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Marrakech: From Regime-Building to Ambition-Building

Dear Ministers, We warmly welcome you to COP22 with its cool breeze and dusty trails. 

The entry into force of the Paris Agreement less than one year after COP21 is a remarkable achievement. But if ECO has learned anything in more than 25 years of climate change negotiations, it is to not rest on its laurels. 

Last week presented us with a stark reminder that all countries need to focus on delivering the promises of Paris. Ministers, you came to Marrakech to spell out the necessary details of the decisions taken in Paris, and by doing so seek to underpin real climate action at home. 

You came to tell fellow ministers how, inspired by the Paris Agreement, you have taken immediate further action, so that the ambition gap can be closed. This early action is essential to achieving the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C.  

Sadly, what in COP-land is called the 2016 ‘facilitative’ dialogue began with only limited preparation and ended with recycled statements. ECO calls on you to use this weeks’ high-level part of the facilitated dialogue to present your enhanced ambition for mitigation, adaptation and support. 

The next big moment in climate politics will come in 2018. The IPCC report will spell out the implications of the 1.5°C goal and—you read it here first—there will be a major push to raise ambition and revise the current 2025 and 2030 NDCs upwards. As, collectively, if today's NDCs are set in stone the window for achieving the global goals you just set in Paris will be already closed. 

The facilitative dialogue 2018 (FD2018) is key to closing the ambition gap. FD2018 needs to be prepared with all the usual trimmings including COP guidance to the Presidency and Secretariat, an agenda, submissions by parties and observers; an expert dialogue, and technical papers. To stay below 1.5°C it is crucial that we go beyond mitigation and address the insufficient means of implementation (finance, technology, and capacity-building) required to unlock the conditional NDC’s potential. 

It is said that money ‘makes the world go round’. The issue of finance is rightly receiving a lot of ministerial attention. It is clear that adaptation really needs more attention. So, how about committing to enhance efforts to finally achieve the magical balance between mitigation and adaptation, and confirming the Adaptation Fund as an instrument of the Paris Agreement? Two politically important signals that seem appropriate for an African COP. Funding for adaptation is what Africa and the developing world as a whole need most urgently.  

You must be just as surprised as ECO (and just a tad annoyed?) to find that many of the draft decisions from the first week of this COP do little more than postpone the inevitable. They are largely procedural, as Parties did not find common ground, be it on agriculture or the date by which the Paris rulebook must be completed (answer: 2018). Instead, there is the ‘Appel de Marrakech’, a most gentle call to action by our host, not a COP Decision. You have come at just the right moment to insert some spirit into the documents. 

2016 may have been the year when the clean energy revolution took flight. Solar and wind energy are competing head to head with dirty power plants - and winning. Some countries have eliminated fossil fuel subsidies. However, 2016 has equally seen many announcements of new investments in climate-killing coal-fired power plants. If they are allowed to be built in your country, you may well be responsible for closing the door on meeting the Paris temperature goals. ECO is not surprised that our youth are taking governments to court over this fundamental injustice, and that they too are winning. 

Muffling the Trump-et

Rumours are swirling that President-elect Trump may move swiftly to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, or even the UNFCCC. While withdrawal would certainly be a major setback, ECO reminds its readers that one of the great strengths of the Paris Agreement is that it was built to withstand such an isolated, short-term political setback, even by the world’s second largest emitter.

Indeed, the Agreement is already proving its resilience. No country has said that they would follow the US out of the Agreement. Quite the contrary, many countries and groups, including China, the EU, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the Least Developed Countries, the High Ambition Coalition and others have all reconfirmed their commitment to continue to take aggressive climate action under the Agreement. Others such as Australia, Pakistan and Italy have even joined the Agreement in the days since the US election results came in. In so doing, they have sent a resounding message that the countries of the world will forge on, with or without the US.

If the Trump administration does decide to cede leadership and credibility on an issue of such surpassing global importance, others are ready to take its place. China has said that it is prepared to have a stronger voice—and to reap the rewards in terms of international standing, goodwill and global influence that will surely accrue. 

On the flip side, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement would do considerable damage to the US’ global standing and credibility in the world. Countries have clearly shown, through the unprecedented engagement of their leaders in the development of the Paris Agreement, that climate change is now a core national interest and a top-tier diplomatic priority. By abandoning the global effort to contain the climate crisis, the Trump Administration would severely undermine its ability to achieve any of its other diplomatic priorities. The Bush Administration discovered this when it left the Kyoto Protocol. ECO can only hope that the incoming administration quickly learns this lesson, before the damage is done.    

