ECO Newsletter

Brazil’s Environment minister Ricardo Salles is taking a two-week break from all the trouble back home and enjoying the good wine and tapas in Madrid. In his spare time, he embarrasses his country’s professional diplomats by trying to play negotiator. His tactic: to blackmail richer countries into paying Brazil for burning down the Amazon rainforest.

Minister Salles has said he is coming to the COP to demand big money in return for environmental protections after the current government has systematically dismantled forest protection programs and  the existing funding channels that involve any control  and oversight systems, such as the Amazon Fund and other bodies that involve civil society and other stakeholders. 

The minister calls his management strategy “results-based environmentalism”. The results couldn’t be clearer: deforestation, which makes up the lion’s share of Brazil’s carbon emissions, has sharply increased this year – rising by 29% for the one-year period ending in July. Assassinations of indigenous and community leaders are increasingly common throughout the Amazon re gion, when they get in the way of the land-grabbers, ranchers and illegal miners who are feeling newly empowered by the efforts of President Bolsonaro and Minister Salles to support unsustainable economic expansion in the Amazon and dismantle the already fragile regulatory and enforcement systems.
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Dear Delegates,

ECO is glad you found your way to Santiago de Chile Madrid. Rest assured, ECO will not forget about the people of Chile and will closely follow the situation and update you. But not only the location of COP25 has changed. Just like the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report last year adjusted our frame of reference, so, too, have the IPCC Special Reports of this year adjusted our measuring sticks by clearly showing us that irreversible tipping points and climate impacts will hit even faster than what we anticipated just last year.

Around the world, millions of people have taken to the streets — from Hong Kong to Bolivia, the UK, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, Ecuador, and Chile — demanding their right to a better life. We are not only seeing the failure of big emitters to respond to the demands of people, youth, and science but also a profound blindspot of the inherent linkages between social, ecological and climate justice. The IPCC 1.5°C report robustly highlighted the need for governments to internalize these connections and act on them. ECO knows relocating COP25 has created challenges – but hopes you don’t even think about taking this as an excuse to underdeliver.
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In some parts of the world, today is cyber Monday, one more day of consumption splurge. ECO is no fan of this consumerist model, but in a conciliatory spirit, we have prepared a shopping list nonetheless. And what better thing to hunt for on a day aimed at driving market activity than a robust set of rules to establish the Paris Agreement’s market mechanisms under article 6?

By the end of this COP, ECO hopes that Parties will have agreed to a system which not only helps countries deliver on their targets, but also helps increase emission reductions and ensures environmental integrity. Parties might be used to hearing ECO complaining about Article 6, but today ECO wants to just  “think positive” about the market mechanisms.

First, the mechanism will generate new projects, in the thousands, that will benefit (and not harm) local communities and provide concrete sustainable development benefits in the countries that most need it, notably LDCs and SIDS. Projects will be mainly small scale and focus on transformative technologies. This will contribute to developing renewable energy to provide access to electricity for poor communities, while respecting the strictest rules on additionality and vulnerability, and setting baselines well below business-as-usual.
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Australia burned this spring. Not the regular fires that the country sees every year at the height of summer, but a conflagration. These were fires so hot they started their own thunderstorms, with associated lightning starting yet more fires. At one point, the combined fire front was 6,000 kilometres long. If you drove from Bonn to Madrid, back to Bonn and then returned to Madrid again, you’d still be almost 700km shy of the length of the front. So far six people have died.

Vast swathes of national parks, farmland and ecosystems have been destroyed. An estimated 1,000 koalas have died. Rainforests – places once described as “permanently wet” – burnt for the first time. More than 500 homes were lost. And it’s not even summer yet.

Bushfires of this scale are unprecedented in spring. Driven by increasingly hot days and one of the most extreme droughts ever recorded, now in its 36th month, the realities of climate change have arrived for the Australian people, flora and fauna.

The impacts go beyond the direct threat to lives, farms and businesses. Smoke from the fires has seen the air quality in Sydney the worst in the world in November .The
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We want some resonance. A resonance that could amplify Latin American perspectives, visions, and challenges at this so-called “Latin COP”.

