contexts in which projects take place evolve, so should the baselines. Ensuring that methodologies are approved for a time-bound period, and requiring the review and update of baselines over time, is necessary in order to reflect the inherently dynamic nature of the viability of various technologies. 
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