Submitted by MBrockley on
ECO heard that GRULAC met yesterday and has had constructive discussions on an important issue for 2014. While ECO congratulates the region on a constructive environment for discussions, there is a lot of whispering in the corridors about it.
ECO hopes to hear officially and loudly what those whispers are ASAP so we can all get ready for it.
Submitted by MBrockley on
It is encouraging to note that Parties were satisfied with the progress they achieved during the previous ADP session. ECO also notes that observers were allowed in the rooms and invited to provide input in several sessions and roundtables. Contrary to popular belief that observers prevent Parties from having an open dialogue, this clearly shows an absence of a correlation between the presence of observers and ability of Parties to talk to each other in a constructive manner. Far be it for us to suggest that there could also be an extremely long of list of “closed” contact groups and sessions in which Parties have failed to produce any meaningful results.
This finding is actually confirmed by a recently published scientific study suggesting that “governments interested in increasing public support for ambitious climate policies could benefit from more CSO involvement” (Bernauer, T. & Gampfer, R. (2013)). Now that we have successfully debunked this theory that our presence could possibly distract some honourable delegates, ECO would suggest that Party delegates welcome our presence and our expertise in all sessions – including roundtables, expert meetings, and informal consultations – with open arms (or at least not closed doors). When such a presence is not foreseen, the only thing standing between such a regrettable situation and an open and transparent process could be the courage of one delegate to bring this point to the attention of the facilitator of this gathering.
We would like to emphasise that NGOs are colourblind – we have never checked the colour of badges at the entrance of the NGO party. Delegates might want to think about this before deciding to institute such a check at the entrance of any negotiation room.
Submitted by MBrockley on
We understand that you want to have your agenda item to hold over our heads like the Sword of Damocles for the coming years. And indeed, it’s true that the Saudis have their Response Measures item to wreak havoc with whenever they want, and others have made silly demands, and sometimes gotten away with them. Clearly some democratic solution must be found. So here’s ECO’s proposal: Every Party is entitled to their own agenda item in the body of their choice, in which they can introduce any matter at any time, and all work in all other bodies must stop until that matter is resolved to the satisfaction of that Party. In this situation, which shall henceforth be known as “Multiple Agenda Deterrent”, or MAD1, we hope the threat of all other parties pushing the button in retaliation will be sufficient deterrence that no party will dare to go first.
You are welcome.
1Not to be confused with “Mutually Assured Destruction”, an entirely different scenario
Submitted by MBrockley on
Carbon markets are in the dumps and policy makers and market participants alike are scrambling to come to their rescue. This weekend, ECO spent two days with delegates to discuss the future of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and what changes to its underlying modalities and procedures are needed to make the CDM fit for the future. The number of delegates that showed up on Sunday at 9 AM showed us that there is hope.
Let’s start with the good news. For the first time, human rights impacts of CDM projects and harmful impacts of large power supply projects in the CDM were discussed openly! Now dear delegates, it’s time to move into action mode: start by kicking coal out of the CDM, find a way to phase out large scale power projects, improve the stakeholder consultation process, establish a grievance mechanism and move the whole CDM far beyond offsetting!
But ECO is worried that certain Parties that host many CDM projects did not seem to like the proposed changes. Some of them posited that everything was all right with the mechanism and that people who raised doubts about additionality were only showing their ignorance. ECO suggests that a little less self-congratulation would be in order given the number of academic studies that have concluded that there are in fact substantial problems. If you want a future for the CDM you need to improve its reputation by addressing the problems, not ignoring them. This old-fashioned thinking will certainly not help the CDM to recover and scale up but will once and for all give it the lethal injection.
Joint Implementation has been in the shadow of the CDM for many years. Yet close to 800 million JI credits have been issued to date. Strong reforms are needed for JI. Almost all of them under track 1 have very limited transparency or integrity. Despite the poor quality of JI offsets, they are used extensively. Strong reforms are needed for JI. The experience with JI track 1 shows that a new, unified track needs to have strong international oversight. Also, issuance of JI credits for emissions reductions after 2012 should only be possible once the host country has issued its AAUs for the second commitment period. The future 2015 regime will require market mechanisms to work in a different world where many developed and developing countries will have mitigation commitments.
This issue is currently being discussed in SBSTA, where Parties are establishing a new market mechanism and a Framework for Various Approaches that should make emission reductions units that are achieved by various mitigation systems internationally tradable and eligible for meeting national emission reduction targets.
