Category Archives: UNFCCC
November 8, 2012 Climate Equity, Not Fossil Fuel Subsidies
By David Ciplet and Timmons Roberts
It’s absurd — the countries least responsible for causing climate change are suffering worst and first from its impacts, including droughts, floods and famines. Meanwhile, wealthy countries continue to feed the problem by directing hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize fossil fuel industries every year. In fact, the support they’ve offered those hit hardest is less than one percent what they give the polluters most driving climate change.
In 2009, these countries promised to end fossil fuel welfare once and for all. It is time that they met this promise. Redirecting this money to the Least Developed Countries and other vulnerable nations would help them to adapt to this new climate reality and level the playing level playing field for clean energy, spurring a transition to a sustainable economy.
In three weeks, representatives of the world’s nations will meet for talks on the United Nations’ climate change treaty. President Obama led the initial charge against handouts to Big Oil, but lost the political will to make it a reality. Hot off his reelection, Obama has a huge chance to be bold and start moving money from the problem to its solution. Sign the petition here – Avaaz.org will deliver the petition to wealthy countries at the climate talks when we reach a critical mass!
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- Posted under Adaptation, Climate Finance, Uncategorized, UNFCCC, UNFCCC Negotiations Topics
June 23, 2012 Ecological Debt and Climate Justice After Durban: Time for Some Practical Politics
By Timmons Roberts*
Photo Cred: Orin Langelle/GJEP
Written December 21, 2011, posted March 21, 2012
In the utilitarian lecture-hall of the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa, some of the world’s top scholars and activists on the “ecological debt” spoke to a half-full hall. Impassioned speeches outlined the big idea: that rather than owing a huge economic debt to private and World Bank lenders and governments of the wealthier nations, the world’s poorer nations are actually owed an “ecological debt” due to the plundering of their natural resources by colonists and neo-colonizing corporations alike.
Who owes by this reckoning? The global North. The bill? By one scholarly estimate: US$1.8 trillion. Others argue that it is impossible to calculate the value of complex ecological systems, but the first level estimation is that the financial debt of poor nations is tiny in comparison and should be forgiven.
The microphone is passed around the audience in the risers, and finally finds its way to the hands of a Durban labor union leader.
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- Posted under Civil Society, Durban: COP 17
April 18, 2012 Shaping the Durban Platform: Latin America and the Caribbean in a future High Ambition Deal
By José Alberto Garibaldi, Monica Araya, and Guy Edwards
After the longest session on record, governments at the COP17 in Durban in December 2011 agreed to negotiate by 2015 a climate deal to enter into force in 2020. The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action defied predictions that the meeting in South Africa would lead to a collapse of the UN climate talks. Many parties from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have worked many years to make possible the political compromise achieved in the final hours and included in the Durban Platform. Today, the challenge is to make this platform ambitious enough to avoid dangerous climate change.
In this new CDKN and Energeia Policy Brief we discuss the outcomes of the COP17, the contribution Latin America and the Caribbean made and the implications of the Durban Platform for the region. The Brief finishes by offering a set of recommendations:
1. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries supporting high ambition at the international climate negotiations need to continue to shape a more ambitious climate narrative by acting together, domestically and internationally, and strengthening existing work with experts on bold action both within and outside the COPs.
2. Informal exchanges inside and outside of the UNFCCC process to jointly define key milestones for the Durban Platform and identify areas of convergence and divergence must take place within LAC countries and with Africa and Asia between now and 2015.
3. Both at home and abroad, the LAC region needs to improve how it communicates its successes on low carbon, climate resilient strategies to keep building confidence and generating a stronger impact at the international climate negotiations.
4. LAC countries need to continue to explore how best to advance national conversations linking climate change issues such as mitigation and resilience plans to national interests and potential losses in food security, infrastructure and trade.
To read the Policy Brief click here.
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- Posted under Latin America, UNFCCC
January 24, 2012 Latin American governments and civil society combine forces at COP17
By Guy Edwards
The COP17 was a watershed moment for Latin American civil society participation in the UNFCCC negotiations. Civil society organizations (CSOs) actively engaged with governments at the talks and, in turn, governments made efforts to reach out to civil society. This increased level of exchange can be observed on two levels.