Transparency is the New Black

ECO hopes that all negotiators had a chance to rest over the weekend and will be back to the conference venue with a renewed sense of common purpose. A good way to demonstrate this would be to ensure that no arbitrary and disproportionate restrictions are imposed on civil society presence in negotiating rooms. Last week ECO saw only 2 representatives allowed in each APA negotiating room to represent the whole range of views and expertise available among environmental and development NGOs.

Having been impressed by the hospitality of the people of Marrakech, ECO really has a hard time accepting these exclusionary rules enforced at the UN venue. Do the secretariat and the APA co-chairs really believe that only two badges allow for a good representation of four-billion women? Or two badges for those representing 1.8 billion of young people? 

We call on the presidency, the APA co-chairs and the secretariat to ensure more inclusive arrangements for the second week. Unless they voice their opposition to these new practices, parties remain complicit in this situation.
 
The first CMA must open in an inclusive context and ECO looks forward to working with Parties to find adequate modalities ensuring a sufficient participation of civil society throughout the second week.

Don't Leave for Tomorrow What you can do Today
Popular wisdom suggests that you never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, because that increases the chances that you will get it wrong, miss deadlines, or both! Climate  ambition is not an exception to that rule especially when missing the deadline could mean losing lives, ecosystems and countries.
Paris Decision clearly states that NDCs do not set us on a well below 2ºC path (not to mention 1.5ºC). Therefore all countries must review and raise the level of ambition if we wish to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goals. 
So far ECO has not seen much enthusiasm for this from any country...except one! Argentina was the very first country to state that a review process for its 2015NDC will start right away after Paris… And it did! 
ECO wishes that Argentina's example will inspire other Parties,to do the same. That’s the only way to be ready for the Facilitative Dialogue in 2018, a decisive moment if we want to achieve the 1.5ºC goal set in the Paris Agreement. 
Real Climate Leadership Means Keeping Fossil Fuels In the Ground
 
Post-Paris, the gap between reductions needed to reach the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C and countries’ pledged reductions remains too wide. Between now and 2018, Parties need to figure out how to close that gap.
 
The science is clear. The only way to achieve the Paris Agreement commitments is to stop new development of fossil fuels and keep most of the world's remaining fossil fuels in the ground.
 
Communities across all continents are taking up the call and demand that their countries halt the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. In Argentina, indigenous Mapuche communities are mobilising to defend their traditional territories and halt corporate efforts to exploit the planet's second-largest deposit of shale gas. In Australia, ranchers and other landowners are joining the Lock the Gate movement to block coal mining and unconventional natural gas operations. In the U.S., Sioux protectors in Standing Rock are defending their sovereignty to fight efforts to bulldoze sacred sites to build a $3.8 billion pipeline. This pipeline would threaten water supplies and facilitate the export of dirty fracked crude from the Bakken Shale. In the Philippines, the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development together with other groups are at the centre of a national movement against coal mining and other dirty fossil fuel extraction. The movement combating fossil fuel development is powerful, global and growing.
 
This people power can’t just go unnoticed by Parties. The time is now to increase their pre-2020 ambition by ceasing investments in fossil fuel production and infrastructure.  

Three Paths to $100-Billion-a-Year
With the three proposals on a COP22 decision on long-term finance, negotiators must have had something to chew on over the weekend. Surely, combining the contrasting views on finance such as those of Canada on behalf of a few Umbrella Countries with those of the G77/China is just the treatment to overcome a CAN party hangover.
ECO is not surprised that the EU is keen to see the $100 Billion Roadmap welcomed, nor that the Umbrellas wish to go even further by inserting OECD figures into the decision (drawn from the 2016 Biennial Assessment). That almost looks like hoping that the COP would implicitly accept the donor countries’ methodology on what and how to count - somewhat bypassing the ongoing SBSTA discussions on accounting modalities for support- including overrating the climate-relevance of provided funds and counting market-rate loans at face-value. 
These nasty technical issues aside, everyone concerned about the growing adaptation needs in developing countries will have noticed that all sides have understood that something must be done about the existing imbalance between mitigation and adaptation in the allocation of finance. The EU and the Umbrellas seem to be fine with the COP welcoming an increase in adaptation finance and be done with it. Not exactly a call to action. In contrast, the G77 calls on developed countries to quadruple adaptation finance. 
Poles apart as it seems, but this is what the ministers are coming over for, right? They need to ensure a decent outcome of COP22 by assuring developing countries that enhanced efforts will be undertaken to go beyond current plans and projections on adaptation finance.
Linh Do
Editor-in-Chief, The Verb


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