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A COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO TELLING THE STORIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATES WORKING TOWARDS MAKING THIS WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
The Fijian presidency gaveled COP23 to a close just before 7am on Saturday, November 18 after a full night and early morning of negotiations. You can see the details of what happened over the course of the evening here. The overall document coming out of COP23 is the Fiji Momentum for Implementation. Some of the major points of interest include:
Loss and Damage: The main COP 23 agenda item focusing on loss and damage was the review of the report of the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts. There was much debate between parties as to whether loss and damage should become a permanent item on the negotiating agenda during future subsidiary body meetings, especially considering what some felt was an unclear mandate, and need, for the Executive Committee to continue its work after the initial 5-year work plan ends in 2020. Looking at the COP23 decision regarding the Warsaw Mechanism, it looks as though the parties have tried to address this by making clearer the rolling of the Committee beyond these initial five years ending in 2020. This seems to be an alternative solution to making loss and damage a permanent item on future negotiating agendas. Of course, the underlying tension below much of the loss and damage work and demands in negotiations is that countries see this mechanism as a tool for financing projects addressing loss and damage issues. This COP has done nothing in its official reports to move past the knowledge-gathering efforts of the previous two years and into looking at financial mechanisms attached to loss and damage. You can find the advanced unedited version of the WIM decision here. Agriculture: The working group on agriculture finally reached an agreement in the SBSTA/SBI joint task this COP, a decision 3 years in the making (over the course of five sessions). The decision calls on SBSTA and SBI to jointly address food security and agriculture, and specifically its vulnerability to climate change, through workshops and other means not really specified in the decision. The one-page decision then requests observers and parties to submit requests for topics for such meetings, listing 6 topics to begin with which include modalities for implementing the recommendations of the past 3 years' workshops, methods of assessing adaptation/adaptation co-benefits, and improved livestock management systems. You can find the advanced unedited version of the decision here. Indigenous Peoples: An outcome many parties were looking to by the end of this COP was the operationalization of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform, mandated by the Paris Agreement to focus on knowledge, effective engagement, and climate actions/policies. The final decision accepted by the COP lays out in two pages the purpose of the Platform as understood by the Parties as well as a further explanation/illustration of the three general focuses of knowledge, engagement, and climate policies. Additionally, per the decision, the first activity of the Platform will be a multi-stakeholder workshop on the further operationalization of the Platform's three work areas. The decision still left questions that need to be answered before any full operationalization and so it has been referred to the SBSTA April-May session to be further discussed. You can find the advanced unedited version of the decision here. Adaptation Finance: Countries continued to negotiate on the role of the Adaptation Fund in serving the Paris Agreement throughout this COP. They did not decide that the Adaptation Fund "shall" serve the Paris Agreement, but there is agreement that it should serve the Paris Agreement. Shall adds legal weight to the assertion which some countries are not comfortable with as of yet. The conversation moved away from this language and towards the legality of how to transition the Fund. The parties decided that this transition should be the focus of the next negotiating session. Here is a link to the final informal note from the APA agenda item on the Adaptation Fund. Ocean Pathway Partnership: Fiji along with many partner countries launched the Ocean Pathway Partnership on Thursday. This one page document states the importance in connecting oceans and climate change. It specifically calls out the interconnectedness of Sustainable Development Goals 13 (climate) and 14 (ocean). The document does not create any new agenda item or work program under the UNFCCC (which is what some parties had hoped for), but it does encourage integration of the ocean into future NDCs and into other negotiating streams. At the launch, Fiji announced that Sweden would be the co-chair of the Ocean Pathway Partnerships. Here is additional information about the Pathway although the final document is not posted yet. To check out the decisions coming out of COP23, you can check out the UNFCCC website. Thank you for following along during our time at COP23! Please reach out to us if you have any addition questions about the UNFCCC process. AnnaAnna is a master's student pursuing a dual degree in Climate and Quaternary Studies with the Climate Change Institute and in Global Policy with the School for Policy and International Affairs. Her research interests include climate change adaptation governance and interactions of international climate governance and ocean governance regimes. Interested in reading more? Find more posts at 'COP23 Perspectives: The University of Maine Delegation to the 2017 United Nations Climate Change Negotiations'
