ECO Newsletter

Today ECO returns to the highly motivating, yet alarming findings of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C: to limit global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society – and in doing so we can bring clear benefits to people and ecosystems.

According to the Report, limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce impacts on ecosystems, human health and well- being, making it easier to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society. In contrast, exceeding 1.5°C means grave risks for people and vulnerable systems around the globe.

The Report also highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C or more. For instance, by 2100, global coral reefs, and rapidly escalating risk sea-level rise would be 10 cm lower. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century compared with at least once per decade. As ECO explained yesterday coral reefs would decline by 70–90% with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (>99%) would be lost with 2°C.

The UK’s groundbreaking Climate Change Act is now 10 years old. This piece of legislation was a global first in setting up a legally-binding 2050 climate target — broken down into five-year emissions budgets to allow for political accountability and responsiveness to new science. It also established an independent statutory advisory body: the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), to bring climate science directly to policymakers and hold government to account for those budgets.

While the Act remains an excellent framework, its target is in need of an update — especially in light of the IPCC 1.5oC Special Report.

ECO is delighted to note that the UK Minister has taken the first step towards increasing the UK’s long term ambition – and potentially the nearer-term carbon budgets. She has formally asked the CCC to give advice on how the UK can get to net-zero, and by when ECO hopes that this will be by 2045 – which a recent report showed was possible; we await the CCC’s analysis, due by in March/April 2019. This means the UK will be in a good position to enhance its NDC by 2020, perhaps even in line with 1.5oC – as all countries should aim to do.

ECO welcomes New Zealand coming in from its years in the wilderness and finally accepting that carrying over old and dodgy credits from previous commitment periods of the Kyoto Protocol is a bad idea.

New Zealand has quite the stash of these, but Minister for Climate Change James Shaw has confirmed to Australian media that carrying over these credits would make it challenging for the world to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement. ECO is pleased to agree with the Minister, that this would be a bad idea.

This is a refreshing change, especially from a country that previously earned infamy for its creative accounting.

All eyes remain on Australia, which is silent on whether it will follow suit, and whether the Paris Rulebook will end up allowing it to do so. Australia expects a surplus of around 300 million tonnes of carbon credits by 2020. ECO suspects that it plans to use these to meet its Paris Agreement target without having to cut emissions.

It is these kinds of loopholes we expect the Paris Rulebook to close.

ECO looks forward to the Minister continuing with this positive, loophole-slaying attitude as he co-chairs Article 6 negotiations in the coming days.

We should really talk about that thing. You know, the crisis facing the planet.

It’s important, right? We’ve talked about it a lot already.

Maybe we think so, but there seem to be some who don’t …

Parties agreed at COP23 that the Talanoa Dialogue would be designed to enhance ambition. However, that spirit seemed to have escaped some parties in their interventions in the Talanoa Dialogue events yesterday. There was perhaps no Party that seemed more dead set against ambition in Talanoa than Egypt.

Despite the IPCC findings that current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) put us on track to 3oC warming or more, and the numerous calls at COP24 for urgently scaled-up actions and targets before 2020, Egypt made it clear they had no interest in discussing more ambitious NDCs before 2020.

Today the European Commission will present its new draft long-term climate strategy for the European Union to the COP. ECO is pleased to have gotten an early look, and is breathing a sigh of relief because the European Commission recognises the need to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C.

We are also pleased to see the proposal for the EU to go to net-zero emissions by 2050. This proposal is a welcome shift, given that the European Commission has spent the last three years implementing legislation that would bring EU emissions down by only around 80% by 2050.

This new net-zero proposal would bring EU emissions down by around 93% by 2050, which is the upper end of the range that was identified by the IPCC in 2007, and was endorsed by the EU in the run up to Copenhagen. And ECO has been advised that the word ‘by’ actually means ‘at the latest’.

The IPCC 1.5°C report reveals that the pathways that limit the chances of overshooting 1.5°C and avoid heavy reliance on carbon removal in the second half of this century require global greenhouse gas emissions to reach net-zero by 2044.

ECO would also like to remind the EU and other developed country Parties that they have agreed to continue to lead on climate action.

Today, the political phase of the Talanoa Dialogue begins, starting with Ministerial Roundtables. ECO is looking forward to hearing Ministers tell stories from the real world – sharing views on the significance of the IPCC special report on 1.5o (SR1.5) and how this COP needs to respond.

In honour of the Oceans Action Day, which took place this past weekend, ECO thought it would highlight one such story about the real world of marine ecosystems and the difference between 1.5o and 2oC of warming. Brace yourself, dear ECO readers, as it is a grim one. At 2oC, coral reefs will likely be annihilated. Gone. Toasted. Wiped out of existence. At 1.5o, enough of the reefs may survive so that they can be rehabilitated and brought back to health. Even with the current level of warming, a substantial proportion of coral reefs have experienced large-scale mortalities that are causing them to contract rapidly. In the last three years alone, large coral reef systems such as the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) have lost as much as 50 percent of their shallow-water corals.

The value of coral reefs cannot be overstated. Coral- dominated reefs are found between latitudes 30°S and 30°N along coastlines where they provide habitats for over a million species.

The Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (WIM) celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday. On such an auspicious occasion, let’s look back on its achievements.

The WIM was set up with three elements to its mandate: i) enhance understanding; ii) facilitate coordination; iii) enhance action and support (aka finance). It’s made some gains on the first two — reaching out to other bodies and establishing a Taskforce on Displacement. But as for enhancing or mobilising finance, the WIM has been missing in action.

It is apparent that developed countries have been scared of finance for loss and damage — they’ve spent years ensuring that negotiations talk about finance as little as possible and in the smallest of rooms. When finance was discussed, it was almost entirely about insurance for extreme events. Delegates, please note: making vulnerable countries pay insurance premiums is NOT climate finance! Nor, for that matter, is making them take out loans to recover from increasingly strong and frequent hurricanes propelled by warming oceans from ever-rising GHG emissions. Enough!

It is well past time to discuss finance to address loss and damage. The WIM needs to be fully operationalised into a mechanism that can channel funding at scale to vulnerable countries.

ECO overheard on several occasions — even at the plenary yesterday — some alarming conversations between negotiators and Ministers. After three years, there still seems to be some confusion of two very different notions of “finance” in the context of climate ambition!

Yesterday, a handful of Ministers from developed and developing countries met in Plenary Śląsk to discuss the need for enhanced action pre-2020. This is, of course, because the levels of climate action and emissions reductions until now have been, and continue to be, woefully inadequate. The same can be said about finance and other support to developing countries.

Thankfully, it is not too late to make a difference – to close the gap and avoid carrying this burden into the future, as has clearly been stated by several developing countries during the plenary discussion. As the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C makes abundantly clear, every year, every gigatonne of emissions, every action, and every fraction of a degree makes a difference.

We hope the discussions yesterday contribute to urgent efforts to scale up action, as well as reinforcing the message from the IPCC report as to what is needed to get on track to staying below 1.5°C degrees.

Importantly, the outcomes of this crucial high-level meeting should be captured in a COP24 decision, along with COP decisions from ministerial discussions on finance and on the Talanoa Dialogue. Together, these will contribute to the balanced package we all want.

ECO considers some elements critically important, and thinks these should be captured in the outputs of this stocktake and related COP decisions, such as:

• Recognition of climate action shortfalls in the pre-2020 period – particularly from developed countries, and calling on them to meet and exceed targets ahead of 2020;
• The need for scaling-up finance and support, including through the Green Climate Fund in – meeting the $100 billion commitment with rigorous accounting methods agreed by all Parties;
• A call for cooperative action between countries – e.g.