Some countries have put forward good proposals to avoid double counting. But ECO is missing support for centralised governance and international consistency of standards and how to achieve net mitigation benefits. And let’s not forget, before we can agree on anything, we need an international accounting framework and clearer and more ambitious pledges.
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After this weekend’s CDM reform workshop, ECO has new hope for the CDM’s ability to address human rights. For the first time in the history of the CDM, Parties had an open dialogue about the impacts of CDM on human rights. It is important to recall that Parties agreed to “fully respect human rights in all climate change related actions.” The review of the CDM Modalities and Procedures provides a critical opportunity for the CDM to make this a reality.
A case in point…The Barro Blanco project is a hydroelectric dam that is currently under construction on the Tabasará River in western Panama. Once completed, the dam is projected to flood homes, schools, and religious, historical and cultural sites in Ngäbe indigenous territories, threatening the Ngäbe’s cultural heritage. In addition, the dam will transform the Tabasará River – critical to the Ngäbe’s physical, cultural, and economic survival – from a flowing river to a stagnant lake ecosystem. This will severely affect the Ngäbe’s lands and means of subsistence, and result in the forced relocation of many families.
CDM rules require investors to consult with local stakeholders and to take their comments into account during the registration process. However, the company did not consult the Ngäbe communities regarding the Barro Blanco project and its impacts. In February 2011, the Ngäbe, in collaboration with civil society groups, submitted comments to the CDM Executive Board. The comments documented the Ngäbe’s concerns, in particular the fact that the Ngäbe were not given notice of the consultation process and were never consulted. Despite concrete evidence that the Barro Blanco project violated CDM rules on stakeholder consultation, in 2011, the CDM Executive Board registered the Barro Blanco as a CDM project.
Now that Barro Blanco has been registered, there is no process that allows the Ngäbe to raise their concerns regarding the project’s social and environmental impacts. Over the past two years, the SBI has been negotiating an appeals procedure that would allow stakeholders to challenge registration decisions under the CDM. However, ECO is dismayed that, as discussions currently stand, this procedure would not provide a means of recourse for affected communities once a project is under construction or operational.
More than 6,500 projects are registered under the CDM, and these projects will be operational for many years to come. ECO calls on Parties to revise the CDM Modalities and Procedures to: establish international safeguards to protect human rights; strengthen requirements on how to conduct local stakeholder consultations; establish a grievance process that allows affected peoples and communities to raise concerns about harms associated with CDM projects; and develop a process to deregister projects where there are violations of CDM rules.
To learn more, join us at a side event on CDM and human rights TODAY at 6:30 pm in Room Solar. You will meet on Monday at 6:30 pm, wWeni Bakama, a Ngäbe activist, and other panelists who will discuss how we can integrate human rights protections in the CDM.
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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!
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ECO was overjoyed on Saturday when a number of Parties publicly called for a process to develop an Equity Reference Framework. Such a process would be an opportunity of the first order, one that could allow us to unlock ambition, maximise participation, and ensure success in Paris.
South Africa, Kenya, Gambia on behalf of the LDCs – ECO warmly welcomes your constructive interventions on this matter. We now encourage all Parties to make submissions to the ADP co-chairs ahead of Warsaw, and to support a Party-led process with extensive expert input designed to get us to a workable framework for assessing both mitigation and finance commitments.
Singapore – ECO agrees with you on the primacy of the Convention! But let’s please be clear on one critical point: No Party proposing an Equity Reference Framework has any desire to re-write the Convention. Just the contrary. The goal here is to ensure that the Convention’s all-important equity principles can be put effectively into practice.
ECO encourages all Parties to now put forward views on indicators that simply but adequately represent these principles. With these views on the table, Parties could then define a basket of indicators that help inform and bound the discussion. Such a basket would give the Parties and Observers a standardised context within which commitments can be prepared and compared, and against which both Parties and independent experts could test the adequacy and fairness of all commitments.
US – if it’s any comfort, we can assure you that nobody believes that it will be easy to focus the diversity of views on equity into a working consensus. But it is possible, and such an effort, pursued in good faith, would yield its own benefits. The next few years will not see us agree on every detail, but we can reach a consensus that is sufficiently precise, and sufficiently robust, to allow the Parties to agree to commitments that accord with both the science and a full operationalisation of the Convention.
The 2015 accord will only be ambitious and inclusive if it is also fair. On that we can all agree. With the EU, Switzerland and other Parties also showing openness to this discussion, week one of Bonn gave us hope for genuine progress on equity. ECO looks forward to many more constructive discussions over the week ahead.
