The
decision to limit global warming to 1.5°C is vital for small scale
family agriculture, which is especially climate-vulnerable. However, as
the UNEP emissions gap
report highlights, there is still too much distance between the Paris
Agreement targets and Parties’ NDC commitments. This gap reveals a clear
imperative for countries to reaffirm and set an ambitious course
towards attaining this goal during COP22, a sentiment
echoed across platforms here this week.
Maintaining and increasing ambition is crucial, but ECO reminds Parties that they should also consider
how these commitments will be met. In order to meet the long-term
goal, IPCC scenarios estimate that up to a billion hectares of land
need to be dedicated to negative emissions efforts such as bioenergy—a
strategy that can threaten land rights, trapping
farmers between a warming world and restricted land access. If done
wrong, climate action in the land sector could have massive negative
impacts on food security, adaptive capacities, development potential,
gender equality and the livelihoods of communities
dependent on small-scale agriculture, as well as on biodiversity and
ecosystem integrity, with an increased risk of land-grabbing and rises
in food prices.
To
ensure the 1.5°C target is reached in the best way, Parties need to be
proactive in reducing their emissions before looking at offsets. Strong,
comprehensive social
and environmental safeguards that ensure human rights must be
developed. Parties
must prioritise emission reductions before 2020, instead
of delaying on the assumption that they can compensate later with
negative emissions. Moreover, solutions are at hand, in the energy,
transport, and forest sectors, and within food systems
(production and distribution models, diets, food waste,
agroforestry/livestock combinations).
In
Monday’s Opening Plenary Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa stated
that COP22 will herald a “new era of international climate action”. ECO
urges this COP to work
on ensuring that the legacy of 1.5°C is a movement towards a more just,
equitable, and environmentally sound world – one in which land rights,
local food sovereignty, and security are reaffirmed and emboldened, and
not a reversal of the (hard won) development
gains of the 21st century.
Challenging Sacred Cows
It's great that today is Farmers' Day! That way, ECO gets to
celebrate and protect the 2 billion smallholder farmers who feed most of
our fellow planet dwellers, using less than a quarter of the world’s
farmland.
Large-scale industrial agriculture drives the majority of
emissions from the agriculture sector. Synthetic fertilisers create high
levels of emissions. They require large amounts of water, threatening
water tables and wetlands and making crops
more vulnerable to climate change. What’s more, intensive meat
production generates high levels of methane emissions and deforestation
to grow livestock feed.
In contrast, many smallholder farmers—especially women in
developing countries—use agroecological techniques to strengthen
adaptation, nurture biodiversity, soils and natural fertility, all while
avoiding emissions.
Putting all that into consideration, it is time to freshen up the
SBSTA agriculture talks, which have gone stale. With clear references to
food security, sustainable consumption patterns and human rights in the
Paris Agreement, negotiations on
agriculture have a critical opportunity to make these a reality for the
world’s farmers facing climate change.
A new SBSTA Work Programme on Agriculture and Food Security is
critical to provide a sustained space for open dialogue, where countries
can consider how to implement their own agriculture NDC pledges,
whether on adaptation, mitigation or both.
This new programme should also develop guidance to ensure that
food security and farmers’ rights, including safe access to land, are
protected in the face of climate change or risky new technologies. It
should be a space where all aspects of
food security—including social, environmental, gender, biodiversity and
food production—can be addressed. And guidelines for finance to support
the right types of agriculture should be developed.
In particular, a work programme on Agriculture and Food Security
must address mitigation in those areas, which, when addressed, have the
greatest potential for meeting the 1.5°C goal. These are industrial
livestock, intensive agriculture, food
waste and retail and consumption patterns. Protecting smallholder
farmers means targeting countries with the highest per capita emissions.
Now, post-Paris, it’s time to challenge a few sacred cows.
[____]: What this holds for the world?
Don’t
worry, ECO gets out of the (UNFCCC) house every now and then. Or at
least enough to know that there's something going on in America right
now, and it could mean
good or bad news for the climate.
The
Paris Agreement was a watershed moment for the world: it signified a
global commitment to climate action. With the US election (finally!)
over, the new President
will have an opportunity to catalyse further action on the climate,
sending a clear signal to investors to stay on track transitioning to
renewable-powered economy on track.
Climate
is an important diplomatic area for the US, as seen during COP21. It is
also an area where the next President should continue to build
collaborative relationships
to address climate change. All over the world, climate change action is
gaining momentum. While ECO might be late to (or recovering from) the
US election party, stay tuned for the reaction from Marrakech to the
next American President tomorrow.
Conditional NDCs Must Unlock Ambition
Every single assessment of the NDCs has indicated that Parties are
not on track to meet the 2°C goal of the Paris agreement, let
alone 1.5°C. Fortunately, some Parties have already put forward the
seeds of a possible solution to this problem. Some have used their
contributions to specifically indicate additional mitigation
potential that could be unlocked with technology, finance and
capacity-building support. These efforts, conditioned upon the delivery
of support, represent an additional 2.4 GT of emissions reductions in
2030.
If we identified 2.4 GT of additional mitigation potential through
contributions without any guidance, how many more GTs could be unlocked
if developing country Parties indicated how much they can contribute to
the international effort if a specified
level of support was provided (in addition to what they could do with
their own resources)? Developed countries should then honour their dual
obligations to deliver mitigation efforts within their own borders as
well as deliver support to unlock efforts in
developing countries that are conditional on receiving support. More
than any other space in the negotiations, partially conditional NDCs
emphasise how critical the delivery of finance, technology and capacity
building is to achieving the goals of the Paris
Agreement. And they offer an opportunity for countries to work
collaboratively to unlock additional emissions reductions.
As Parties pursue further discussions on the features to be
included in future NDCs, ECO can only hope that they will all agree that
clarity on conditional and unconditional efforts is a key feature that
can help to unlock greater ambition by
quantifying the levels and nature of support required.
Let’s Make Inclusiveness the Norm
ECO heartily applauds the move by Parties negotiating loss and
damage yesterday to deviate from the bad practice of closing informals
to Observers after the first session. ECO was inside the second informal
meeting (after being there for the
first), and neither did the sky fall in nor did Observers disrupt any
conversations. The work of the loss and damage mechanism itself already
sets a good example of inclusiveness and interaction with civil society.
This now sets another precedent which all
other informals should follow. We hope this is the beginning of a long
running love affair with openness and transparency.
With kisses, Civil Society
The Search for Loss and Damage
Delegates, who amongst you does not have a UNFCCC website horror story? ECO is the first to acknowledge that
unfccc.int
has improved dramatically over the years, but there’s still one problem
area, seemingly designed to drive the casual (or even daily) user to
the brink of madness: Try to find
“Loss and Damage” on unfccc.int.
Go on, ECO will wait for you to try…
...don't worry, we're still here.
Ah, yes, dear delegate, welcome back. Don't worry, we're here for
you. We understand. Or did you get there? If so, kudos! ECO wouldn't be
surprised if you gave up in frustration, though. Or hurl your mobile
device in exasperation. Or worse, your
laptop.
It seems the UNFCCC web team has not yet understood that loss and
damage is now, in this post-Paris world, wholly separate to and distinct
from adaptation and worthy of being found in its separate section,
rather than hidden in the bowels of
the website, only to be discovered via an interminable set of clicks.
After all, if loss and damage has graduated to its own Article in the
Paris Agreement, surely it can graduate to its own link on the left hand
menu of the website.
Linh Do
Editor-in-Chief, The Verb
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