ECO Newsletter

In many ways, the COP can take place anywhere. Inside the halls, meeting rooms and plenary spaces of IFEMA, you could be forgiven for forgetting that you are in in Spain at all. Each year the COP comes to town and creates a world of its own. Whether you are in Katowice, Bonn, Marrakech or Paris, the view from the negotiating table is frustratingly generic. Each year the negotiations are characterised by the same tedious bickering, the same dragging of heels, and the same proactive vandalism of the process by big polluting countries.
However, when the COP comes to Glasgow next year, it will be coming to a very specific place. From a UK point of view, the COP taking place in Glasgow is a complex predicament. Scotland remains part of the United Kingdom, but has its own government with extensive powers in key areas, including over many aspects of climate change policy. COP26 will therefore be a UK Government event, taking place in a part of the country that develops its own, more ambitious, climate policy. Furthermore, just as we don’t know if the UK will still be in the EU this time next year, there will be questions asked about Scotland remaining in the UK, as its government seeks legislation for a second referendum on Scottish Independence.
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Dear Party delegates,

2019 has been a year in which millions of people have taken their demands to the streets (and hundreds to the halls of the IFEMA Conference Center), clearly voicing our discontent with the c-o-m-p-l-e-t-e lack of ambition to address the climate emergency.

With only 17 days separating us from 2020 — the year when global emissions need to decrease drastically — it’s high time to adopt an ambitious package here at COP, before going home and getting to work in our respective countries and communities.  We came here to hear your concrete plans on how you will enhance your NDCs by 2020 to ensure we limit warming to 1.5°C, and we didn’t hear much that inspired hope.

To prepare you for such an exciting year as 2020 will be, ECO has put together a list of the necessary ingredients for a truly transformative NDC:

This NDC will affect everyone, so include everyone; ensure a broad civil society based approach. Don’t know where to start? Here’s a TIP: process needs to be Transparent, Inclusive and Participatory.
A well-defined timeline for enhancing your NDCs, making sure they are complete by the end of August or, at latest, September.
A long-term strategy that will ensure a sustainable, equitable, and just transition of our societies, for people and planet, with real positive impact on the ground and at local levels.
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At COP24 in Katowice, 14 accredited participants were stopped at the border and denied entry into Poland so that they would not be able to attend the COP. These people were from the Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.

After 1 year, it is still a mystery to ECO on how the Polish authorities identified those climate activists as a possible “threat to national security” of the hosting country. Most of them were newcomers at international climate change events, and did not have records of offences in Poland or any other country. ECO hopes it was not like in the movies when police officers make their investigations based off some paranormal perception of the future.

This year, we met Nugzar Kokhreidze from Georgia, who had been denied the right to participate in the climate negotiations by Poland and spent 4 days in the transit zone at the Katowice airport. He is a friendly, cheerful, and kind person and  it is still not been made clear why and how he was selected as a person who poses a potential threat to Poland’s national security. Now at COP25, Nugzar has become one of the 12 people who were physically debadged during a peaceful protest on Wednesday, December 11th.
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As countries make plans to ramp up their NDCs, they need a 1.5°C scenario to help them chart a course away from fossil fuels. On Tuesday evening, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol took to the plenary stage for the Energy Day Ministerial meeting. Energy ministers from around the world shared the (still largely inadequate) actions their countries are taking to decarbonize the energy sector.

Sadly, right now, the IEA is fueling inadequate levels of ambition. The IEA has rebuffed growing calls to develop a 1.5°C scenario. Instead, the IEA, in its scenarios, prolongs our dependence on fossil fuels — especially fossil gas. It’s so-called Paris-aligned scenario only reaches net-zero by 2070, at least 20 years too late. The IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is frequently used to justify major new fossil fuel infrastructure, including coal in Australia, tar sands in Canada, fracking in the Permian, and offshore drilling in the Arctic. All of these new developments are incompatible with 1.5°C.

“Energy decision-makers need to make hard decisions… The aim is not to increase our egos, but to decrease our energy emissions,” said Birol. ECO couldn’t agree more. Now it is time for the IEA to put egos aside and heed the science, the needs of its own members, the growing calls from the financial community and the climate movement and create a 1.5°C scenario.
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On December 9, the world celebrated anti-corruption day, and on December 10 human rights day. These topics keep evaporating at COP. Why is ambition still lacking when we have the solutions, technologies, and the money? Solving the climate crisis is possible, but vested economic interests, corporate capture, and a lack of political will are in the way. CAN is calling on Parties to commit to good governance and act with the highest degree of integrity when deciding on the future of our planet; a conflict of interest policy is urgently needed for the UNFCCC.

We need to end undue influence now

Political interference from vested interests prevents measures being taken to solve the climate crisis and can redirect the negotiations toward solutions that don’t align with the science and which undermine ambition. A recent report shows that the world’s five largest oil and gas companies spent over US$1 billion on climate-related branding and lobbying since the Paris Agreement. This must change; the way that lobbying and campaign financing is regulated at national levels must improve. 

Corruption and political interference take many forms, from self-enrichment to the blocking, delaying, and watering down of key policy-making.

The fossil fuel industry and other emission-intensive industries have a long and well-documented history of undermining the UNFCCC and other bodies.
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Six long months ago CAN published a briefing on climate change and the SDGs which rightly sought to bring the discussion way beyond goal 13 on climate change. In this, it argued that efforts to achieve all the goals are dependent on efforts to respond to global heating. The clue is in the ‘sustainable’. Similarly, responding to the climate crisis depends on advances made towards the development goals.

As the IPCC 1.5ºC report said: “sustainable development supports and enables the fundamental societal and systems transitions and transformations that will help limit global warming to 1.5°C. It can achieve ambitious mitigation and adaptation in conjunction with poverty eradication and efforts to reduce inequalities”.

Several SDG themes (i.e. socio-economic sectoral categories) are addressed by numerous climate actions, indicating that there are multiple opportunities for policy coherence. This can be a major contribution of climate action to the delivery of coherent delivery of Agenda 2030.

Analysis has shown that links between existing NDCs and the SDGs are found in the areas of water, food and energy.

Despite environmental goals being represented in a bunch of the NDCs, many countries do not make explicit plans to realise potential for nature-based solutions that could help deliver SDG 14 (life below water) and 15 (life on land), as well as contributing to climate mitigation and resilience.
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The twin traumas of social and environmental crises are bearing down on citizens around the world, but political leaders lack the passion and ambition needed to address thelooming catastrophe. In some places, they lack even simple acknowledgement and acceptance. To get a better sense of what happens outside the walls of COP, ECO spoke with youth from Chile and Mexico, and their experiences show how stark the contrast is between the struggles of people on the ground and the attitudes of their leaders. The people in charge could learn a thing or two about working together from these youth.

What’s clear is that the climate crisis and the social crisis are two sides of the same coin, and need to be addressed together in order to fully be addressed at all.

Chileans are facing enormous challenges with their government. And because COP25 was supposed to be there instead of here, let’s hear from a Chilean youth as COP comes to a slow, unsteady end.

What the world, and even Chile’s own government, doesn’t understand is how most Chileans are alarmingly exposed to the disastrous effects of the environmental catastrophe. Because of extreme social and economic differences, the 1% live comfortably and ignore the social issues that affect the most vulnerable.
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We know that life on Earth is facing two interlinked emergencies – climate, and biodiversity – both of which result from human pressure on the natural world, and both of which have only a small window of time left in which we can act to solve them.

Each crisis makes the other worse. Every time we clear or log a forest, drain a wetland, dry out a peatland, bleach a coral reef, over-exploit a fish stock, trawl a seagrass bed or dam a wild river, we make things worse, whether exacerbating the climate crisis, or further damaging biodiversity; in turn, reducing ecosystem integrity and stability. Carbon, formerly safely stored in those ecosystems, is released.  Once damaged, these natural ecosystems are then more vulnerable to further loss and damage from drought, fire, acidification, deoxygenation and climate change.  All of which risks increasing the release of GHGs to the atmosphere and making the future for biodiversity on which our lives depend ever more tenuous. Indigenous peoples appreciate this more than most, often having a closer and deeper relationship with nature; yet their wisdom is ignored, their territories invaded and destroyed, and their human rights disregarded in the name of the most climate- and nature-unfriendly initiatives.
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ECO [welcomes] [recognizes] [notes] the publication of the triad of chapeau decisions, known to all you negotiating lovelies by the melodic monikers 1/CP.25, 1/CMP.15 and 1/CMA.2.

There are good elements in the current drafts, but there is still room for improvement in the remaining [2][3][4] days of COP.

ECO welcomes the strong thread of scientific recognition, especially in 1/CP.25. Indeed, for climate change, it is imperative for our survival that politics is led by science. It is evil for politics to play fast and loose with the facts, and the fact is, much greater mitigation action is needed. An explicit mandate for all Parties to revise and enhance their NDCs — both mitigation and adaptation intentions — by October 2020 should be included. And since the decision text includes recognition of the gap, it should also include a mandate for the secretariat to calculate the size of the gap, based on NDCs received, in time for COP26. The potential of nature for helping deliver resilience and mitigation aims is already well explored, and now should be the time to realize this potential. Regarding nature: while the importance of ocean ecosystems is well reflected in the text, it seems odd that land does not receive similar recognition. 
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