Tag: Marrakesh accords

LULUCF for Ministers

Submitted by Anonymous on December 6, 2011 - 11:21pm

Ministers, your attention is about to be rewarded. This article aims to preserve your sanity.

In the past, ministers have run out of closed rooms when asked to make decisions on LULUCF. When a minister once was asked how the LULUCF rules were progressing in Marrakesh he replied, “I have no idea. It is like fighting in a fog and the civil servants have all of the weapons”.

The basics of LULUCF are not hard, just weird, and they work in opposition to the rest of the UNFCCC process. For example, it is generally assumed that developed countries should be cutting their emissions, or at least trying to. This is not the case in the Alice in Wonderland world of LULUCF; quite the opposite in fact.

To begin with, the ‘rules’ are currently optional, so if a country thinks that a LULUCF activity such as forest management will result in an emission, then it can choose not to account for it. If it thinks that the activity will result in a removal, then it will account for it and take the credit.

Are you with us so far? Can you imagine the fuss if developed countries arbitrarily decided not to account for industrial emissions? This is what is commonly known as legalised cheating.

So we offer a remedy. Ministers should ensure that developed countries have to account for all LULUCF emissions and removals, not just the ones that suit them. This is called mandatory accounting and it really should be a core principle, or at the very least apply to forest management and wetlands.

It gets worse. The new rules on forest management are likely to allow countries to account for emissions however they choose, giving a whole new meaning to the word ‘rule’.

The most popular option (Option 1) is for the reference level (baseline) to be a projection, which assumes that emissions will increase, thereby ensuring that no emissions have to be accounted for.

Imagine this ‘rule’ being applied to electricity generation. A country could build as many new coal-fired power stations as it liked, and as long as the country first announced that it would do so, they would not have to account for any of the emissions. Bearing this in mind, ministers should reject Option 1 and go for either Option 2 (proposed by the Africa Group) or Option 3 (by Tuvalu) instead. These are not ideal but they are a lot better than Option 1; almost anything would be.

Now for another mind-bender. To fully understand Harvested Wood Products (HWP) requires a twists in logic that we hope that ministers will not countenance, so here’s very simple advice. Just go for Option 3.

Last but not least, there is a proposal called FLU, which is as nasty as it sounds. This is an attempt to rewrite the Kyoto Protocol’s article 3.3. Reject “flexible land use” out of hand.

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Taking the High Road to a Mandate

Submitted by Anonymous on December 1, 2011 - 11:15pm

ECO has long insisted it is necessary to agree a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. All developed countries under the KP should ratify their new 5-year QEROs (quantified emission reduction obligations), base year 1990, having a level of ambition consistent with a fair share towards their agreed 2º C goal. Yet it is clear that the multilateral system will need to evolve through time toward becoming a truly adequate, fair, legally binding global agreement.

The essential complement in Durban will be extension and clarification of the mandate of the AWG-LCA for a comprehensive legally binding agreement as the agreed outcome. This mandate must enhance implementation of the Convention, not overhaul it, building explicitly on and fully respecting its principles so that Parties do indeed, in a fair framework, fulfill the promise of the ultimate objective of the Convention: “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

This mandate at a minimum must include:

(1) The result of the negotiations, specifying that Parties are building on and moving beyond the Bali Action Plan’s “agreed outcome”, showing that the world is prepared to affirm and act on the ultimate objective of the Convention by working towards a legally binding instrument with legally binding commitments.

(2) Reaffirmation and full respect of the principles of the Convention to guide the negotiations, which must include equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, as well as environmental integrity and adequacy

(3) End date. ECO repudiates the calls from some Parties that negotiations should begin in 2015. Much needs to be done to develop essential elements of finance, adaptation, technology and of course mitigation going forward towards the legal agreement. Negotiations are not yet guided by a timeline or clear agreed goal. Agreement reached in 2015 would allow time not only to build a framework analogous to the Kyoto Protocol, but that span of time would allow more effective development of content closer to that achieved over the four years of negotiations between the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol and the Marrakesh Accords. And entry into force in 2018 would allow a more rapid response to new science.

(4) The scope, building on the Bali Action Plan, Cancun Agreement, and the Kyoto Protocol acquis.

(5) The process to fulfill the mandate.

ECO expects the Chair to address these principles in the draft legal decision text to come out of Friday’s ‘informal informal’ under the ‘principles’ bullet.

Ambition can and must be ratcheted up massively, in particular by developed countries, to jointly achieve real emissions reductions of at least 40% by 2020. A legally binding instrument under the AWG-LCA is needed to secure full participation by the US, which has repudiated the KP, the only existing international legally binding instrument to reduce emissions and ensure that responsibilities for technology and financing support for developing countries are made legally binding.

The mandate will also show that all Parties are taking action under common rules and guidelines that can showcase successes. The world must respond in a clear and unambiguous way to the urgency from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). A mandate is needed here in Durban to provide a common framework for these principles and dramatically scaled up response to our climate crisis.

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