But here we are, yet again in Europe – for another year. Here, we are leaving representatives from different constituencies behind, in just another example of carelessness and insensitivity to the people and peoples who have less capacity to respond. Does it sound familiar? Regrettably, there is no time to get on a boat and sail through the ocean and, sadly, our surnames are only Pérez, Gonzales or Mamani.

The change of the COP venue and quick shift to another continent certainly can be seen as positive, but in the world we envision “the end does not justify the means”. We want to see more empathy and recognition of the consequences for people and communities in Latin America and beyond.

It might be winter here in Madrid, but ECO would encourage everyone to feel that it’s hot out there. It’s hot for many reasons – and not only because of the sunny weather in Chile.

It is hot because the political and social context in the ex-host country is hard and unfair and requires a profound reassessment of what society as a whole considers a “prosperous nation”.
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Ok Boomer Fossil

For this COP to be successful, governments, particularly major emitters, must not only commit to mitigation and finance targets that are 1.5^°C-compatible pathways; they must also ensure that the transition from an extractive economy to a regenerative one is just and equitable for all involved.

The reason is simple: neoliberal and unsustainable economies that have fuelled the climate crisis have also fuelled a deep socio-economic inequality among and within countries. We must take this once-in-a-century opportunity to establish new relationships of power that are focused on justice, equity, and environmental sustainability to give our future a fighting chance. Workers deserve good jobs with family-sustaining wages, where workers have a voice in their terms of employment. Moreover, it is critical that these new jobs are created in and by the very communities that are losing them, and that community-led programs are established with meaningful public input to help workers transition to new employment, receive protections until they are able to start their new jobs, and are supported with vocational education programs to succeed in their new choice of employment.

ECO urges that all Parties in the next round of NDCs must incorporate just and equitable transition plans for and led by all workers and communities impacted by the energy transition.
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Hey, have you heard the one about the NGOs, the volunteer firefighters and the movie star who torched the Amazon forest so the government would get the blame?

Crazy, right? In normal times this would be the stuff of novelas, Brazil’s beloved soap operas, and everybody would consider it a horrible joke.  

Except that Brazilian President Bolsonaro, his Environment Minister Ricardo Salles (who plans to be with us here at COP25 for the whole two weeks), and some of their allies in regional police forces and courts, as well as their massive and suggestible social media following, appear to take it very seriously. And when a crowd of land-grabbers, ranchers, illegal miners and loggers considers you an enemy in Brazil, the results can be deadly.

But to explore the dark humor of the story, we have to go back to Bolsonaro’s election campaign. Then, he promised to “put an end to all kinds of activism” while stopping the unreasonable persecution of the aforementioned land-grabbers and illegal miners and other poor hard-working fellows who just wanted to replace rainforests with soybean and cattle – and for whom the forest protection laws were a nuisance.

Jump ahead to August, when Bolsonaro fans throughout the Amazon were gleefully lighting fires to celebrate their good luck.
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ECO is not sure how many delegates remember the First Periodical Review (FPR)(2013-2015) and its Structured Expert Dialogue (SED), when the best scientists of the world presented their newest research on climate change. One of their biggest message was the insight that there is no guardrail for a limit on global warming (e.g. the 2ºC limit) as there are major impacts for warming below such a limit. Consequently the FPR concluded and COP 21 in Paris decided to limit global warming well below 2ºC and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.

The FPR finalised its tasks at COP 21, and COP 21 decided to have a Second Periodical Review (SPR). This is an excellent opportunity for delegates at UNFCCC negotiations to learn from the latest science. What do we know on specificities of the Paris goals? What on a potential overshoot of these goals and associated reversibility? How would Parties change their mind after an intense consideration of the tipping points that we are approaching? Last week seven distinguished climate scientists alarmed ECO, revealing that humankind could enter a state of potentially catastrophic climate change on a new “hothouse” Earth. The SPR also has the task to examine the progress we see towards achieve the Paris goals.
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