action pictures

My Rather Late Stocktaking

Rishi, blogging from Bangkok

After eight full days of negotiations, I also wanted to do a little stock taking exercise similar to what the Parties did at the mid session plenaries except mine are rather informal and remarks are not made in the same area.

What’s in a name?

A lot. One of the mandates of the LCA ad hoc working group is to come up with a shared vision. Some classify it as a building block under the Bali Action plan, some don’t. And, here’s why.

What exactly should the shared vision be? Operational, aspirational or inspirational? What’s the difference? Well, the Americans wanted the shared vision to be aspirational, something we all aspire to and hope to achieve. That is also a short way of saying we don’t want a commitment clause in the shared vision. Pretty much the same goes for inspirational too. Now operational would mean that the shared vision becomes a part of a legally binding COP decision.

Since most of text has been undergoing major changes, primarily streamlining and consolidation, placement of proposals (bracketed in the negotiating text) has turned into a major issue. What do we call a country trying to move the enhanced action on mitigation to the shared vision section and proposing that the shared vision should just be a declaration of political will and not something that will be legally enforced through a COP decision.

“Sorry, the text is only in English”

Overheard at the document distribution desk, this statement reveals a lot about high paced negotiations. The ‘non papers’ that the facilitators or chairs of the contact groups issue as streamlined/consolidated/revised versions of sections of the negotiating text are only immediately available in English. While this might not be a problem for countries that have large delegations, this can be particularly crushing for non English speaking delegations with small teams. My sympathies particularly go out to the francophone LDCs. How can we expect these countries to form a well thought out position when they spend most of their time translating the text with some elements inevitably getting lost in translation.

Inter alia, one more time

The Latin phrase for ‘among other things’ has been one of the most used phrases in the negotiating text. I think this signals two major things:

1. Negotiators want to give themselves leeway and insert inter alia to take into account situations or issues that they have not thought out
2. Weak commitment and lack of mandate; by tagging inter alia with almost all of the issue, one basically gets a text that hesitates to take a clear stand on anything.

Perhaps something that capped this all together was during the mountain action this morning. The text of the pledge that we have been trying to get countries to sign has something in the line of: mountains must be made a priority in climate change negotiations. One lady, before she signed, took out her pen and wrote ‘inter alia’ after mountains. That says it all.

The Kyoto

The two negotiation tracks that the COP13 created have allowed countries to chug away separately. The corridor talk here has been that the US is trying to kill the Kyoto Protocol by merging the two negotiating tracks and coming up with a severely watered down deal that is palatable to American interests. The general conception is that Kyoto Protocol automatically gets defunct after 2012. This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation. The first commitment period ends in 2012 and the Kyoto Protocol will stay alive unless it’s explicitly killed by merging LCA and KP.

Furthermore, proposals by Australia and some members of the Umbrella group only blur the distinction between developed and developing. Why should developing countries also make national schedules, along with everyone else, and commit to reducing emissions in that manner? This violates two major principles: common but differentiated responsibilities and historical responsibility.

Going around in circles

Make no mistake, private finance needs to be mobilized. The CDM and offset mechanisms generated a major cash flow of towards emission reducing projects in developing countries. Any climate deal in Copenhagen will need to get the private sector on board and based on the strong inclination of the EU and the USA along with South Americans (for REDD), a market is going to be created/extended.

The fundamental issue here is will the markets generate offsets that are additional to mitigation targets adopted by developed countries or will they be able to add the carbon offsets to their compliance obligations? And, what mechanisms will generate offsets? Can NAMA generated offsets (if they can generate offsets) be sold to meet compliance targets? What about REDD? Will the credits be fungible?

Norway for example is committing to a 40% reduction in emissions. Now, what they won’t clarify is what fraction of these reductions will take place from offsets and from domestic sources. Pushing the Kyoto Protocol to expand the use of flexibility mechanisms and declaring that one will undertake an ambitious target (with offsets) is exactly what the section title says, it’s going around in circles.

Signing off,

Negotiators had been asked to come in a ‘full negotiating mode’ but it was easy to see that whatever impetus they carried was easily dampened by the complex negotiating text that required an extreme amount of effort just to be streamlined. World leaders had declared their support for a Copenhagen deal but the momentum did not seem to carry through.

As far as the non papers go, it looks like one of the achievements of Bangkok will be a substantial reduction in the volume of the text. This reduction has made it much easier to see exactly where and what the debates are and where countries have drawn their lines. This was all too difficult in the INF documents.

Because the options are starting to get pretty clearly defined, I hope that there is enough political capital to make the decisions. Barcelona probably will be only an exercise that will help to fine tune the shortened negotiating text. Copenhagen has a series of major political decisions to make.

