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ECO watched with dismay the two-day (and counting…) negotiation over the agenda of the subsidiary bodies. We were happy to see that the Ad hoc Working Groups got underway in a constructive fashion yesterday and hope to see quick resolution to the issues holding up the SBI and SBSTA.
Since these discussions are taking place (sadly, once again) behind closed doors, ECO is not in a position to judge what is really happening. We do realise that there are high political stakes in the issues being talked about broadly in these negotiations. Developing countries are being asked to do more in terms of MRV of actions and reporting while finance commitments are inadequate and reduction targets are slipping. The fact that the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol is uncertain weighs heavily on many parties mind and on ours as well.
The work of the subsidiary bodies is critical to moving forward on many issues, but particularly for Adaptation, REDD, and MRV. In Cancún, the advances in these three issues represented a real breakthrough for the last few years of negotiations. Those decisions set the stage for real action on the ground if Parties can begin working out how to operationalise them. And getting these details right could help pave the way for the political decisions needed from the LCA and from the KP. While there are, no doubt, serious issues involved in the discussions around the agenda, the disagreement among Parties is undermining the ability of the UNFCCC to effectively and efficiently conduct the process to reach a FAB deal.
ECO is unwavering in its belief that the UNFCCC is the most appropriate place for global cooperation on climate to take place so it wants to see the UNFCCC more empowered. We hope the parties can find a way to resolve these agenda disputes, preferably before they arrive at the meeting, in a way that strengthens the power and capabilities of the UNFCCC for the “full, effective, sustained, implementation” of the Convention, which is fundamental to life on Earth.
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ECO feels strongly that Parties should stop hiding behind the issue of data quality in order to avoid accounting for emissions from their lands sector. Indeed this is an issue that should be tackled in SBSTA discussions on methodological grounds this week. Under current LULUCF proposals, countries can choose which land use activities under article 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol they want to account for. It is essential that, instead, we move to comprehensive accounting for emissions from land use. However, Parties often express the concern that they are not yet able to manage the necessary inventories and monitoring, and that existing methods tend to be expensive.
As a result, only a small proportion of the emissions from land use activities are accounted for. This means that many feasible and ‘low hanging fruit’ mitigation opportunities are missed. Furthermore, the emissions from the land use sector remain ‘hidden’ from Parties’ accounts and can increase without penalty.
ECO wants developed countries to agree on ambitious emissions reductions targets and therefore urges for Parties to move to improve data quality in LULUCF. The lack of high-quality data is no excuse for limiting the accounting regime. Getting the data right is not so much a question of lacking technologies and methodologies. Instead it is, above all, a matter of the lack of political of political will to improve capacity for better monitoring and reporting, and to allocate the funds needed to achieve this. Time and resources have been invested in MRV-ing REDD+. Surely then, developed countries should also be able to make similar investments for the land sector in their own countries.
All the capacity, methodologies and guidance for reporting and accounting for the most significant pools of emissions are already available or within reach before the start of the second KP commitment period. ECO therefore thinks the following stepping-stones could be achieved in the second commitment period:
Mandatory accounting for all existing and new land use activities as soon as data quality can be achieved.
Concentrate MRV efforts in the near term on hotspots (areas of land with the most significant emissions) and quantify these as accurately as possible.
If data quality is not sufficient, estimates could be based on conservative values.
Parties can establish joint work programmes to support countries that lack capacity.
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Cancun delivered the Green Fund, now Durban must deliver the sources of finance to fill it. Where the money will come from is the $100 billion+ question governments will need to answer at the African COP.
Financial flows for climate action must be scaled up to the tune of several hundred billion dollars a year. While much of this can come from the private sector, principally for mitigation, it won’t flow without public funding to invest in capacity-building, technology R&D, creating policy and regulatory frameworks, and to leverage the private sector investments into areas where they are not now flowing.
Meanwhile REDD requires public finance investments over the next decade in the tens of billions of dollars, and adaptation requires even greater sums of public finance. It’s clear to ECO that the annual $100b figure must be almost entirely public finance to make a significant contribution to the amount of financing needed.
ECO recognizes that there are many issues on the finance agenda in Bonn – from learning the lessons of the fast-start finance (2010-2012), establishing new institutions, and deciding the scale of finance requirements. The finance issue that parties should focus most of their efforts on here in Bonn, and between now and Durban, is how to generate the public finance required.
