While CTCN was not in my vocabulary when I arrived in Marrakesh, I began hearing about it on Tuesday at a RINGO meeting (through whom we get our accreditation).\u00a0 The parent organizations for CTCN are UNIDO (UN Industrial Development Organization) and UNEP (UN Environment Program).\u00a0 Jukka Uosukainen (who has been involved in UN work on the environment for several decades and who served as Special Envoy for Climate Change for the Govt of Finland), appointed\u00a0 the first Director of the the Climate Technology Center and Network (CTCN, spoke) to RINGOs because CTCN–which is barely 2 years old–wants the participation of and brainstorming by the research development and science community.\u00a0 The CTCN answers requests (policy, legal, advisory) for technology upgrading vision and capacity of developing nations.\u00a0 Since its inception, they receive roughly two requests a week and they have only a ten-member staff.\u00a0 There is a sense that demand for services that CTCN can provide is growing rapidly. They have had to choose among LDCs’ requests for assistance because they don’t have enough money.\u00a0 Some of the assistance comes in the form of webinars and on-line support.\u00a0 CTCN matches applications it accepts with appropriate experts.\u00a0 An example is that they worked with Colombia on a detailed, climate-friendly, waste management plan for one city.<\/p>\n
U.S. negotiator Pershing, in his briefing on Tuesday evening (11\/15), said that one of the problems with financing for various COP projects was that public money was not adequately leveraging private dollars.\u00a0 He calculated that, close to OECD figures that came in in time for the COP pre-meeting three weeks ago, UNFCCC was getting only about thirty cents private money from every dollar of public money, which was not effective.\u00a0 It is my sense that this is an issue for the new CTCN initiative as well.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, I sat in on the CTCN press conference on Wednesday at 10 a.m. where a handful of\u00a0 nations pledged $23 million to scale-up funding for CTCN as it “delivers tailored capacity building and technical assistance at the request of developing countries across a broad range of mitigation and adaptation technology and policy sectors.”\u00a0 What I noted was that Canada and the U.S. were given credit for leading this effort to increase contributions.<\/p>\n
The COP Deputy Executive Secretary, Richard Kinley, (Canada) called CTCN a success story.\u00a0 The Canadian Minister of Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, said Canada would match its original contribution with another 2.2 million.\u00a0 The EU Commission representative, Roberto Ridolfi, announced a contribution which I think was about $10 million; he added that he thought one of the greatest functions of CTCN would be the networking.\u00a0 He claimed that 20% of development assistance must now be climate-sensitive. Other contributors in this group were Germany, Japan, Korea, Denmark, Italy, and Switzerland.\u00a0 Among these, Korea alone was a non-Annex I country.\u00a0 The Korean representative said they were happy to participate\/contribute to sustainable development of other countries, even to a small extent.\u00a0 They promise to be a strong supporter of CTCN in future.<\/p>\n
U.S. Special Envoy Pershing said that the U.S. view about the importance of technology has been one that crosses the bounds of partisanship and rests on belief in the importance of technology in solving problems.\u00a0 Our own U.S. funds have already been put on the table (that is, he says they won’t be affected by the U.S. presidential election).\u00a0 He pointed to the enabling environment at the heart of the Paris Agreement, and he looks forward to other nations joining the CTCN funding effort in the future.\u00a0 He said the U.S. contribution last year was $1.5 million and this year another $2.5 million.<\/p>\n
The press asked who would evaluate CTCN activities and how.\u00a0 The CTCN Director said there will be an interim review on CTCN effectiveness next year.<\/p>\n
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While CTCN was not in my vocabulary when I arrived in Marrakesh, I began hearing about it on Tuesday at a RINGO meeting (through whom we get our accreditation).\u00a0 The parent organizations for CTCN are UNIDO (UN Industrial Development Organization) and UNEP (UN Environment Program).\u00a0 Jukka Uosukainen (who has been involved in UN work on … Continue reading Enthusiasm–and problems faced by–the new Climate Technology Center & Network<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}