Submitted by MBrockley on
In yesterday’s issue, ECO outlined the process for tabling, reviewing and adopting ambitious commitments for the 2015 agreement, including setting a deadline for tabling initial commitments in 2014. ECO thinks it goes without saying that such commitments – in their various shapes and sizes – should be framed in terms of a five year commitment period. But since SBI is still stalled and everyone has some free time, we figured we’d lay out the full case for why that’s true.
First, shorter commitment periods encourage early action. As we all know too well, it is easier to put off action when the deadline is far away – and ECO is all about getting action. Second, your political masters are accountable on 4-6 year cycles, so 2030 targets set in 2015 would be too many election periods away, and hence candidates for “someone else’s problem”. Third, a shorter commitment period reduces concerns about locking in low levels of ambition (wonder why ECO would be worried about low levels of ambition…). Fourth, single year targets don’t give ECO or Parties any certainty over emission pathways (just see the discussions in the SBSTA work programme on developed country targets). Better to have things defined in advance. Finally, it enables targets to be set based on the best available science as that science evolves.
This last point has other design implications. While ECO wants (and the world needs) short commitment periods in order to review progress and ramp up ambition regularly, it is also necessary to know where we are aiming. Thus, a long-term temperature goal, a 2050 global emission reduction target and a carbon budget are crucial for setting the course, as are low-carbon development plans for all countries. After all, at least three quarters of all proven fossil fuel reserves have to stay in the ground (and probably more) if the world is serious about avoiding dangerous climate change. So, get into planning mode and start charting the course of those ambitious, 5-year commitment period pledges now. ECO can’t wait until 2014 to see what you’ve come up with!
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“Climate Action Network (CAN) has slammed blocking moves by Russia which have stalled progress during the first week of the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany.
CAN - a network of over 850 NGOs all working together to combat climate change - voted to give Russia the nation the weekly fossil award for the country which does the most to block progress in the talks a day early.
Kaisa Kosonen, senior political adviser from Greenpeace International, said so far five days have been wasted as Moscow insisted the rules on agreeing laws in the UN climate process be discussed - meaning many negotiation sessions could not begin - and all efforts at compromise so far have been blocked.
'It’s in everybody’s interest that the rules of the game are respected, but frankly, the Russians broke the rules first by pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol and by not taking any climate action even though they are a major emitter,' Kosonen said.
Moscow’s actions seem to stem from their anger over the way their objections to the Doha Decision - which quite rightly removed tons of poor quality emissions permits from the system - at last year’s major climate talks was ignored.
However, governments have as few as five negotiating sessions left before the 2015 climate agreement has to be signed. This behavior derails progress towards this deadline.
It comes as science finally re-enters these political negotiations with the kick off of the First Periodical Review to measure the adequacy of and the progress towards the global agreement to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees C.
Scientists told country delegates that the 2 degree limit was still achievable - but its clear there remains a huge gulf between the action governments have currently committed to and what the world needs.
Furthermore, with deadly climate impacts already being felt around the world and the carbon concentration breaking through the 400 ppm landmark, scientists said the world is currently experiencing the “worst-case climate change scenario” envisaged by the IPCC in 1990.
The kind of progress that Russia is blocking includes workshops that would help developing countries do more on climate. For example, unable to proceed are:
· a workshop designed to help developing countries prepare and implement emissions reduction targets
· efforts to help developing countries implement forest related emission reduction efforts more effectively
This process has the real potential to change lives on the ground by agreeing a global agreement that provides assistance to countries looking to use technology to adapt to the impacts of climate change and reduce their emissions, but right now the interests of a few are holding back its potential to move forward.”
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The ECO Presidency is pleased to invite you to a special High-Level Observer Reception in the presence of ADP Chairs Dovland and Mauskar.
The ECO Presidency and ADP Chairs will have the pleasure of presenting you with views, creative ideas and concerns by non-governmental experts closely following negotiations here in Bonn.
The event will begin at 1.15 on Saturday the 8th of June 2013 at the Twilight Ballroom of the Maritim Grand Hotel in Bonn.
* This special event was organised in response to the numerous complaints received from delegates frustrated with the fact that NGOs are not allowed in closed meetings AND limited to short or no interventions in open meetings, due to time constraints. While we love to see delegates reading and quoting ECO, we don’t believe it makes up for these shortcomings in NGO participation under the ADP
* Cocktails will be served to delegates who write down and report on NGO views. Fossils will be distributed to delegates who do not show up to this event (courtesy of ECO).
* Dress code: black tie