Saturday 18 November 2017

Little drama in Bonn COP23 FIJI 2017 : Outcomes COP 23


Outcomes from Cop 23

Concrete Climate Action Commitments at COP23
UN CLIMATE PRESS RELEASE / 17 NOV, 2017


UN Climate Change News, Bonn, Nov 17 – As the UN Climate Change Conference comes down to the last day and governments work to complete the final negotiation decisions, it’s good to be reminded of the new wave of climate action that has been announced during COP23 from countries, cities, states, regions, business and civil society.
The common message from all sides at this conference has been that action to get on track towards the objectives of the Paris Climate Change Agreement and to ultimately achieve the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals is urgent, time is really running out and everyone simply must do much better together to drive climate action further and faster ahead now.
Above all, this means rapidly raising the current global ambition to act on climate change that is captured in the full set of national climate action plans (NDCs) which sit at the heart of the Agreement.
The following list includes announcements made during Cop23 to drive us further, faster and together to this destination.

Financing Climate Action

Major announcements included funds to support the poorest and most vulnerable, whose plight has been brought into sharp perspective by this year’s extreme weather
  • InsuResilience Initiative additional USD 125 mln from Germany to support provision of insurance to 400 more million poor and vulnerable people by 2020. A G20 and V20 (vulnerable nations) partnership
  • Adaptation Fund exceeds 2017 Target – Germany’s contribution of 50 million euros and Italy’s contribution of 7 million euros means the Fund has now surpassed its 2017 target by over USD 13 million and stands at a total equivalent of USD 93.3 million dollars
  • Norway & Unilever USD 400 mln fund for public and private investment in more resilient socioeconomic development.  Investing in business models that combine investments in high productivity agriculture, smallholder inclusion and forest protection
  • Germany and Britain to provide combined USD 153 mln to expand programs to fight climate change and deforestation in Amazon rainforest
  • European Investment Bank will provide USD 75 million for a new USD 405 million investment programmeby the Water Authority of Fiji. The scheme will strengthen resilience of water distribution and wastewater treatment following Cyclone Winston, the world’s second strongest storm ever recorded, which hit Fiji in February 2016
  • Green Climate Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development signed up to free USD 37.6 million of GCF grant financing in the USD 243.1 million Saïss Water Conservation Project to make Moroccan agriculture more resilient
  • World Resources Institute announced a landmark USD2.1 billion of private investment earmarked to restore degraded lands in Latin America and the Caribbean through Initiative 20x20
  • UNDP, Germany, Spain and EU launch EUR 42 million programme NDC Support Programme at UN Climate Summit to help countries deliver on the Paris Agreement
  • NDC Partnership to establish a new regional hub to support implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the Pacific
  • 13 countries and IEA - EUR 30 mln to “IEA Clean Energy Transitions Programme” to support clean energy transitions around the world
  • Ecuador to reduce 15 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in the forest sector
  • Gabon’s National Park Service to halt illegal logging to stop emission of 20 million tonnes of CO2

Investing in Climate Action

  • HSBC announces 100 billion for green investments just before COP23
  • R20 and Blue Orchard Finance’s African Sub-national Climate Fund to provide ready-to-invest projects and funds to implement at least 100 infrastructure projects by 2020

Coordinating Climate Action

With so many climate action pledges and initiatives from across government, business and civil society, there is a growing need to coordinate effort to ensure that every cent invested and every minute of work contributed results in a much greater impact than each acting separately.
  • SIDS Health Initiative by WHO, UN Climate Change secretariat and Fijian COP 23 Presidency to ensure small island developing states have health systems resilient to climate change by 2030
  • America’s Pledge brings together private and public sector leaders to ensure the US remains a global leader in reducing emissions and delivers the country’s climate goals under the Paris Agreement
  • Powering Past Coal Alliance brings together 25 countries, states and regions to accelerate the rapid phase-out of coal and support affected workers and communities to make the transition
  • C40 mayors of 25 pioneering cities, representing 150 million citizens, pledged to develop and begin implementing more ambitious climate action plans before the end of 2020 to deliver emissions neutral and climate resilient cities by 2050
  • Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction – signed agreement to dramatically speed up and scale upcollaborative action
  • below50 -World Business Council on Sustainable Development initiative to grow the global market for the most sustainable fuels.
  • EcoMobility Alliance - Ambitious cities committed to sustainable transport.
  • Transforming Urban Mobility Initiative - Accelerating implementation of sustainable urban transportdevelopment and mitigation of climate change.
  • The Ocean Pathway Partnership aims, by 2020, to strengthen action and funding that links climate change action; healthy oceans and livelihoods including through the UN Climate Change process and via national climate action plans
  • United Nations Development Programme launched the Global Platform for the New York Declaration on Forests to accelerate achievement of its goals of forest protection and restoration.