Part of this must be from developed country budgets. But how much and from which governments must be spelled out. Durban is only one year away from the end of the fast start funding period, and there are as of yet no concrete commitments at all for the 2013 to 2019 period.
But even if we assume optimistically that governments will scale up from the fast-start levels, the problem remains. Developed countries have a tendency to provide funding that is not new and additional, but rather often comes at the expense of other existing commitments to development finance. Supplementary sources alongside government budgets will be absolutely necessary if we are to reach the levels of predictable, new and additional public finance required.
What is needed is a clearly defined and structured process to analyze, negotiate and reach conclusions on the sources of long-term finance between now and Durban. This process should involve workshops, submissions, informal Ministerials, receipt of and responses to input from past processes like the AGF and ongoing processes like those in the IMO and G20. By Durban this process should reach key conclusions on several concrete sources of finance and set out a pathway forward to operationalize them and identify further sources needed. This should include the establishment of an effort sharing approach for developed country governments’ budget contributions, and also explore a range of new and innovative sources, including international transport (bunkers), financial transaction taxes (FTTs), and Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).
A breakthrough agreement in Durban on the basic parameters of a mechanism to address emissions from international transport, that can generate finance for climate action in developing countries, would demonstrate conclusively that the multilateral process is alive and well and breaking new ground. If Durban can also get resolution on a second commitment period on the Kyoto Protocol that sends a strong signal and provides certainty to private sector investors, Durban could well be remembered as a turning point on the road to a fair, ambitious and binding global regime.
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Bioenergy had a starring role in this week’s workshop on developed country emission reduction targets. The theme of many parties was reducing energy sector emissions by substituting bioenergy for fossil fuels.
At last, Mexico sounded a note of caution in their presentation in the workshop on NAMAs, pointing out that reliance on biofuels is difficult to do sustainably, can be harmful in terms of conservation and REDD targets, and can impact on agriculture
Bioenergy - a clean alternative?
Bioenergy leaves a carbon footprint which is largely ignored when proposed as an alternative. This is an unacceptable situation as we face exponential growth in this energy source which is being justified in the name of addressing climate change.
The worry arising from tremendous expansion of bioenergy production from land and forests is not just the unintended consequences of constraining food supply and the potential to destroy biodiversity, as important as those are. There are also problems arising directly from the failure to address deficiencies of accounting rules in the KP.
ECO is compelled to point out that although the use of bioenergy is often claimed to be carbon neutral, this is rarely so. The emissions released from producing and burning bioenergy can be much larger than those for fossil fuels, especially when converted to liquid fuels or where grown on emissive peat soils, as shown in the chart.
Developed countries:
Actual emissions, fake accounting
Equally rare is accounting for the actual emissions. Yes, it’s that old problem – the LULUCF rules – once again!
Under existing IPCC guidance, bioenergy is accounted as carbon neutral when it is combusted in the energy sector, as it is a renewable energy source. But the crucial presumption underpinning this is that emissions associated with the provision of bioenergy have been accounted for in their sector of origin (i.e., the land use and forestry sector) in their country of origin and netted out against carbon sequestration in growing the bioenergy crop in the first place.
In developed countries this assumption founders on the failure of the LULUCF rules to mandate accounting for either forestry or cropland management. Currently, many parties choose not to do this. There isn’t even a proposal on the table that all parties must account for all LULUCF emissions including cropland management, in which case parties won’t include those activities in their reporting when they are emissive. In addition, the proposal for projected reference levels for forest management in the KP second commitment period opens a new kind of loophole, and this is a very concerning development also for accounting bioenergy emissions specifically.
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Ministers, it’s ECO again. May we have a few moments with you? Yes, you guessed it – right here in your hands is our clean and manageable list of key decisions for the remainder of the week.
We’ve heard that you feel there are too many choices and papering over the differences in the negotiations might be the best achievable for the moment. But
remember, that trick only works once.
A high level political statement by itself will not cut it. We need a real agreement in Cancun, not a repeat of Copenhagen’s climate shame. No magic moment is going to arrive when the hard choices become easy. But the path to achievement is just steps away.
