ECO Newsletter

Saudi ArabiaOn Behalf of the Arab Group

It’s great to be consistent – reliable is good, right? Seems old habits die hard, especially if your allies keep the door open for you …

So, given that we are at COP 24, it is no shock that there are some offenders that keep on coming back.

This Fossil award is for the most consistent, insistent and persistent voice undermining ambition in the negotiations so far this week – Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, an intervention by Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Arab Group, summarized their overall approach.

In the session on the Global Stocktake, Saudi Arabia, called for deletion of the term “ambition mechanism” in the preamble to the Global Stocktake text on the grounds that it pre-judges the outcome of the GST. The IPCC SR 1.5 and the entire Paris Agreement makes it clear that we need much more climate ambition if we are to meet the agreement’s long-term objectives.

Saudi efforts to undermine ambition don’t stop there. Saudi Arabia (speaking for like-minded developing countries or LMDCs for those not in the know) opposes agreement on any new information for NDCs to promote Clarity, Transparency and Understanding, and supports a“no text”outcome.

How would you like your accounting, readers? Consistent, well done, and accurate? (In that case I’d recommend our MDB special.)

Or maybe you’d like a loan soufflé? Or perhaps lots of different methods all mixed together – with sprinkles of figures plucked from the air (for the climate component of aid programmes)?

Seriously though, accounting rules are important, as this is what will incentivise good quality climate finance.

The SCF and the OECD both delivered reports this week. They gave us some figures, which sound very nice, but when we looked a bit closer they seem inflated. And there are worrying trends on adaptation, and on flows to LDCs.

We have some top tips:

• Measure what matters: We need to encourage more spending on adaptation. Both the OECD and the SCF show that this is still underfunded. No more than one quarter of climate finance, which is far from the Paris Agreement’s stating that “provision of resources should also aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation”.
• Furthermore, the need to keep track of how much goes to LDCs. The OECD forgot. Standing Committee on Finance said this was only 24%, and 2% to SIDS. Grant-equivalent accounting: We’d also recommend you account for the climate finance that developing countries pay back to donor countries – those South-North flows – because loan repayments are not captured at the moment.

As the weather gets colder and Parties work to make a complete rulebook, the spirit of the Paris Agreement — the eight rights based principles included in the Paris preamble are looking forward to being part of that happy family.

How do their chances look? Advocates argue that effective implementation of the Paris Agreement requires people to be at the centre of all climate decisions-making processes and actions. Parties must include the following fundamental elements throughout their implementation guidelines: human rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, public participation, gender equality, just transition, food security, ecosystem integrity, protection of biodiversity, and intergenerational equity.

But some feel their presence in the Paris preamble is enough to allow them to thrive in climate action around the world, or that mere reference to the preamble in the Rulebook would be enough or that maybe just one or two of the principles need to be included.

Including human rights language within the Rulebook itself will help Parties develop and implement the effective climate action needed to stay below 1.5oC. Ultimately, this is what the Rulebook is about: giving guidelines to Parties, to help them to put general principles into concrete steps for necessary climate actions.

We were pleased to see many of the rights have a home in the current text in APA agenda item 3 on the planning processes of NDCs, but we are wondering why some elements are still left behind.

The purpose of the Talanoa Dialogue is to take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the long-term goal of peaking GHG emissions as soon as possible and achieve net zero emissions by mid-century, in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C. The outcome of the Dialogue shall also “inform” the preparation of countries’ nationally determined contributions.

The IPCC SR1.5 makes clear that the world is not on track to limit warming anywhere near 1.5°C. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this exercise is that the current level of ambition is woefully inadequate. In Katowice, Parties must correct course, by agreeing on six key elements of a COP decision on Ambition.

To help negotiators stay on track, ECO has put together a helful pocket checklist: