18 December 2009
Obama, Chinese call for climate accountability
| Hitting the targets, raising the money, counting the carbon: accountability is the key to a deal in 2010. Copenhagen is not all about delayed planes, surprise appearances and procedural farce. There have been some important concessions in the countdown to the end of the summit. First, Hilary Clinton gave US backing to the emerging commitment to raise $100bn a year by 2020 to |
support those most impacted by the serious disruption that will come from a 2 degree change in temperatures.
The Meles plan is one of the few anchors in the stormy discussions among the hastily convened "friends of the chair" - two dozen heads of state who hurriedly drafted a three page political deal in the small hours of this morning.
Second, the Chinese announced that although they would not accept a legal obligation to open their carbon books to outside auditors, they could see the accountability benefits of inclusivity and responsiveness in their reporting. "The purpose," said Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, "is to improve transparency." There has been next to no discussion so far on the governance and accountability arrangements that will be needed to ensure that the climate finance will not be squandered or embezzled.
The remaining problem is simple: the commitments made by countries to date don't add up to enough of a reduction in global emissions. A confidential internal UN memo spells this out. From the doodles on the memo, it looks not so much leaked as left lying around. What is needed is a major additional commitment today to reduce emissions from several of the major emitting countries. Europe committing to a 30% reduction may flush out other significant offers.
Negotiators aren't buying themselves much time. The next summit in Mexico may be brought forward to the middle of 2010, rather than the end. We will have to work much faster and much more effectively in the next few months to specifiy the detail on how the money will be raised (and spent), what reductions must be agreed on, and how countries will make themselves accountable for progress. Copenhagen looks more and more like the beginning of the real deal, not the end.
The Meles plan
17 December 2009
 | 10 billion here, 10 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking real climate money. Yesterday I blogged about 'MRV' (monitoring, reporting, verification). This started as a nerdy issue and has rapidly become a geopolitical hot potato. UK minister Ed Miliband yesterday evening confirmed that transparency is one of three key sticking points in the negotations which were due to run late into the snowy Copenhagen night. |
The second big issue is the money. One fanciful notion circulating a few days back was for rich nations to allocate 5% of their GDP to support poorer nations: this would add up to several trillion dollars. Over the last 24 hours, senior negotiators have been carefully assessing the 'Meles Plan', a set of much more modest compromises on financing for developing countries put forward by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, standing alongside President Sarkozy earlier this week in Paris.
People familiar with the contents of the Plan are either violently against (many African commentators say
it's too little too late) or cautiously approving (British advisers see it as a way for Africa to get some much needed financial support fast). As with many aspects of these negotiations, everyone is in such a rush and logistics are so scrappy that few have yet read the detail of the Meles Plan - even though it ony
runs to eight paragraphs.
While campaigners have locked onto the 2 degree target and the initial fast track sum of $10 billion a year, the key to the proposal really is the commitment to have a prestigious group do serious work over the next few months on innovative financing mechanisms like taxes on financial transactions and international transport; and the use of special drawing rights.
If a 'Meles Commission on Innovative Financing' received a mandate today or tomorrow to work hard over the next 100 days in a more conducive environment than Copenhagen, there could be the real prospect of raising 100 billion Euros a year to support developing nations. That may fall short of the understandable demands of poorer nations. But it would have the virtue of being real money.
Monitoring emissions: technology leading politics
16 December 2009
AFP | There is an upbeat mood here in the Copenhagen sleet. There is a real buzz as 120 heads of state begin to arrive. But negotiators have left it to their bosses to solve in 48 hours a number of serious headaches. |
One of the controversies is "MRV" - who should undertake monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon emissions country by country to see if they are meeting targets.
Current emissions data is always years out of date - and often of questionable reliability. How do hundreds of national datasets add up to the global overview? How will progress on reducing emissions be independently assured? Not by allowing third party verifiers to give legal pretexts for border tariffs, insist the Chinese. Should emissions inventories be maintained by the UNFCC, the IEA, the EIA, or by some other acronym agency? Who will help build national capabilities in monitoring low carbon strategies?
MRV is a highly charged climate acountability debate.
On the fringes of the negotiations last night, outside the crush of the Bella Centre, was the launch of a fascinating accountability innovation: the Planetary Skin Institute. It may sound like a Brazilian cosmetic surgery clinic but it's actually an ambitious new mult--stakeholder initiative between public, private, NGO and academic partners. Building on preparatory work between NASA and Cisco, the mission is to "sense, predict, act".
Planetary Skin is intended to become a vast, open-source IT network providing near-real time environmental data in a trusted and timely fashion. Its just the sort of thing that could have cut through some of the stalemates on the MRV issue over the past week in Copenhagen. MRV is no longer a political hot potato but a technological blueprint.
Will Planetary Skin's governance systems prove robust enough to assure stakeholders who will inevitably be suspicious? Will its non-profit business model outwit private sector competitors like google, who are active in the remote3 sensing space. Time will tell, but Planetary Skin is surely a welcome addition to the range of climate accountability innovations emerging outside the formulaic plenary sessions here in Copenhagen.
Fouling up climate world cup
14 December 2009
Getty Images | Apart from the football world cup, there's nothing like spending a couple of weeks in friendly competition with climate colleagues from around the world. In the crazy crush of Copenhagen, with nearly 50,000 people in town for the climate negotiations, and hundreds of side events to pick and choose from, its fun - but tough - to qualify. That's why I was intrigued to try out an exciting experiment from the Climate Secretariat to see who could get a place in the stadium for the final week. What an own-goal. |
This morning, at 7am, thousands of particpants assembled with me to test a completely new participative process called the Ad Hoc Standing Group (AHSG). The UN has been stung by criticism that its climate summits are 20th century and fail to
bring out creative solutions.
So the AHSG was something new: a play-off where teams were playing the sub-zero weather not the clock. If we kept warm and hung together, while other people got cold and went home, we might finally win an official UN registration as NGO observers and pass through the heavy policing to the Bella Centre, where other warmer participants were sitting through plenary debates, sipping coffee and nodding off in side meetings.
So far, so like the Football World Cup group stages, where most teams have worked surprisingly hard to qualify but expect an easy
next stage. Only problem was, my group in the queue seemed pretty challenging.
First up was David, Tom and Deneen from the anti-deal free-market US think tank the
National Center. Next was Masanori from the Japanese centre of expertise on clean development,
IGES. Then there was Emily, a seasoned campaigner for
Amnesty International, the human rights advocates. And finally, just what every World Cup hopeful most dreads: the Brazilians. In this case a charming lobbyist from the Brazilian electricity industry.
Over the next nine hours, we probed each others' strengths and weaknesses. Amnesty advocates dont text so fast when fingers are numb. Climate free-marketeers cant decide whether to hand out their t-shirts for free to keep other climateeers warm. The Japanese laugh off other climate initiatives just as they see the Renault ZE as a pale imitation of the Toyota Prius. And Brazilians really dont thrive on prolonged sub-zero temperatures.
The queue barely moved. After inching forward for nine hours with no food or information, many of us were still prevented from registering, despite having valid accreditations. But we learnt a lot from each other during the Ad Hoc Standing Group - about finding common-ground, understanding each others' commitment and tactics for campaigning.
We also saw the Climate Secretariat in a new light. It is making last-minute efforts to claw back the accreditations it has so freely offered in the last few months, to reduce the number of participants at the summit who can hold the negotiators accountable. The result: it has given itself a red card for unaccountability: a nasty game-plan, and fouls all the way through.
