Publications

Some people still believe that allowing equity a prominent place in the UNFCCC negotiations only increases the chances of deadlock.  Our view, in contrast, is that a breakthrough on equity is essential to a breakthrough in the negotiations.  Extremely ambitious action will only occur within a regime that meets the legitimate development needs of the world’s poor.  Equity, and a process for equity, must be forged into instruments of cooperation and breakthrough.

This brings us, immediately, to the Convention’s core equity principles, and to the need for equity indicators that properly express those principles.  Clarifying these equity indicators is now a top priority.  Doing so wouldn’t be enough to bring real life into the negotiations – only action is action, and only finance is finance – but for all that, a greater agreement on equity would be a game changer.  Agreement on convention-based equity indicators, in particular, would enable real comparability of effort, and thus a regime in which free riders everywhere can be clearly identified. 

The ultimate need, here, is the formal agreement of an Equity Reference Framework under UNFCCC.  The immediate need is a focused effort to agree on a small list of well-designed equity indicators that, taken together, allow us to adequately model the Convention’s core equity principles, as they bear upon the challenge of a cooperative and extremely ambitious global climate transition.

The goal of this paper is to enrich the equity debate by defining a small (as simple as possible, but no simpler) list of Convention-based equity indicators.  We offer this analysis to the Parties, for their use in the coming negotiations and in a possible formal equity review.  In addition, this analysis will anchor the informal equity reviews that CAN and other NGOs will conduct in parallel to the formal UNFCCC processes.

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Legal scope, structure and design of the 2015 agreement 

The scope, structure and design of the 2015 agreement should be consistent with a 1.5ºC global carbon budget with high likelihood of success, including targets and actions within an equitable framework that provides the financial, technology and capacity building support to countries with low capacity.   It should be serious about ensuring sufficient support for dealing with the unavoidable impacts of climate change. It should be built on, developing and improving the rules already agreed under the Kyoto Protocol and the Convention including transparency through common and accurate accounting and effective compliance processes, respecting the principles of equity. The form of the 2015 agreement should be a fair, ambitious and legally binding protocol.

Kyoto Protocol as a basis for the ADP

The Kyoto Protocol provides a good basis for future Protocol, its rules have been tested and should be improved and built upon.  Existing elements of the Kyoto Protocol that provide a basis for the new Protocol include:

·       Long-term viability: the KP provides a framework that can be updated for each 5-year commitment period, while maintaining its essential elements

·       Top down approach, setting an overall objective, an aggregate goal, for developed countries, allowing appropriate consideration of the science, with comparability of effort between countries established through their respective targets (Article 3.1)

·       Legally binding, economy-wide, absolute emissions reduction targets (QELROs) for countries with high responsibility and capacity, expressed as a percentage below the 1990 base year (Annex B)

·       A system of 5-year commitment periods, with comparability of effort measured against a common base year allowing for reasonable cycles of review linked to the IPCC reports and for comparability of effort (Articles 3.1 and 3.7).  A commitment regime under the new 2015 agreement should set at least two 5-year commitment periods, so that there are clear consequences in the already-agreed second period for failure to comply with the first 5-year target, and so that a next set of two 5-year targets is in place before the first 5-year period expires.   The system should include an adjustment procedure similar to the adjustment procedure under Article 2.9 of the Montreal Protocol that is restricted to increasing ambition. This adjustment procedure should allow both unilateral real increases in ambition by a country and for a ratcheting up of all countries resulting from an adequacy review.

·       Monitoring, review, and international verification system (Articles, 5,7,8 and associated decisions)

·       Compliance mechanism composed of two tracks – facilitative and enforcement (Article 18).  Compliance with the new 2015 legally binding outcome will depend in large part on effective *domestic* compliance processes, which can be facilitated by sharing of domestic best practices in compliance design.  This will in turn facilitate better compliance with international obligations. 

·       Mandatory review of provisions of the Protocol for subsequent commitment periods (Article 3.9)

·       Supplementarity – ensuring that market or non-market mechanisms are supplementary to (ie, CDM) to domestic actions, and don’t undermine the fundamental need to decarbonize all economies (Article 6.1d)

·       Required reporting on ”demonstrable progress”, establishing an important reporting requirement and stocktaking (Article 3.2)

·       Basket approach to GHGs, and the ability to list new gases and classes of gases (Annex A)

·       Use of Global Warming Potentials (GWP) to allow comparability of the impacts of different gases on global warming (Article 5.3)

The Equity Reference Framework

Equity is back on the negotiating table, and this is no surprise. Climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC were never going to succeed unless they faced the challenge of “equitable access to sustainable development.” Unless they faced, more precisely, the equity challenge of not just holding to a 2°C or even 1.5°C-compliant global emission budget but also supporting sustainable development and adaptation. These are the preconditions of any successful climate transition.

We enter the ADP negotiations with equity as a major focus, and this really is no surprise. The climate negotiations were never going to succeed unless they faced the challenge of “equitable access to sustainable development”. Unless they faced, more precisely, the equity challenge: holding to a 2C or even the 1.5C compliant global emission budget while also supporting a common right to adaptation and sustainable development. These are preconditions of any successful climate transition. The difference today is that we all know it.

Under Workstream 1, the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) in decision FCCC/ADP/2013/L.2, “invited Parties and Observer organisations to make further submissions, by 1 September 2013, building on the conclusions of the ADP at the second part of its first session”. CAN welcomes the opportunity for Parties and Observer organizations to provide further submissions to the ADP and intends to respond in depth on the implementation of the elements of decision 1/CP. 17 in a separate submission.

Our purpose in this short document is to encourage both Parties and Observer organizations to consider two questions, both of them central to the design of the future climate agreement, when they make their 1 September 2013 submissions. The single goal that underpins these two questions is to operationalize equity in a manner that clears the way forward, by meeting the demands and expectations placed upon the ADP “to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”.

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SBSTA Closing Plenary Intervention by CAN

-Delivered by Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis 

Thank you Co-Chairs,

We thank you and Parties for having a very focused session and urge the work to continue forward with the same motivation and attention. 

Nevertheless going forward,

Parties must ensure that climate policies encompassing agriculture include considerations and safeguards that protect and promote food security, biodiversity, equitable access to resources, the right to food, animal welfare, and the rights of indigenous peoples and local populations, while promoting poverty reduction and climate adaptation.

The design of the framework for various approaches and new market-based mechanism must be based on the lessons learned from existing mechanisms.   These mechanisms and framework will function under the convention and therefore have to be consistent with the rules and requirements of the convention. Using such mechanisms to meet emissions targets requires a strict accounting framework and increased mitigation ambition.  

Lastly, the compromise on MRV provides a lesson for other streams, but the toothless safeguards reporting gives no assurance that safeguards will be implemented. The outcome on drivers is encouraging, but all parties must be clearly obligated to act, and the language on livelihoods not only contradicts the science but also threatens the involvement of indigenous peoples in REDD+.

Thank you.