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- Posted under Civil Society, Durban: COP 17, Latin America
January 24, 2012 Why the UNFCCC needs more countries like Mexico
By Guy Edwards
During the COP17 I caught up with Dr. Fernando Tudela Abad, one of Mexico’s foremost climate change experts and a high ranking official of the Mexican delegation. Dr. Tudela is Under Secretary of Environmental Policy and Planning at the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resource and also chairs the expert group of the OECD on climate change.
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Tags: Mexico
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- Posted under Latin America, UNFCCC
December 9, 2011 Occupy COP17
By Adam Kotin and Cecilia Pineda
As negotiators determine the fate of the Kyoto Protocol on the last day of COP17, youth from all over the world, NGO members, and a few distinguished negotiators stormed the hallways of the International Convention Centre demanding climate justice.
Protesters began the march toward the opening plenary for the 7th meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) singing a mix of the South African miner’s song “Shosholoza” and chants for climate justice. Borrowing the human microphone from the U.S. Occupy Wall Street movement, they voiced their demands for the negotiators to come up with an ambitious, legally-binding treaty to reduce emissions.
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- Posted under Civil Society, Durban: COP 17
December 9, 2011 Is anyone listening to the new leaders on climate?
By Cecilia Pineda
In the months prior to the COP15 in Copenhagen, President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed convened the first meeting of the Climate Vulnerable Forum and urged leaders to make active carbon neutral pledges to arm their convictions that their survival depends on all countries pursuing low-carbon economies.
Nasheed believed that a bloc of carbon-neutral developing countries could move the outcome of Copenhagen.
To Nasheed’s disappointment, not all of the countries jumped on the carbon-neutral bandwagon and it is unlikely whether these countries could have prevented the train-wreck of Copenhagen which sacrificed 189 voices for the sake of 5. Nonetheless, out of the ashes of the COP15 we have begun to see the rise of new leaders and alliances, which rally under the progressive banner and promote low-carbon growth at home and abroad.
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- Posted under Durban: COP 17, Mitigation, UNFCCC
December 8, 2011 It Takes Two Hands to Clap
By Linlang He
Will China break the impasse in the negotiations?
Yesterday morning’s High-Level Forum on Climate Change at China Pavilion clearly lifted the spirits of its participants. Head Delegate of the China Delegation Mr. Xie Zhenhua, together with leaders from the World Bank, the UK and the EU, summarized China’s current achievements in energy efficiency and renewable energy development, reaffirmed the need for a greener growth and urged developed countries to “play from their hearts”.
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- Posted under China, Durban: COP 17
December 7, 2011 El Salvador stresses adaptation to keep its head above water
By Adam Kotin
When devastating floods hit El Salvador in October 2011, 40% of the country’s crops were wiped out. Agricultural Minister José Guillermo López Suárez was forced to import the nation’s signature kidney beans all the way from China.
But sadly, this wasn’t a new experience for the fast-developing Central American nation. At a COP17 panel presentation, El Salvadoran Minister of the Environment Herman Rosa Chávez discussed the slew of extreme weather events his country has endured over the last several years.
For El Salvador, severe climate-related losses have almost become an annual rite.
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Tags: El Salvador
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- Posted under Adaptation, Durban: COP 17, UNFCCC Negotiations Topics
December 3, 2011 Latin American civil society builds bridges at the COP17 in Durban
By Guy Edwards and Mónica López-Baltodano*
Today, at the COP17, a group of Latin American platforms, networks and fora organized by the Building Bridges initiative met with delegations from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama to discuss the primary issues under negotiation including the longevity of the Kyoto Protocol, designing the Green Climate Fund and adaptation.
The Ecuadorian commented on her satisfaction at seeing so many young people participating in this important event, and that with Rio+20 around the corner, the outcomes from Durban will have an impact on the event to be held in Brazil, 20 years after the Earth Summit that gave rise to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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- Posted under Durban: COP 17, Latin America