ECO is wondering what is going on in the Shared Vision negotiations. We heard whispers of much needed improvements, such as the recognition of the need to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to no more than 350 ppm and limit global temperature rise to 1.5° C, as well as the acknowledgement of historical responsibility and the link between human rights and climate change related actions.
All these elements must be included for a clear and robust shared vision that reflects our collective intention to ensure a liveable planet for us and for future generations.
But Ministers, ECO is going blue in the face! How many more times do we have to say ‘Gigatonne Gap’ before it
finally sinks in? As UNEP affirmed in its authoritative report, there is a significant gap between the emissions pledges set forth in Copenhagen and the reductions the planet actually needs by 2020 to limit warming to 2° C, much less the 1.5° needed to avoid severe and even catastrophic impacts.
Yet the latest version of the Mitigation text contains no acknowledgement of the Gigatonne Gap, nor does it set forth a timely process to close it. A legitimate outcome in Cancun must explicitly provide the pathway to increased ambition.
ECO also calls on parties to anchor the pledges currently on the table so that commitments and actions can be strengthened over the next year before inscribing them in legally binding form in South Africa.
ECO is pleased that the MRV text has evolved in the past week from an empty 36-word shell to a real basis for negotiation.
But there’s a long way to go. The tables have turned here in Cancun and we’re finally hearing more about the need for enhanced MRV provisions for Annex I countries, including common accounting rules, as well as MRV of finance using a common reporting format.
This is only right – the United States and other developed countries have been calling for increased transparency for developing countries but have been shy about improving their own.
Establishing a Technology Mechanism and creating an operational Technology Executive Committee (TEC) is well within the remit here.
Unfortunately, the USA has been blocking progress on the TEC and CTCN discussions and negotiators are planning to kick many elements into the long grass, such as reporting lines and the link to the financial mechanism. This would be dangerous as it would leave too many issues to be dealt with during 2011.
The draft text is virtually content free when it comes to creating an operational framework for new, radically scaled-up, focused and integrated Capacity
Building.
The stocktaking needs to clarify whether developed countries intend to take
capacity building seriously (that is, on par with finance and technology), or whether they are happy enough just to leave it behind as crumbs in the corner.
On International Transport, the COP must guide ICAO and IMO in taking effective action to reduce emissions quickly, create a framework for these sectors to fairly contribute funds to mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, and ensure no net incidence of impacts on developing countries.
On Adaptation, a Cancun decision must launch the committee to oversee technical and coordinating provisions for adaptation under the Convention. Further, response measures does not have a place under the adaptation agenda. The resources available for adaptation should not be use as compensation for the loss on oil revenue as a result of mitigation action.
By the end the week decisions on
Financing must be taken to establish a climate fund under the guidance and
authority of the COP, along with a process to clarify the scale of this fund and guarantee sufficient resources for adaptation, along with the mechanisms and instruments to generate the required revenue flows.
We have heard that some developed countries are raising doubts about their ability to contribute to a fund under the UNFCCC due to constitutional or other legal impediments. These are simply tactical maneuvers to delay a decision,
using the fund as a bargaining chip to get concessions from developing countries on other issues such as international consultations and analysis.
Negotiations on the Flexible Mechanisms are (unsurprisingly) facing difficulty, including even which text should be used.
However, at least two things should be done. First, the loopholes in existing mechanisms must be closed now. A primary example is surplus AAUs. Second, relevant principles should be set for further negotiations in LCA. If any new mechanisms are to be discussed going forward, they must go beyond offsetting. And they have to close the Gigaton gap, not widen it. Other important principles should also be set such as preventing double counting, supplementarity and contribution to sustainable development.
A very disturbing development is that the option for keeping CCS out of the Clean Development Mechanism has vanished from the draft text being forwarded to the CMP. At the very least, SBSTA must address the creation of perverse incentives for increased dependence on fossil fuels.
On land and forests, the message is simple but let’s say it again: Close the loopholes!
With respect to legal form, ECO calls on Parties to establish open and transparent processes to discuss their proposals, both now and after Cancun. Likewise, just as the Berlin Mandate provided clarity on legal form to the negotiating process that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, Parties should agree mandates at Cancun to confirm the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol as well as a legally binding outcome in the LCA and set them up for adoption at COP 17 in South Africa.
