Tag: Adaptation

ECO was impressed by the creative moves of the delegates on the dance floor Saturday night. Now, with only 16 meeting days left this year, ECO expects to see an increasing amount of creative and ambitious Party moves inside the negotiation rooms too, to make the COP in Warsaw a success. (It is worth clarifying that this does not mean wiggling out of commitments!)

2014 - the year of ambition - is just around the corner. The foreseen KP Parties' revision of their targets next spring offers a timely moment for all countries to revise their near term targets, while Ban Ki-Moon’s leaders meeting in the autumn of 2014 presents a great opportunity for tabling new 2025 targets.

In Warsaw, Parties will need to commit to both strengthening their current targets (to bridge the 2020 gigatonne gap), as well as to putting forward new, post-2020 targets in 2014 that are fair and adequate. To ensure that the 2014 pledges will be transparent, quantified and comparable, Parties will need to agree on some guidelines in Warsaw. Equally, the Warsaw Decisions will need to give further clarity on the nature and scope of commitments for countries at different levels of responsibility, capability and development. Commitments should include mitigation and finance and be guided by an Equity Reference Framework (ERF), for which a formal process needs to be established.

While Parties have already agreed to deliver a negotiating text on the 2015 agreement before May 2015, Parties will need to adopt a work plan and milestones for producing this text in Warsaw. Specifically, Parties must agree on key elements for a structure of the 2015 deal so that subsequent sessions can build on them  to move steadily towards a comprehensive final agreement, and not leave all decisions to be resolved at Paris. We all know where that leads…

All developed countries must set out – in a comparable manner - what climate finance they will be providing over 2013-2015, as part of doubling fast start funding levels for this period, and commit to a roadmap for scaling-up global public climate finance and reaching $100bn per year by 2020.

ECO would like to extend a formal invitation to Finance Ministers to take part in the Warsaw COP so that the “high-level ministerial dialogue” (yes, parties in Doha wanted it to be THAT special) actually delivers the decisions we need so urgently on finance. Parties must also pledge specific amounts of finance to the Green Climate Fund, which must be operationalised in Warsaw, and to the Adaptation Fund.

Parties must also agree on a way to ensure that international aviation and maritime transport, which are not included in national emissions targets, make a fair contribution to emissions reductions, and to financing climate actions in developing countries. These are the fastest growing emissions sectors worldwide, and their fuels are currently not taxed, unlike domestic transport sectors, which means they are not paying for their climate impacts, and have an unfair advantage over other sectors.

As should be clear by this point, dear ECO reader, there is much to do in Warsaw and afterwards. This week, the ADP should focus on its work plan from now until the COP. As time is short and ECO is completely fed up with procedural nonsense (SBI anyone?), this does not mean spending the week discussing whether to suspend or conclude the ADP (as ECO can only imagine the potential mess of trying to open another ADP session and the agenda discussion that would ensue). Rather, Parties must set a deadline for the next round of submissions and clarify the content sought. Here, views on the decisions from Warsaw including guidance on a deadline for initial pledges (2014), information on the details of those pledges and the process for review (i.e. the ERF process), as well as initial thoughts on the overall structure of the 2015 agreement, are a minimum.

Finally, you can’t spend all of your time planning. You’ve got to also be doing. So, in addition to the ADP work programme forward, ECO urges Parties to take time preparing the actual tangible outcomes for Warsaw, including in terms of 2013-2015 finance pledges, loss and damage mechanism and near-term ambition. Here’s to a productive week!

Today, Parties will put forward ideas for advancing adaptation in the 2015 deal under the ADP. 

As dangerous climate change looms closer and closer, and with little sign of increased mitigation ambition, millions of the poorest people in the world will face impacts that threaten their lives and livelihoods. Response to climate change through a new agreement must see adaptation as an essential component.

The roundtable will have inputs from the technical bodies, Adaptation Committee and LEG into the ADP to avoid duplication of efforts and to learn from ongoing work. This is important, so as to understand where the current architecture can be improved. However, it is even more important to identify major gaps that need to be addressed. Here, ECO sees an important role in the ADP process in correcting some of the shortcomings of past agreements.

The most important gaps are related to finance. Hardly any donor country has achieved the balance between adaptation and mitigation in the fast start finance period that was agreed in Copenhagen and Cancun. Adaptation finance lags far behind mitigation finance. Both are crucial and both need to expand rapidly.

Secondly, ECO also highlights the problem that currently only donors determine what kind of projects might be counted as fast start finance, without a voice for the recipient countries in determining whether the reported finance is really climate finance. ECO has serious doubts about some projects that have been reported as adaptation finance.

Finally, climate finance is undermining financing for poverty reduction and addressing the needs of the poorest. Almost all donor countries count adaptation finance as Official Development Aid (ODA). We observe many countries report rising climate finance figures, while total ODA is decreasing (often far below the committed 0.7%). If it had been agreed that adaptation finance counted as ODA and that it would target the most vulnerable and poorest communities, this would be less of a concern. But this commitment was deleted in the Copenhagen and Cancun negotiations, over the objections of civil society.

Prioritising the needs and risks of the most vulnerable people is essential. This means scaling up new and additional adaptation finance for post-2020, based on past and future responsibilities for causing the problem, and allocating at least 50% of public climate finance to adaptation.