I’ll be tweeting from the LCA plenary tomorrow (twitter.com/rishirbhandary) and will be updating the blog more often while the plenary is in session for updates.

Video from Bangkok: Nepali Negotiators views

Mr. Pursuttom Ghimire, Joint Secretary, (UNFCCC focal person) Ministry of Environment, Nepal

Mr. Batu Krishna Uprety, [Joint Secretary] , Ministry of Environment, Nepal (Legend for Nepal in Climate negotiation)

Costal flooding & Climate Change: Sushila Field trip for media in gulf of Thailand

The Flooded Temple

WWF International organized a press trip to view the effect of costal erosion and the adaptation people are following on

the gulf of Thailand to show the effect of climate change in Thailand. We (Anil and Sushila) had also got the opportunity to be a part of the trip. It started at 9am in the morning, we gathered together and headed to Samount Sarkhon province. At bus we were introduced to each other. Mr. Kim Carstensen, Leader, WWF Global Climate Initiative gave us a brief update on the climate change negotiation.

We arrived at a local school for the launch of The Greater Mekong Climate Change Report.

The Boon of Bamboos

The greater Mekong region covers  Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We then visited  KHOK KHAM Community Centre where we got to see the innovative local solutions to the impacts of climate change. Mr. Vorapol the community hero’s story was shared by himself. The visuals of his childhood home and front gate now swamped in mud was observed, then he told us the

story of his struggle and his early attempts to find a solution. We got to see the bamboo fences and plantation of mangroves for the adaptation.

We then visited a temple which was flooded some 16 years back. Everybody left the area, but after 5 years a Monk came to the place and he struggled to save the temple. It was his story for the struggle of saving a temple since 11 years and he constructed the walls just 2 years ago.

A Electric Pole in Middle of Ocean

“Now the temple is visited by many people and people regain their faith in god”; says the Monk.

The impacts are horrible and the same can be happened everywhere around the world and also in NEPAL although we don’t have coastal region, but we do have the terai which is flooded and erosion occurs. We need to do something before it’s too late to save our planet “EARTH”.

Money Matters: Ramblings on Adaptation Finance

Rishi, blogging from Bangkok

Funds are needed to make sure that people can adapt to the impacts of climate change. Of course, the most vulnerable are those with the least capacity to adapt The question is, how do we generate the necessary funds to support adaptation? Can we assess contributions from Annex 1 countries? Make them contribute 1.5% of collective Annex 1 GDP? Is this even possible given that countries have not even met their ODA targets of 0.7% of GDP?

At the other end of the climate finance spectrum, we have the carbon offset market. However, relying on the market for a large share of the proceeds for adaptation is not an effective way to generate funds and this has a number of reasons:

a. if we look at the distribution of CDM projects, they are mostly in India and China, they alone account for 60% of the projects. The most vulnerable countries do not even have CDM projects.

b. Revenue from CDM money is not predictable nor is it adequate. Furthermore, the transaction costs associated with CDM are simply way too high

c. The market will operate such that the money will go to the sectors where the largest amount of carbon offsets will be created with the least amount of money. This is the reason for the popularity of HFC reducing projects under the CDM

d. There is a perception amongst LDCs that CDMs and other market mechanisms are actually grant money. This is either a gross misunderstanding about the nature of CDM and its primary feature of it being a flexibility mechanism or developed countries have sold flexible mechanisms to developing countries as grants and have eschewed from their responsibility of making stringent emission reductions.

One option that is currently in place is through levies on CDM credits that go to the Adaptation Fund. Some have called on to include a levy on all offsets and not just the CDM to increase the base. However, as one might argue, why should we tax projects in developing countries to fund adaptation activities in developing countries? This is not in line with historical responsibility and climate and adaption debt at all.
An approach that has been incessantly highlighted in the negotiating text (INF.1 and INF.2) among other documents, is integrating adaptation into national policies, esp development ones. Any sort of development policy articulated must take into account climate change and incorporate climate risk management. LDCs, because they have a lot to achieve in terms of building infrastructure and other necessary pillars of development, have a unique opportunity to integrate climate risk into development projects. Besides, it just makes economic sense to prepare for climate risks now instead of paying much more later on by ignoring such risks.

However, if climate change policy is fully integrated into development, what does this mean in terms of funding? Will donors point to such integrations to make an excuse to provide funding that is not additional to ODA? How can we separate an independent pool of funds and call that adaptation oriented if developing countries are being pressurized to incorporate and align all development priorities with climate change?

What exactly is an adaptation action? Can there ever be a clear distinction between adaptation needs and development needs? Are countries now going to be asked to show enough scientific backing to be eligible for funds? Should we just ask for 2% of ODA and use that for adaptation as well? Questions, questions, questions.