Author: Jennifer Peck

Today I attended the Article 6 informal negotiations, a side event on Article 6 and decarbonizing the energy sector, and a side event on climate finance. The Article 6 negotiations were extremely well-attended — negotiators and observers filled the big plenary hall, and there were also lots of people interested in the finance panel. Several panelists in the finance panel pushed for more climate finance to be delivered through multilateral development banks. (The US is a donor to five of these: the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank.) The argument was that these have been the most effective in mobilizing climate finance so far, and that they can move quickly using existing institutional knowledge and relationships. At the same time these entities can have conflicting priorities and varying mandates, so it seems that this might make more sense as a complement to mechanisms like the GEF, GCF, Adaptation Fund and (eventually?) a fund for loss and damage.

I also got a chance to visit the Green Zone, which is the area with broader access than the Blue Zone where negotiations, official side events, and pavilions are hosted. This area turned out to be a very corporate and sanitized space, meant for engagement with Spanish society. I saw lots of school groups, a VR headset exhibit, and an exhibit of children’s art and letters that had been sent over from Chile.

On the way to the Article 6 negotiations this afternoon I ran into the wonderful Liz Nichols (former Swarthmore professor and now finance negotiator from the State Department) and decided to tag along with her for a bit instead.  We stopped by the US State Department Delegation Room and chatted while her colleagues busily prepared for their meetings.

I followed Liz to an informal meeting about the details of providing GEF support for Parties to the Paris Agreement to submit the (new) required BTRs (biennial transparency reports).  These are huge all-sector audits that contain a national greenhouse gas inventory and progress updates on achieving NDCs.  These reports are hugely expensive for developing countries, so funding is a make-or-break issue for whether these will be ready by January 2024.  It’s hard to manage emissions without measuring them, so this is a really big deal for tracking progress and reducing emissions.

I sat at a small table in the GEF pavilion with Liz and a couple of other US negotiators, GEF leads, representatives from UNDP and UNEP and three donor and LDC parties.  The discussion was a technical one on how to design the funding process for the BTRs to make it accessible and effective.  Even in a small group there were a lot of competing interests and perspectives even though everyone had (more or less) the same goal.  It really drove home what Liz had told us before — that the details are important and hard to get right.

This is being called the “Action COP”, and yesterday’s opening plenaries focused again and again on turning pledges into concrete action as countries prepare their climate action plans for next year.  Chile’s graphic for the COP leans in to its long-skinny resemblance to the hand of a clock:

 

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which lays out the rules for global carbon markets, has turned out to be a major sticking point in the negotiations and is a key outstanding issue on the negotiating table this year.  A well-designed system can decrease abatement costs, direct investments to areas where they can most effectively reduce emissions, and allow countries to increase ambitions for their targets.  A poorly-designed system can make NDCs meaningless by flooding international markets with credits that do not reflect actual reductions in emissions, whether because they were banked under less-restrictive systems, are double-counted through multiple NDCs, or reflect “reductions” from artificially high business-as-usual emissions. This afternoon I attended an academic session on designing carbon markets to avoid some of these pitfalls, including a range of interesting ways to test for “additionality”, i.e. whether a project reflects a real reduction in emissions below BAU levels.  (For example, should switching to solar count toward emission reductions even when it’s the lowest-cost option for power generation?) . It’s an incredibly interesting issue where the technical details are extremely important and very political.  I don’t expect we’ll see too much progress this week, but I’ll be watching closely after I get back to see what happens in week 2.

Finally, an easter egg for econ folks was this event hosted by the Indonesia pavilion:

Global eminent person Jeffrey Sachs is speaking next Thursday — following up on his talk at Swarthmore in October!  (There’s another global eminent person speaking the day before: H.E. Al Gore.)

Day 1 is underway in Madrid! We’ll have more later, but just wanted to share the link to the livestream of the US Congressional Delegation’s press conference that should be starting soon: https://unfccc-cop25.streamworld.de/webcast/us-congressional-delegation

I’m waiting outside hoping to get in, but if I don’t I may be joining you watching the video from across the hall here.

Today marked the kickoff of events in the US Climate Action Center, the non-federal US pavilion hosted by We Are Still In. I attended these events as well as a session of the informal working group on item 7 of the Ad-Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA) agenda.

The US delegation is led by US undersecretary of state for political affairs Thomas Shannon, a career diplomat and Obama-era appointee. The negotiators seem to be experienced COP participants, some with long histories with the climate negotiations. From reports from other RINGO constituents and our own observations in the meetings, the US delegation has been relatively subdued but not absent from the negotiations. US negotiators seem engaged in issues of process and substance in the informal sessions for the APA and the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage.

The “unofficial” US delegation has been anything but subdued at this meeting, holding events in a network of inflatable domes just outside the main negotiations. The Climate Action Center is huge and very polished. (The cost of the regular pavilions is 380 euros per square meter +19% VAT).

This is the hub for the delegation of US non-federal leaders, including mayors, governors, corporate executives, clergy, and university presidents who are attending the COP. William Shatner was not able to attend in person but sent his well-wishes via video.