Corporate Emission Cuts

Government Ratifications

  • Syria ratified the Paris Agreement – 170 have now ratified
  • Six countries have ratified the Doha Amendment (Belgium, Finland, Germany, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden) – 90 countries in total have ratified
  • Eight countries have ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol (Comoros, Finland, Germany, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Luxembourg, Maldives, Slovakia and the UK) – 19 countries in total have ratified
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Fig. - taken from following link

pdf-icon Approach to the Talanoa Dialogue(version of 16 November 2017)

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Momentum Builds With New Financial Commitments on Insurance and Forests to Scaled-Up Climate Action by Governments, Cities and Companies

UN Climate Change News, Bonn, 18 November 2017 - Nations agreed today to launch the next steps towards higher climate action ambition before 2020 at the close of the annual UN climate conference held in the German city of Bonn.
Backed by a wide range of positive announcements from governments, cities, states, regions, companies and civil society, delegates from over 190 countries agreed to a 12-month engagement focusing on ‘Where are we, where do we want to go and how do we get there?’
The ‘Talanoa Dialogue’, inspired by the Pacific concept of constructive discussion, debate and story-telling, will set the stage in Poland in 2018 for the revising upwards of national climate action plans needed to put the world on track to meet pre-2020 ambition and the long-term goals of the two-year old Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement's central goal is keep the global average temperature rise below 2 Celsius and as close as possible to 1.5—the lower limit is deemed crucial for survival by many small islands and vulnerable countries.
Over one degree of this rise has already occurred since pre-industrial times. The current set of national climate action plans, known as NDCs, are still heading for a path towards 3 Celsius, possibly more.
Frank Bainimarama, President of the conference also known as ‘COP23’ and Prime Minister of Fiji, said: “I’m very pleased that COP23 has been such a success, especially given the challenge to the multilateral consensus for decisive climate action. We have done the job we were given to do, which is to advance the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement and prepare for more ambitious action in the Talanoa Dialogue of 2018.”
“There has been positive momentum all around us. And Fiji is especially gratified how the global community has embraced our concept of a Grand Coalition for greater ambition linking national governments with states and cities, civil society, the private sector and ordinary men and women around the world,” he said.


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Climate summit goes slow and steady but King Coal looms



Little drama in Bonn other than some star turns and a pantomime villain. All eyes are now on Poland, the next summit host


For an issue that often seems to lurch from crisis to catastrophe, the steady but vital progress at the UN’s global climate change talks in Bonn was reassuring. But there remains a very long way to go before the world gets on track to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming.
There was little drama as the diplomatic sherpas trekked up the mountain of turning the political triumph of the 2015 Paris agreement into a technical reality, with a rulebook that would allow countries to start ramping up action. They got about as far as expected in turning the conceptual into the textual, but no further.
But that is not to say there were no star turns. Timoci Naulusala, a 12-year-old Fijian boy, gave a passionate yet nerveless account of the destruction of his village by Cyclone Winston in 2016 to the gathered heads of state and ministers. “Climate change is real, not a dream,” he said.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, turned on the charisma and heartened the gathered nations with a pledge to replace the US funding dumped by Donald Trump for the UN’s climate science body.
The Trump administration, which wants the US to be the only country in the world not in the Paris deal, was the pantomime villain, but only succeeded in uniting the 195 other nations against it. The sole US event brought an executive from Peabody, the US coal company with a long history of funding climate denial, to argue for “clean coal”. A protest song and walkout from most of the audience followed and for the rest of the summit, the US delegation was irrelevant.
But the large coalition of US cities and states backing climate action – which as a group represents the third-largest economy in the world – stole the American show, with the California governor, Jerry Brown, popping up everywhere, pumping up the crowds.
The multi-nation pledge to phase out coal use was the political high point, but the dragging on of the coalition talks in Germany prevented Angela Merkel from potentially joining the party. The politics is key: UN climate talks run on consensus, with no votes, so trust and momentum are vital and were preserved in Bonn.
But the summit was like a dress rehearsal for next year, when the Paris rulebook has to be finalised and poorer and vulnerable nations will demand much more action and funding from the rich countries they blame for climate change. Further gatherings in Paris in December and California next year will also help prepare the stage for the 2018 UN climate summit.
That will be in Silesia, a heartland of Europe’s King Coal, Poland, which has already started feeling the international pressure to clean up its act. If that summit achieves its goals – accelerating carbon cuts – then the curtain will have been raised on the clean, green 21st century, against a backdrop of the mines and power plants of the 20th century.