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ECO has noticed that there’s a lot of talk in the UNFCCC meetings about what countries will promise, pledge, commit to, and otherwise say that they’re really, really going to do.
Much less frequently do we hear that countries are actually achieving emissions reductions. That adds to the pleasure of seeing the announcement yesterday that Brazil’s deforestation rate has fallen to another record low level. The reduction in Amazon deforestation, from over 27,000 km2 in 2004 to below 6,500 km2 this year, is in fact the largest reduction in emissions made by any country anywhere on the planet. And so Brazil, a tropical developing country, has already done what the biggest industrial powers in the world have simply promised to as long as a decade from now.
According to calculations by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Brazil’s reduction deforestation emissions in the past five years, from the 1996-2005 average that serves as its baseline, amounts to 870 million tonnes of CO2 annually. How big is that? Well, the EU’s pledge of a 20% reduction by 2020 corresponds to just below 850 million tonnes, and the US pledge of a 17% reduction (below 2005, not 1990) is about 1,200 million tonnes.
Brazil originally set a goal of reducing deforestation 80% by 2020. But since it has already achieved 67%, outgoing President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva recently moved that date up to 2016.
Brazilian NGOs have shown that their country can and should do better than that. A broad coalition of civil society groups is pushing for a reduction to zero and by 2015. The new data prove that this goal is clearly feasible. The incoming administration of President-elect Dilma Rousseff should adopt it so as to continue Brazil’s global leadership on climate.
The struggle to eliminate deforestation has not been easy, and by no means is it over. In fact, there’s now a backlash led by agricultural interests in the Brazilian Congress against the Forest Code, whose enforcement has been an important tool to reduce deforestation.
A recent study by the Observatorio do Clima coalition has shown how the proposed amendments to the Forest Code would create loopholes that could increase emissions very substantially. If they are not rejected, the Brazilian government’s climate leadership will be called into question.
Brazil’s progress, not only because of government policies but also strong and continuing pressure from Brazilian civil society, emphasizes the need to adopt a strong REDD+ decision as part of a balanced package here in Cancun. But more than that, it demonstrates the importance of countries taking action now, rather than using the inaction of neighbors as an excuse. It’s time for the Annex 1 countries to go beyond promises and start acting to reduce emissions dramatically and rapidly, they sure can too.
Bem feita, Brasil!
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In the international climate negotiations leading up to a Copenhagen agreement, different topics are often discussed separately and with specialized experts. This implies that synergies between concepts are sometimes not identified. two issues that receive particular attention in the negotiations are “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation” in developing countries (reDD) and “sectoral approaches”. With this report, we want to close the gap between reDD and sectoral approaches, explore synergies where they exist and discuss how they can be used. We identify ways in which positive aspects and advances on particular issues in the separate tracks can support the broader discussion on the Copenhagen “package” in general. We provide recommendations on how to find pragmatic, realistic ways to use these synergies to advance the international climate negotiations up to and after Copenhagen
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The REDD+ Partnership has spent hours and days agonising on whether and how to involve stakeholders in the decision on how they should participate in the Partnership’s deliberations. This has proved far more controversial than one would expect in a voluntary partnership.
Originally an item to be discussed and resolved last Saturday and Sunday in meetings prior to the current UNFCCC session, under the inept chairing of Papua New Guinea and Japan this issue was held over to Monday and yet again to Tuesday.
Then, despite the fact that almost every partner in the room wanted to resolve the stakeholder participation question first, the co-chairs fell back on the excuse that the Partnership must operate by consensus, side-stepped the issue and pressed forward to other matters.
ECO has been observing this unfolding drama with fascination and growing alarm, and has a simple point to make. Consensus is not the same as unanimity. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree fully with everything; it means reaching a decision that everyone can live with. Under that definition there was a working consensus in the room, as indicated in statements by well more than a dozen partners, all voicing similar opinions on moving the agenda.
Many in civil society use the principle of consensus all the time and know how to do this stuff, just as with participation and consultation and representation and empowerment and capacity building and a whole host of other things that REDD needs. To which is added substantive expertise from decades of experience working on forest and land use issues.
Civil society can be, and wants to be, an asset in the REDD+ Partnership process. Why are the co-chairs treating that as a problem not an opportunity?