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One of the major focuses of this COP is climate finance. Basically, how are we, as an international community, going to pay for all the mitigation and adaptation actions that are required in order to keep global temperature rise below 2°C and to decrease negative repercussions of climate impacts that are already occurring. In addition, discussion on finance covers the topic of Loss and Damage (L&D). L&D is basically the results of climate change impacts that were not prevented, and they can take the form of economic losses or non-economic losses. This area is of particular interest to the Small Island States group, the Least Developed Countries group, and other developing country groups because they would like developed countries to pay for the impacts that climate change has had and will continue to have on their countries due to developed countries being the major historic perpetrators of such changes. Finance is a key component of COP23 because the parties are still trying to figure out how finance will operate under the Paris Agreement. Basically, the creation of the Paris Agreement gives a new opportunity for countries to set up finance systems, and each country wants to ensure that the system will work for them. The Adaptation Fund, which was established under the Kyoto Protocol, is one place where countries are debating if this Fund should continue to play a role under the Paris Agreement, or if it should not. Today, I attended a morning full of negotiating sessions on the Adaptation Fund, and one notion is very clear. Developing countries feel very strongly that the Adaptation Fund should continue to play a key role in the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement. As emphasized by the Philippines, on behalf of the 77+ China, they believe that the Fund has been extremely successful in funding "concrete adaptation" to date, and that it has provided access to funding to developing countries is a way that no other fund has achieved. Developed country support for the Fund is not always so clear. But, it should be noted that yesterday during the opening session of the COP, Germany pledged 50 million Euros to the Adaptation Fund on top of their current contribution. The goal was clearly to send a signal of confidence in the Fund and to set an example for other countries to do the same over the next two weeks. Will this German leadership lead to a confirmation that the Adaptation Fund will continue its work under the Paris Agreement? Right now, it is too soon to tell, but I will be attending further negotiating session on this topic and be able to report back as decisions are produced. AnnaAnna is a master's student pursuing a dual degree in Climate and Quaternary Studies with the Climate Change Institute and in Global Policy with the School for Policy and International Affairs. Her research interests include climate change adaptation governance and interactions of international climate governance and ocean governance regimes. COP23 kicked off Monday morning in Bonn, Germany with the opening ceremony and plenaries. The ceremony featured an important cast of characters for international climate change negotiation including the last year's COP President from Morocco, this year's COP President from Fiji, the German Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (because they are physically hosting the COP here in Bonn on behalf of Fiji), the Chair of the IPCC, and the head of the UNFCCC. Upon accepting the Presidency of the COP, the Prime Minister of Fiji, Minister Frank Bainimarama asserted that the delegates here, and the countries they represent, "are all in the same canoe," and therefore, we need to work together over the next two weeks to achieve the objectives of this COP. So, what are the main areas of focus for this COP? This is a bit of a challenging question because each delegation comes in with a slightly, or wholly, different agenda. But, some of the main objectives/focuses of the COP that were articulated today during this opening ceremony and ensuing events held by both country delegates and NGOs are listed below.
There is certainly a lot of work to be done, but the collective spirit of Paris and the action-oriented spirit of Marrakech live on here in Bonn. We will see how the above priorities unfold over the next two weeks in this context. AnnaAnna is a master's student pursuing a dual degree in Climate and Quaternary Studies with the Climate Change Institute and in Global Policy with the School for Policy and International Affairs. Her research interests include climate change adaptation governance and interactions of international climate governance and ocean governance regimes. Challenge: Monitor greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions every day at every location on earth Why: To measure the movement of carbon from activities on Earth's surface, anthropogenic and otherwise, to the atmosphere because GHGs have caused warming of ~1°C around the world Solution: Satellites and remote sensing Since the 1990s negotiators have been coming to the COP to address key issues related to "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system", what that means is an entirely different blog post. However, due to the burning of fossil fuels, humans have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to over 400 parts per million (ppm). This has caused substantial warming around the world, and continued carbon emissions have the world concerned about future warming and impacts from a changing climate system. Since the first measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations by Charles Keeling in 1958, we have come a long way in measuring the quantity of carbon in the atmosphere. In 2002 the Europeans launched the first satellite to measure atmospheric CO2 from space, called SCIAMACHY. This satellite used differential optical absorption spectroscopy, basically a fancy way of saying it measured light at various