Tagged: Adaptation

14 Mar, 2014

2015 Agreement lost and damaged without adaptation? 

ECO has noted with pleasure that this week many Parties provided their initial views on the role of adaptation and loss and damage in the 2015 agreement. There’s no doubt whatsoever that these two elements are integral to the 2015 agreement. The agreement simply cannot ignore the growing evidence of how increasingly severe climate change impacts are eroding hard-won development gains due to the massive mitigation and adaptation gaps.

However, ECO is concerned about some Parties’ views that characterise adaptation as a national responsibility. How can it be acceptable to shift the burden of dealing with the impacts of irresponsible consumption and production in some countries to the most vulnerable without offering any support?

For ECO, climate change 101 is pretty simple:

1 x lack of mitigation = required support for adaptation.
2 x lack of mitigation = 2 x required support for adaptation + loss and damage.

The links between mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage are as obvious as basic math. And here is another more frightening equation:

∑ All current mitigation efforts = >4℃ warming.

Or for those not mathematically inclined, the total sum of all current mitigation efforts will still lead to more than 4℃ of warming.
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10 Mar, 2014

ECO’s 1-2-3 for Parties at this ADP

Has the extreme winter weather that’s gripped North America, the devastating flooding in the UK or the [insert your own top-of-mind climate-related disaster here] made a case for more ambitious action with you and your Party yet? If not, the release of Working Group II’s 5th assessment report on climate impacts at the end of this month surely will. ECO has long said 2014 must be the year of ambition, so let’s start off on the right foot and make the most of our five days together in Bonn.

There are 3 tasks this ADP session must deliver on to ensure that a draft text is developed by Lima and that countries come to the Ban Ki-moon Summit with ambitious pledges for Paris to close the gap in the near-term.

EIN: Agree on the structure and process for developing a draft negotiating text for this year. We all know what building blocks will form the basis of the deal in Paris — mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology and capacity building — but now it’s time to get into the specifics. It’s imperative that critical elements, like the legal architecture for the 2015 agreement including the compliance regime; an MRV framework that will ensure transparency and environmental integrity; a review mechanism to ratchet up ambition over time; and progress on fleshing out the loss and damage mechanism agreed in Warsaw, not fall off the table.
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26 Nov, 2012

Bridging the Gulf

From one aggressively air-conditioned conference centre to another… Only three months ago, ECO was sitting in tropical Bangkok pondering the outcome of COP18, and now here we are on the edge of the desert. But what a change three months can make. A new Chinese leadership, a new mandate for US President Obama, elections in Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania and Venezuela, as well as many, many more extreme weather events, resulting in severe loss and extensive damage. But will such monumental shifts in global politics affect the outcome in Doha?

Despite high hopes, Doha was never going to be a cup final. Durban, marked out for the grand ‘huddle’, gave the negotiators new political instructions. Doha must prepare the roadmap for 2015. ECO would like to remind delegates this doesn’t mean you can kick back and snooze till then. Remember – if you snooze, you lose! Too much is at stake. The final saga of the Kyoto Protocol rolls on, the LCA requires successful closure and a work plan for the new Durban platform for both a 2015 deal and near term ambition must be established, along with progress under the subsidiary bodies. Doha must not renegotiate Durban. We must only move forward.
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5 Sep, 2012

Ace the AC

ECO congratulates the Adaptation Committee (AC) members for their selection and welcomes them to Bangkok, where the first AC meeting will take place. The AC has been mandated with the very important task of promoting the implementation of enhanced action on adaptation in a coherent manner, and supporting the COP in taking appropriate decisions on adaptation. ECO would like to encourage all members of the AC, both from developed and developing countries, to work as ONE TEAM and with a true spirit of collaboration and cooperation.

In its first meeting, the AC’s members will focus on developing its three year work plan and its modalities. ECO requests that the Adaptation Committee include the following priority issues. The AC should:

– consider the linkages and stimulate coherence among the various adaptation institutions within the UNFCCC, including the Standing Committee and Green Climate Fund

– develop an overview, identify gaps and establish/strengthen regional centres and networks to address those gaps

– facilitate discussion among Parties to explore ways to effectively address regional, cross-border and common sub-regional adaptation issues through promoting ecosystem- and community-based approaches.

Other issues to be to reflected upon include the guidelines and modalities for the National Adaptation Planning (NAP) process for non-LDC countries and national institutional arrangements for adaptation.
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5 Sep, 2012

Get Technology’s “Boots On the Ground” Grounded

We stand at the precipice of what could be the final stroke of the LCA at COP18 in Doha, and the conversation is turning ever more to the question of how political decisions for various elements of the LCA that have not been fully resolved will be handled post-COP18. ECO sees that the discussion on technology transfer, which cuts across mitigation and adaptation, provides a stark view of what’s at stake if the LCA’s closing is not properly done, in the light of the sometimes yawning gap between the understandings of developed and the developing countries.

If you mark the IPCC Assessment Report 1 (1990) as the starting point, the discussion on technology transfer has been ongoing for more than two decades. That’s a lot of work to sit idle if the Technology Mechanism suddenly faced a lack of support, and a staggering missed opportunity to close the mitigation gap and address the growing need for climate adaptation.

As it now stands, the Technology Mechanism lacks full funding even on a short-term basis, its governance and reporting structure are incomplete, its linkages with other bodies inside the Convention are hampered by the chicken/egg dilemma, its cross-cutting support for NAMAs and NAPAs/NAPs is uncertain and ill-defined, and the conversation on what is likely the most political decision of all – how priorities are to be set within the TEC and CTCN – has barely been broached, if at all.
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