This an interesting group: not party to the official negotiations, but it is positioning itself as a group with the capacity to meet US mitigation and financial commitments under the agreement. People at the conference seemed a little puzzled about the division, and some members of the group itself seemed likewise unsure of their specific role at the conference.

On the first day of the conference I attended a panel hosted by the Climate Action Network, an environmental NGO with a large presence at the conference. Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based non-profit working on environmental issues, spoke about the US role at the negotiations, emphasizing that subnational groups were trying to both cut emissions and mobilize climate financing to help the US meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement. A question from the audience about who other parties should be negotiating with, Meyer emphasized that negotiations about transparency, finance, and other official matters must go through the federal delegation, but he urged participants to think of the current administration as an “aberration” rather than a long-term trend in US climate policy. He highlighted the role of the US subnational-delegation as being closer to public opinion than the executive branch of the government. This point came up in the afternoon today when Mayors and State Representatives in the non-state delegation talked about responding to the demands of their constituents.

The event started with remarks by James Brainard, the Republican Mayor of Carmel Indiana. He made the case that there is more support for climate action in the Republican party than is reflected in the executive branch of the government and talked about the nonpartisan history of environmental protection in the United States. (He later talked about the capacity for state and local-level change as a benefit of not ceding too much control to the federal government.)

Mayor Brainard was then joined by a group that spoke about achieving climate goals from the perspective of faith groups, corporations, universities, cities and states. A member of the audience asked the panelist how they hoped to engage with the other countries at the conference, and their responses were understandably vague, since there’s no official channel for them to do so.

The second event focused on market mechanisms to achieve climate progress. Speakers from business and industry talked about offsets, carbon pricing, and investing in renewables. California Assemblymember Cristina Garcia spoke about using cap and trade revenues and real-time local environmental monitoring as a tool to achieve environmental justice in disadvantaged communities.

The main priority of the non-federal US group at this point is to make visible US sub-national support for the Paris Agreement. The US Climate Action Center events today focused on broad strokes of different approaches to achieving the Paris Agreement goals, and events later in the week are supposed to go into more specifics. Perhaps future COPs will have a larger role for the US sub-nationals.

Bula Vinaka!  The 23^rd UNFCCC Conference of the Parties started in Bonn today, presided over by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama of Fiji.  Over 20,000 people are expected to attend what is being called the “Pacific COP”, the first of these meetings to be hosted by one of the island nations most vulnerable to storms and sea-level rise.  The COP 23 President focused on several themes during his opening statement: urgency, “talanoa” (understanding and respect), involvement of non-parties, and assistance to those affected by climate change.  These themes reflect the goals of this COP, which is expected to be a more technical meeting focusing on implementing broader goals set at prior meetings.  This work will lead up to the 2018 meetings, in which Paris signatories have committed to take stock of their collective efforts and progress.

Today I attended an event hosted by Climate Action Network-International on the “Yardsticks for Success” of the Pacific COP 23.  The panel emphasized two parts of the work being done at the COP this year.

First, COP 23 aims to complete the design of the 2018 Talanoan Dialogue (Facilitative Dialogue).  This is a process over the next year for Parties to collectively take stock of their efforts toward reaching their Paris goals and to inform the preparations of new nationally determined contributions for COP 24.  The Fijian presidency has taken a strong hand in shaping this process already, renaming it using Talanoa – a traditional word used in Fiji and the Pacific to indicate inclusive and transparent dialogue meant to build empathy and trust.  The dialogue will address the questions of: ‘where are we?’, ‘where do we want to go?’, and ‘how do we get there?’ in the months leading up to COP 24.  The goal is to assess whether Parties are on track to meet their NDCs and to reevaluate their commitments, which are considered to be well-under the reductions needed to meet global climate goals.

Climate finance is another theme of the work this year.  Fiji has emphasized the need to establish financing for “Loss and Damage” due to climate change, with a focus on natural disasters.  (The logo for the conference shows a small island being submerged by a cyclone-shaped wave).  Delegates also aim to increase the transparency around these funds, including agreeing on accounting conventions that reflect the climate relevance of funded projects.  We’ll hopefully get to see how the process stands at the end of week 1 before we leave, and Sam, Shivani, and Chris will get to see what comes out of the second week of negotiations.

Finally, the Fijian focus on engaging non-Parties and subnational actors is particularly interesting in light of the unusual US participation in the negotiations this year.  The US has sent a formal delegation to the negotiations, which it is still a party to despite President Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from the agreement in 2020.  The Fijian presidency appointed California Governor Jerry Brown as a special advisor to COP 23, who notably launched “America’s Pledge” with Michael Bloomberg in July.  The subnational US delegation seems likely to be a significant presence at the meetings.  The US Federal Government is not hosting a pavilion for the first time this year: instead the “We Are Still In” coalition is hosting the US Climate Action Center, financed by and highlighting US subnational actors.  It will be interesting to watch how these two groups participate in the meetings and how other countries respond to the two groups over the course of the week.