wavelengths, to quantity the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This gave the scientific community a proof of concept that we could indeed measure CO2 concentrations from space. In 2009, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) launched the first dedicated satellite to measure carbon in the atmosphere called GOSAT. This satellite revolutionized the way we view carbon emissions as this mission allowed scientists to see the impact of individual cities, or even singular power plants, on the global atmospheric carbon reservoir. Needless to say, it revolutionized the way we measure anthropogenic carbon emissions. The Paris Agreement calls on every country to report their GHG emissions to the global community and then make efforts to reduce those emissions. In this way, GOSAT is playing a crucial role for the global community in allowing countries to measure their emissions. While there are many ground stations around the world, it is impossible to cover the entire globe with in situ atmospheric carbon measurements. Satellites solve this problem by monitoring the atmosphere from space and collecting data for every location on Earth. And no, it is not just the Japanese. NASA tried to get in the game too in 2009. They were actually coordinating with the Japanese and their GOSAT mission with planned joint cooperation on ground validations for the space measurements. Unfortunately, NASA's OCO-1 did not succesfully launch in 2009 due to some technical issues (sorry, no spectacular explosions). It was not until 2014 with the launch of OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) that a second dedicated satellite was launched into space to monitor atmospheric carbon. Since that time, the Chinese have launch their own satellite for carbon observations, TanSAT (2016). The Europeans launched Sentinel 5p, which is focused on methane emissions just last month, on October 13, 2017. More are coming in the near future too. The global space agencies have additional plans to launch even more satellites with GOSAT-2 coming from JAXA in 2018, OCO-3 coming from NASA in 2018, MicroCarb coming from the French and UK agencies in 2020, Merlin coming from the French and German space agencies in 2021, GeoCarb from NASA in 2022, GOSAT-3 coming from JAXA in 2023, another satellite in the Sentinel series coming from the European Space Agency coming in 2025, and ASCENDS coming sometime in the late 2020s from NASA. Soon enough, space will be crowded and we will have daily or hourly(?) measurements of atmospheric carbon around the world. Some of these missions deserve to highlighted further: Merlin is an effort from the French and Germans based in active remote sensing. This means that they are including an energy source on the satellite in the form of a LiDAR system to monitor GHGs, mostly methane. This will allow for observations at night, something that is not possible right now. This is particularly important in polar regions where the winter passes without any sunlight. This will allow for greater understanding of permafrost thaw among other processes. GeoCarb is also special because NASA is using this mission to dedicate a geostationary satellite above North America to monitoring GHGs in the atmosphere. This satellite will always be located above North America and will continuously monitor GHG emissions from the region. This will illuminate a much greater understanding of small scale carbon fluxes and provide unprecedented insight into anthropogenic and background carbon emissions. The best part about all of this, all the data is free and open to everyone around the world from all the space agencies. WillWill is a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Maine where he is pursuing a masters degree in the School of Earth and Climate Science. Will is interested in glaciers around the world and works with remotely sensed and in situ data to answer questions about glacier dynamics and mass balance.
Bula!!
That means welcome in Fijian, the Presidency of COP23 is Fiji, so this COP has an amazing mix of German and Fijian culture. Bula is said around the COP, as Fiji welcomes everyone to Bonn. Today we were welcomed to the COP with native Fijian dancing, ceremonies, and song. Both the German ministers and Fijian ministers welcomed everyone to the meeting in Bonn and called for immediate global action. Fiji is a particularly interesting host to a COP because they are representing the Pacific Islands, some of the most impacted locations in the world in the face of global sea level rise. Fiji called for particular action around maintaining the Adaptation Fund, something you will hear more about from Anna in the coming days. Additionally, they called for immediate ratcheting up of ambition, as the countries have currently only pledged one-third of the necessary greenhouse gas emissions reductions to remain below 2°C global warming. Finally, Fiji pledged to bring the most vulnerable countries to the forefront in this COP, something that is particularly important to their region. Needless to say, the negotiators are going to be busy these next two weeks figuring out how to make it all happen. Here is a music video, showing the theme song to the COP. "I'm an Island" attempts to say that the whole world is an island, we are all impacted by climate change, and it is our collective responsibility to take action. More to come this week as we dig into the negotiations! Have questions about what is happening at this COP? Respond to this post! WillWill is a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Maine where he is pursuing a masters degree in the School of Earth and Climate Science. Will is interested in glaciers around the world and works with remotely sensed and in situ data to answer questions about glacier dynamics and mass balance. |
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