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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