CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS BONN JUNE 2013 NGO NEWSLETTER

10 Ju n e

Project Issue

ECO has been published by NonGovernmental Environmental Groups at major international conferences since the Stockholm Environment Conference in 1972. ECO is produced cooperatively by the Climate Action Network at the UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, June 2013. ECO email: [email protected] ECO website: http://eco.climatenetwork.org Editorial/Production: Kyle Gracey

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 wig gling 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 mo ment for all countries to revise their near term targets, while Ban KiMoons leaders meeting in the autumn of 2014 presents a great op portunity 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, post2020 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 Refer ence Framework (ERF), for which a formal process needs to be established. While Parties have already agreed to deliver

We Saw Success for Warsaw

a negotiating text on the 2015 agreement be fore 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 20132015, as part of doubling fast start funding levels for this period, and commit to a roadmap for scal ingup 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 highlevel ministeri al dialogue (yes, parties in Doha wanted it to be THAT special) actually delivers the de cisions 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 trans port, which are not included in national emis sions targets, make a fair contribution to emissions reductions, and to financing cli mate actions in developing countries. These

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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 cli mate 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 af terwards. 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 in cluding 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 agree ment, are a minimum. Finally, you cant spend all of your time plan ning. Youve got to also be doing. So, in addi tion to the ADP work programme forward, ECO urges Parties to take time preparing the actual tangible outcomes for Warsaw, includ ing in terms of 20132015 finance pledges, loss and damage mechanism and nearterm ambition. Heres to a productive week!

To Russia, and really not feeling the love at this point: 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, its 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 heres ECOs 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 sat isfaction of that Party. In this situation, which shall henceforth be known as Multiple Agenda Deterrent, or MAD*, 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. *Not to be confused with Mutually Assured Destruction, an entirely different scenario

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CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS BONN JUNE 2013 NGO NEWSLETTER

After this weekends CDM reform workshop, ECO has new hope for the CDMs ability to ad dress human rights. For the first time in the his tory 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 re lated actions. The review of the CDM Modalities and Procedures provides a critical opportunity for the CDM to make this a reality. A case in pointThe Barro Blanco project is a hydroelectric dam that is currently under con struction on the Tabasar River in western Panama. Once completed, the dam is projected to flood homes, schools, and religious, historical and cultural sites in Ngbe indigenous territor ies, threatening the Ngbes cultural heritage. In addition, the dam will transform the Tabasar River critical to the Ngbes physical, cultural, and economic survival from a flowing river to a stagnant lake ecosystem. This will severely af fect the Ngbes lands and means of subsist
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 parti cipation, 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 cochairs ahead of Warsaw, and to support a Partyled pro cess with extensive expert input designed to get us to a workable framework for assessing both mitiga tion and finance commitments. Singapore ECO agrees with you on the primacy

[Human Rights] in the CDM

ence, and result in the forced relocation of many families.

CDM rules require investors to consult with loc al stakeholders and to take their comments into account during the registration process. However, the company did not consult the Ngbe communities regarding the Barro Blanco project and its impacts. In February 2011, the Ngbe, in collaboration with civil society groups, submitted comments to the CDM Executive Board. The comments documented the Ngbes concerns, in particular the fact that the Ngbe were not given notice of the consultation pro cess and were never consulted. Despite con crete 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 Ngbe to raise their concerns regarding the projects so cial and environmental impacts. Over the past two years, the SBI has been negotiating an ap peals procedure that would allow stakeholders
of the Convention! But lets please be clear on one critical point: No Party proposing an Equity Refer ence Framework has any desire to rewrite the Convention. Just the contrary. The goal here is to ensure that the Conventions allimportant equity principles can be put effectively into practice.

to challenge registration decisions under the CDM. However, ECO is dismayed that, as dis cussions currently stand, this procedure would not provide a means of recourse for affected communities once a project is under construc tion 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 hu man rights strengthen requirements on how to conduct local stakeholder consultations estab lish 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 Weni Bakama, a Ngbe activist, and other panelists who will discuss how we can integrate human rights protections in the CDM.

Towards Consensus on Equity

ECO encourages all Parties to now put forward views on indicators that simply but adequately rep resent these principles. With these views on the table, Parties could then define a basket of indicat ors that help inform and bound the discussion. Such a basket would give the Parties and Observ ers a standardised context within which commit ments can be prepared and compared, and against which both Parties and independent experts could test the adequacy and fairness of all commitments. posed 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 selfcongratulation would be in or der 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 oldfashioned thinking will certainly not help the CDM to recover and scale up but will once and for all give it the lethal injection. US if its any comfort, we can assure you that

nobody believes that it will be easy to focus the di versity 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 pre cise, and sufficiently robust, to allow the Parties to agree to commitments that accord with both the sci ence and a full operationalisation of the Conven tion. The 2015 accord will only be ambitious and in clusive 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 dis cussions over the week ahead. 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.

Carbon markets are in the dumps and policy makers and market participants alike are scram bling 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 pro cedures are needed to make the CDM fit for the fu ture. The number of delegates that showed up on Sunday at 9 AM showed us that there is hope. Lets 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, its 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 consulta tion process, establish a grievance mechanism and move the whole CDM far beyond offsetting! many CDM projects did not seem to like the pro But ECO is worried that certain Parties that host

Market Mania

ISSUE NO 7

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 extens ively. Strong reforms are needed for JI. The experi ence with JI track 1 shows that a new, unified track needs to have strong international oversight. Also,

This issue is currently being discussed in SBSTA, where Parties are establishing a new market mech anism and a Framework for Various Approaches that should make emission reductions units that are achieved by various mitigation systems internation ally tradable and eligible for meeting national emis sion reduction targets. Some countries have put forward good proposals to avoid double counting. But ECO is missing sup port for centralised governance and international consistency of standards and how to achieve net mitigation benefits. And lets not forget, before we can agree on anything, we need an international accounting framework and clearer and more ambi tious pledges.

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