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‘Planet at a crossroads’: climate summit makes progress but leaves much to do

The UN negotiations in Bonn lay the groundwork for implementing the landmark Paris deal, but tough decisions lay ahead

The world’s nations were confident they were making important progress in turning continued political commitment into real world action, as the global climate change summit in Bonn was drawing to a close on Friday.
The UN talks were tasked with the vital, if unglamorous, task of converting the unprecedented global agreement sealed in Paris in 2015 from a symbolic moment into a set of rules by which nations can combine to defeat global warming. Currently, the world is on track for at least 3C of global warming – a catastrophic outcome that would lead to severe impacts around the world.
The importance of the task was emphasised by Frank Bainimarama, Fiji’s prime minister and president of the summit: “We are not simply negotiating words on a page, but we are representing all our people and the places they call home.”
The Paris rulebook, which must be finalised by the end of 2018, now has a skeleton: a set of headings relating to how action on emissions is reported and monitored. Nations have also fleshed this out with suggested detailed texts, but these are often contradictory and will need to be resolved next year. “The worst outcome would have been to end up with empty pages, but that is not going to happen,” said a German negotiator.
One issue that did flare up during talks was the action being taken by rich nations before the Paris deal kicks in in 2020. Developing nations argued not enough is being done and, with the UN climate negotiations running largely on trust, the issue became unexpectedly serious before being defused by commitments to a “stocktake” of action in 2018 and 2019.
The final hours of the negotiations were held up by a technical row over climate funding from rich nations, always a sensitive topic. Poorer and vulnerable nations want donor countries to set out in advance how much they will provide and when, so recipient nations can plan their climate action. Rich nations claim they are not unwilling, but that making promises on behalf of future governments is legally complex.
Progress in raising the importance of genderindigenous peoples and agriculture in tackling climate change was made. But NGOs criticised slow progress in delivering previous funding promises. Raijeli Nicole, from Oxfam, said: “For the most part, rich countries showed up to Bonn empty-handed.”
Coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel – has had a high profile at the summit, with the US administration’s only official side-event controversially promoting “clean coal”. But the overwhelming momentum has been against the fuel, with a new coalition of countries pledging a complete phaseout. This happened outside the negotiations, a significant move, according to Camilla Born at thinktank E3G: “We have had the Paris agreement living in the real world.”
Poland, which is heavily dependent on coal, is hosting the next UN climate summit in a year’s time and has frequently held up climate action in the EU. But on Friday, apparently under heavy EU pressure, it ended its hold-out against passing a climate commitment called the Doha amendment which sets in law pre-2020 climate action.
Germany, however, has been unable to commit to phasing out its huge coal industry, because Angela Merkel’s talks to form a new coalition have run over time. Nonetheless, Barbara Hendricks, the out-going German environment minister, said on Friday: “The phasing out of coal makes sense environmentally and economically.” She was certain the new government would act, she said.

US president Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris deal has had little impact at the talks, according to negotiators, who say US officials have been neutral and not blocked anything. Gebru Jember Endalew, the Ethiopian chair of the 47-strong Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc, said: “Unlike immigration, you cannot protect your country from climate change by building a wall.” Other big powers, such as China and India, have not used the US move to try to gain extra advantage but remain constructive players, insiders say.
Last minute hitches in closing the Bonn summit remain possible but are not expected by the delegates. Instead the attention now moves to 2018 and the tougher, final decisions that need to be made then.
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who as Peru’s environment minister ran the 2014 climate talks and is now at WWF, said: “The planet is at a crossroads. The decisions we make today set the foundation for 2018 and beyond. Countries must increase their ambition to put us on a path to a 1.5C future.”
“The Poland summit [in 2018] will be tough,” he said. “We expect to make progress, but it is not going to be easy.”
Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate ambassador during the Paris deal and now at the European Climate Foundation, said: “There is no time to rest on our laurels, we are not on track. If we are serious about tackling climate change, everyone will need to step up and put forward ambitious climate commitments between now and 2020.”
link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/17/planet-at-a-crossroads-climate-summit-makes-progress-but-leaves-much-to-do

