ECO Newsletter

This latest round of talks has made it clear that after years in the trenches, many of our colleagues are suffering from a debilitating malady that we might call Equity Stress Disorder (ESD). The symptoms of ESD are many, but the most serious is the delusion that “equity” is the source of all our difficulties, and that, now, after the Paris breakthrough, we’ve put it behind us.

Alas, this is only denial. Equity remains fundamental to the Paris Agreement. The real question is what CBDRRC means — and how it can be operationalized in a post-binary world. Only by facing it head on can we hope to find the path to recovery and ambition.

None of us here at ECO have a psychotherapy degree, but we can perhaps help by calmly explaining the facts of the situation. Here goes:

• The world is a complicated place, thus, we need a new approach to differentiation; a dynamic approach that’s based upon the Convention’s core equity principles. To be blunt, we need a dynamic and non-reductionist approach to CBDRRC. Pretending otherwise is fine, but it’s not going to get us to a high-ambition world.
• There’s still some truth in the North/South “binary,” but it’s not a particularly helpful truth; not here inside the “UN bubble.”

Since the start of this session ECO has been looking for some guidance on climate finance. However, the complexities of these negotiations – debates about the Adaptation Fund serving under the guidance of the CMA or/and CMP; the technical discussions about accounting modalities; and the possibility of including finance in the Global Stocktake – have us completely lost.

It took the CVF press conference to bring things back into focus.  “As long there is a chance to stop global warming at a level that lets humanity survive and thrive, we should seize it,” the climate commissioner from the Philippines said, adding, “This is why we continue to advance the call for world leaders to keep to the 1.5 goal and to recalibrate climate finance.”

Before bidding farewell to the negotiators for a little while, ECO wants to remind them that outside this bubble, speaking about finance also reaffirms the importance of urgent climate action, and brings trust into the new climate regime. Developed countries have already committed to mobilise US$100 billion and while this commitment is welcome, let’s not forget that the costs for addressing climate change within developing countries are significantly higher.

As we move towards COP23, we want to share three priorities.
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The preamble of the Paris Agreement offers a vision of a world that we can all embrace. Parties outlined a joint vision of collective action addressing climate change in a manner that builds on equity; protects the integrity of ecosystems; promotes the rights of those on the front lines of climate impacts and climate responses; and empowers communities.

Now it is time to place this beautiful vision at the core of the implementation of the Paris Agreement. For the APA to best set the path toward fully implementing the Paris Agreement, Parties must consider how the principles outlined in the preamble should guide national climate action and international cooperation.

ECO is concerned that this vision is being lost in the midst of technical negotiations. So far, those discussions taking place under APA have failed to consider how the NDCs, the adaptation communications, the transparency framework, and the global stocktake can promote sufficient climate action and ambition in a manner that recognises important linkages between these mechanisms and the principles reaffirmed in the preamble. These issues must be brought back to the table so as to maximize the benefits of climate action for all people and ecosystems.

As Parties prepare for COP-23, ECO calls on all delegates, and that requires constant attention, to linking the technical negotiations to the preamble vision, so that this process can deliver on all the promises made in Paris.

It is no secret that, while Parties’ NDC’s represent an improvement over business-as-usual trajectories, they fall short of meeting the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals. Moreover, global emissions are not on track to peak by 2020, let alone steep reductions thereafter. According to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, to have a likely chance of limiting warming to 2 °C, carbon dioxide emissions need to drop to net zero between 2060 and 2075. To limit warming to 1.5 ° C, carbon dioxide emissions need to drop to net zero 15 years earlier, between 2045 and 2050. This will require significant transformation at an unprecedented scale and pace.

If our global community is to have a fighting chance of meeting these temperature goals, we urgently need to embrace more long-term and holistic strategies for our global development. Failure to do so risks driving investments towards incremental improvements: like replacing coal with natural gas or improving efficiency of fossil-fueled vehicles and appliances. These improvements, while sufficient to achieve NDC targets, are not sufficient to achieve the transformative changes, like transitioning to zero-carbon energy and electrifying vehicles, necessary to decarbonize the economy.

The Paris Agreement and its associated decisions recognize this need and invite Parties to submit mid-century, long-term low-greenhouse gas emissions development strategies.
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Last week, Parties spent a lot of time and energy discussing adaptation communication under Article 7.10 of the Paris Agreement, as well as Article 13, related to transparency of actions. ECO is pleased with this and sees it as a step towards an effort to allocate adaptation an equal status with mitigation in the Paris Agreement.

The adaptation communications also provide a welcome opportunity for countries to share their adaptation efforts, achievements, and good practices, as well as challenges and gaps in a coherent and coordinated way. A new adaptation registry could serve as an entry point for the learning and sharing of best practices and results to help improve the impact of adaptation efforts.

