ECO Newsletter

Yesterday, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company, floated 1.5% of its shares on the country’s stock exchange in the world’s largest Initial Public Offering. The IPO is expected to raise at least US$26 billion for the company, and potentially up to $29b – which is the largest influx of financing for fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement was signed. Aramco is also the largest single corporate source of carbon emissions since 1965.

Here in Madrid, negotiators are stuck on how to finance loss and damage. So here’s a modest proposal: a [2][5]% share of proceeds levied on trading in Aramco and other oil companies’ shares to provide funding for addressing loss and damage in the most vulnerable countries. This would operationalise the Polluter Pays Principle, and directly link financing for loss and damage to the companies most responsible. This is what we call climate justice!

ECO would like to remind developed countries of the US$100 billion climate finance commitment they promised to deliver annually by 2020. We are not sure whether you have noticed that there is actually not much time left to hit the target, as 2020 is getting closer.

ECO especially worries about the slow progress on the adaptation finance share of your commitment. The climate crisis is already hitting hard on many people, especially those who are the most vulnerable. Those people rely on you to live up to your promises by 2020.  But some developed countries seem to have forgotten the fact that they promised that half of their $100b promised would be for adaptation action. The recent OECD update made us doubt that developed countries are on the right track… In 2017, adaptation finance only rose to $13.3b. What is your plan to get to at least $50b for adaptation action by 2020?

ECO would like to suggest one concrete option available: contribute to the Adaptation Fund (AF)!

The AF is effectively channelling adaptation finance to people and communities most vulnerable to climate change. With its small, localized, mainly direct access projects, it serves as an important niche in the international climate finance architecture.
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Have you ever thought about what you would do if the climate changed the place where you live? When climate impacts hit, impacting your life and livelihood, you have to decide: stay or go. In the driest corridor of Central America, it has been years since rainfall catastrophically decreased.

When the El Niño and climate change made life unsustainable, Yensi Marisela and her husband decided to move to Tegucigalpa. There he found work, and she joined a factory in a special economic zone. Some time after, the son of one of her friends was murdered in a shootout. The insecurity caused by gang activity, cost of living, and the lack of dignified work meant Yensi returned home, while her husband stayed and sent money home.

The drastic change in rain patterns have ruined the harvest in the Dry Corridor, where 60% of people already live under the poverty line and rely on subsistence agriculture. This is a humanitarian crisis aggravated by climate change in which migration is often the only viable option. Migration often occurs within country borders or towards Costa Rica and El Salvador, and more recently, there are increased migration flows towards other international destinations. 

Studies on the gendered impact of climate change show an increased flow of female migrants toward Spain and the US as housekeepers.
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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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