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UN CLIMATE PRESS RELEASE / 14 NOV, 2017
UN Calls to Address Linked Climate, Biodiversity and Desertification Threats
UN CLIMATE PRESS RELEASE / 14 NOV, 2017
Climate Action Priority for Food Security and Zero Hunger
https://cop23.unfccc.int/news/climate-action-priority-for-food-security-and-zero-hunger

“It won’t work without tangible sanctions.” An interview with the economist Prof. Dr. Anke Gerber
The UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) began Monday in Bonn. Thousands of delegates from over 170 countries will negotiate climate goals at the 23rd annual conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The conference runs until 17 November, marking the first time that delegates are convening since the USA announced its decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Presiding over this year’s conference is the Republic of Fiji, an island nation that is already feeling the effects of climate change: 45 villages, for example, have had to be resettled due to rising sea levels. The economist Prof. Dr. Anke Gerber conducts research on, among other things, international agreements. In this interview, she explains to what extent this kind of climate agreement can be binding and what it takes to implement it.
link: https://www.uni-hamburg.de/en/newsroom/im-fokus/2017-11-07-klimakonferenz-gerber.html

Bonn climate talks: Resurrection of trust deficit

Contrary to popular belief, the Kyoto Protocol is not dead.
The 2012 Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol extends its life as it includes the second commitment period (2012-2020) for 37 industrialised countries which took similar legally-binding commitments during the first commitment period (2008-2012).
The legally binding obligations of the 37 industrialised countries under the second commitment period are mainly related to their emission reductions and financing for the developing countries for technology transfer. Many consider the Doha Amendment as the second chance for the developed countries to demonstrate their moral and legal commitments as well as climate justice which they were unable to do in the first commitment period.
And here starts the near collapse of climate-trust between developed and developing countries that the Paris Climate agreement was able to generate with finesse in 2015.
It is sparsely known outside the climate community that the Doha Amendment has not entered into force because only 84 countries have ratified it against the 144 required. Most of the industrialised countries which are required to take binding commitment have not ratified it. Significantly, countries like Japan, New Zealand and Russia have participated in Kyoto’s first commitment period but have not taken on new targets in the second commitment period.
Developing countries at the Conference of the Parties-23 (COP-23) in Bonn, as the first week’s talks are nearing an end, want the issue of commitment under the second period of the Kyoto Protocol to be on the agenda, mainly to discuss the pre-2020 commitment.
Industrialised countries are refusing to discuss it as there is not enough time in Bonn for this and there is an urgent need to finalise the rules to operationalise the Paris Agreement, which entered into force in November 2016.
The urgency of discussing pre-2020 commitments by 37 developed countries and finalising the rule book for the Paris Agreement by 2020, as per agreed time table, are both equally urgent, the developing countries argue.
“You cannot run away from the agreement that you signed two decades back in Kyoto, just because there is a new agreement in Paris” is the strong and harsh message that developing countries are sending to the industrialised countries in Bonn, an African delegate said.
“Developed countries need to be reminded that the Kyoto Protocol is alive. Unfortunately, the developed countries have dispatched it to ICU in Bonn, mainly because they are refusing to meet their commitments of technology and finance of $100 billion per year under the extended period of Kyoto agreement,” said a representative of Like Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) that include, interestingly, India, China and Iran.
link: https://opinion.bdnews24.com/2017/11/13/bonn-climate-talks-resurrection-of-trust-deficit/
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The Paris UN Climate Change Conference COP21 of 30 November - 11 December 2015 was hailed as an agreement that would set the standards of future global political cooperation, agreement and action on impactful climate solutions. It was also regarded as the most important international decision and focused political document on global climate governance in more than 20 years with the aim of preventing major and irreversible damage to our planet’s human and natural systems.

On the final day of this Paris Summit, world leaders from around the world signed a global climate Agreement, a legally-binding treaty for all signatories. President of the Cop21, Laurent Fabius called the agreement a “turning point.  .and a universal action of peace by 196 countries” in the global process to save the planet. The Agreement however, must also be ratified nationally, and will not become binding to its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world's greenhouse gas have sanctioned it.

Although the Paris Accord was seen by many as insufficient to halt global warming, falling far too short of what was hoped for, including a lack of mechanism to ensure that countries enforce the measures, it has been established that it is a good start when compared to the past attempts. With this action, governments, businesses, experts, advocates, civil society and citizens worldwide did finally officially recognize the universal nature of climate change, marking a pivotal moment in modern environmental history, and a significant shift in global perception on climate progress.

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