After this week’s negotiations, a consensus is emerging on the purposes and elements of the adaptation communications and we are indeed pleased to see many delegations recognizing its usefulness. The talks seemed to be stuck, for some time, on the issue of flexibility: some countries seem to suggest that flexibility means no guidance on the elements and information that should be part of the adaptation communication. ECO believes there should be agreement on common elements to be addressed, leaving enough flexibility for Parties to provide the information that is available and useful to communicate.
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Airlines face a big problem with numbers when it comes to the sector’s Carbon Offset and Reduction System for International Aviation (CORSIA) — the planned global measure to offset the sector’s emissions growth above 2020 levels.

That’s because we’re not quite sure how CORSIA’s numbers will add up. As airline emissions continue to grow, airlines will need to buy an increasing number of offsets from other sectors. But the Paris Agreement makes this tricky, as all states have submitted pledges which aim to be economy-wide, and increase in ambition over time. So, when an airline buys an offset, how can it be sure that the emission reduction isn’t being claimed by a state or someone else?

There are many ways that CORSIA can screw up the numbers: for example, if the same emission reduction is sold to two different airlines, or sold once but claimed elsewhere. This is worrying because: given the sector’s major and growing climate impact, it badly needs a working mitigation measure that can assure who should claim what reduction.

The good news is that states, airlines, and civil society are hard at work trying to fix this problem. However, the UN agency running this measure, ICAO, can’t solve this problem on its own.
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The fact that COP23 will be the first COP under the presidency of a small island state, Fiji, draws particular attention to the plight of those that are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. One of the starkest impacts will be the forced migration of millions of people, as sea levels rise and natural disasters grow more frequent.

As recently as this past Wednesday, Vanuatu was hit by cyclone Donna, and cyclone Ella also came close to striking Fiji. As climate change progresses, these extreme events will only intensify, along with other effects such as desertification, sea level rise, and soil erosion. These phenomena will drive millions of people away from their homes, often with no hope of return. The International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that roughly 22.5 million persons are already displaced each year because of climate change. Future forecasts indicate that there may be as many as 200 million to 1 billion climate migrants by 2050. These climate change induced migrations will affect developing countries, as well as developed countries. However, not all people have the same capacity or economic ability to resettle.

In light of this, the UNFCCC climate talks must be an arena to discuss the important issue of climate-induced displacement, especially now that the Paris Agreement has explicitly connected climate change to human rights.
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There comes a time, in every round of negotiations, when a clamour builds for a negotiating text. The decision to shift into textual negotiations is not to be taken lightly. ECO knows well the impact on our dear negotiators of the first glimpse of square brackets on the screen. It inevitably triggers polarization, and retreat into single-minded defence of every one of their valued textual creations.

But sooner or later, on the way to the 2018 package, negotiators have to bite the bullet and dive into textual negotiating mode. There seems to be a surge of enthusiasm for doing this during COP23 in November. ECO would strongly argue that it is necessary to reach a text at COP23. Being mindful of this, the submissions and workshops need to help countries make the leap forward towards text.

Reflecting the submissions and the workshop, the Pre-COP should gather key political questions, such as flexibility and differentiation, for Ministers to provide clear guidance to their negotiators.

There is also the question of what kind of text will emerge at COP23 and how to generate its elements. Will the paragraphs be full-blown legal text? Or should the first step be a more descriptive text that would be converted into legal text at a later date?
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On Saturday, ECO expressed its expectations on the Facilitative Dialogue (FD 2018), highlighting it as the next big opportunity.

One important contribution to make FD 2018 a big opportunity will come from the Special Report of IPCC on 1.5 degrees, which is expected to be adopted in September 2018. We remember the positive experiences with the Structured Expert Dialogue (SED), which was the delivery vehicle of the results of IPCC AR5 to the UNFCCC. The SED helped to communicate the new scientific background to the delegates. So what is the best way to bring the results of IPCC SR1.5 to FD 2018?

As the Second Periodical Review will begin its work only in 2019, another procedure is necessary to extract the relevant results of IPCC SR1.5, and summarize them in a report which should be presented to FD 2018.

To make this happen, ECO appeals to the Fijian Presidency to have this issue discussed at COP 23; and suggests that the design of FD2018, to be adopted in COP23, should allow the space for sound scientific inputs from the IPCC SR1.5, taking into account lessons from the Structured Expert Dialogue. In the open-ended informal consultations on FD2018, many constructive propositions were tabled, notably from South Korea on behalf of EIG, on how FD 2018 could benefit from IPCC SR1.5.
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