In December 2015 in Paris, at the 21st annual Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 174 countries, including the United States of America under then President Obama, agreed to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This historic agreement is now the universally agreed roadmap to tackle climate change going forward. Even though President Trump has officially notified the UNFCCC that his country intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, (but not from the UNFCCC itself), the US will remain in it for two years after giving its notice of withdrawal.

Hence at the upcoming 24th Conference of Parties (COP24) in Katowice, Poland in the first two weeks of December this year, the US will still have their delegation present. COP24 is particularly important as we are expecting to finalise the Rule Book for implementing the different articles of the Paris Agreement.

The reason we need to agree to a Rule Book is in order to measure, report and verify (MRV) each of the articles of the Agreement. As this is quite complicated to do in some cases, countries agreed in Paris to give themselves three years to complete the Rule Book at the COP24.

I will explain below the main articles for Bangladesh and our fellow vulnerable developing countries, and what we will be pushing for at the conference.

The most important article in the Paris Agreement is about the long-term target of limiting global temperature rise to well below two degrees centigrade and if possible below 1.5 degrees. This was a very hard fought article for the vulnerable developing countries as initially none of the developed countries were on board, and even large developing countries such as China and India didn’t agree, as they felt it would be too difficult to achieve. However by the end of COP21 we managed to get all countries to agree with us as it was the right thing to do, even if it was going to be difficult.
In recent weeks an important new special report on 1.5 degrees from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has enhanced the importance of keeping the temperature target below 1.5 Degrees, which will require every country to aim for much more ambitious targets to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy by 2050 at the latest. This will be the biggest issue at COP24, namely raising the level of ambition in each country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) for mitigation.

There will also be an important discussion on the Global Goal on Adaptation which was agreed in Paris but is more difficult to have an agreed global goal on since adaptation is so location specific. Hence at COP24, countries will need to agree on a proxy adaptation goal and ways to measure progress towards it over time. Among the contentious views is a mix of top-down data based indicators of vulnerability reduction versus more bottom-up adaptive capacity focused indicators.

Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries are in favour of the bottom-up approach while many develpped countries prefer the top down approach. This is another issue to keep an eye on at COP24.

The final issue I will highlight is Climate Finance which is always a delicate topic, especially the issue of finance for adaptation in the poorer and more vulnerable developing countries. Developed countries had promised to provide 100 billion US Dollars a year from 2020 onwards, much of it to be channelled through the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Even though President Trump has said that the US would renege on the pledge made by President Obama, other developed countries have promised to make up the US contribution towards the 100 billion a year. We are expecting developed countries to reveal in COP24 how much each of them will contribute towards that 100 billion target and the channels through which they plan to deliver the money.

A new element at COP24 will be the Talanoa Dialogue, which was introduced in COP23 last year by the prime minister of Fiji who was the president of COP23, and which has spawned hundreds of local level Talanoa Dialogues around the world in order to enable ordinary citizens to contribute towards the decisions at COP24. The prime minister of Fiji will hand them over to the incoming COP24 president, the environment minister of Poland, on the first day when the president of COP23 formally hands over the presidency of the COP.

It will be interesting to see how the incoming COP24 president handles the inputs—the results of the global Talanoa Dialogues held over the last twelve months all over the world—he gets from the outgoing President of COP23.

Bangladesh is likely to be sending a sizeable number of officials in the official delegation and there will also be a significant number of non-governmental observers at COP24 as well.

Originally this article was published on November 14, 2018 at Daily Star. The author Dr. Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Email: saleemul.huq@icccad.net

The 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended in Bonn, Germany, on Saturday morning, as negotiations ran overtime by a day. While the event was held in Germany, the official host of COP23 was in fact Fiji, and the President of the COP was the Prime Minister of Fiji himself. This was the first time that a small island developing state had hosted a COP and this made a significant difference to the atmosphere in Bonn.

In COP21 held in France in December two years ago, the historic Paris Agreement was agreed upon committing all countries to take action on both mitigation as well as adaptation and to keep global temperature increase well below two degrees centigrade and, if possible, below 1.5 degrees. The Paris Agreement also set a timetable for having a stocktake of progress by COP24, which will be held in Poland in December next year.

This COP in Bonn was meant to start the process of developing the rule book for implementing the Paris Agreement and initiate the process for the Facilitated Dialogue due to take place in Poland next year. Thus, Fiji introduced the countries to their “Talanoa Dialogue” concept that is used by the islanders in the Pacific to arrive at decisions through consensus, not by adversarial negotiations between groups (which is typically how countries behave at the COPs) but rather by allowing everyone to have a say and reaching consensus through a participatory and inclusive process.

It was in this spirit that Fiji together with Poland launched the Talanoa Dialogue at COP23 which will continue all through the year, rather than waiting until COP24 next year, to consult not just with governments, but also with many other constituencies.

COP23 also came out with two important decisions to ensure better representation at the COPs, namely a Gender Action Plan to involve more women as well as recognising local governments and indigenous peoples’ groups. The inclusions of these groups will broaden the decision-making process and make it more inclusive from now on.

During the official negotiations in Bonn the most contentious issue, as always, was about finance. But this time it was about finance for compensation to the victims suffering loss and damage from climate change. Under Fiji’s leadership the vulnerable countries, including Bangladesh, pushed strongly for developing innovative funding sources for loss and damage. In the end we won a partial victory with the developed countries, led by Germany, agreeing to provide insurance against loss and damage for 400 million poor people. While this is indeed to be welcomed, it will not be enough and insurance is unlikely to reach the poorest and most vulnerable people whose need is the greatest. So, this issue will continue into future COPs.

Another aspect of COP23 that everyone was curious about was what the US would do since President Trump has officially written to the UNFCCC that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement (but not from the UNFCCC itself). As the rules of the Paris Agreement require a country to remain in for two more years before they are officially out, the US State Department did indeed send some relatively low-level officials to be part of the negotiations but they remained low-key. They also sent some officials from the White House in the high-level segment who held an event to try to boost the use of “clean coal”. But they were booed and heckled by the audience.

On the other hand, the non-government sector from the US set up their own Climate Action Pavilion where there was a new constituency speaking every day about how the people of the US are still in the Paris Agreement even if their President wasn’t. These included governors of major states including California, mayors of hundreds of cities, heads of major companies including Walmart, heads of NGOs and universities and individuals including Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all saying that they would fulfil their obligations under the Paris Agreement. As a result, the US is actually on course to fulfil the mitigation pledges made by President Obama in Paris despite attempts by President Trump to reverse all Obama policies.

As a result, the global leadership on tackling climate change has now moved to China, as well as many other coalitions of the willing, including many sub-national states and cities who are taking actions to implement the Paris Agreement on the ground.

This dichotomy between the official government negotiators and the non-governmental implementers was vividly illustrated in Bonn by the two separate venues where these two groups were housed. The venue for the negotiators was the official conference venue with very little natural lighting and most of the negotiations taking place behind closed doors where observers just sat around waiting for the negotiators to emerge. The venue for NGOs and others was set up in a park where there were lots of cafes, many pavilions, booths with information, meeting rooms for side events and a stage for the Talanoa dialogues to take place amongst civil society members. This venue was buzzing with excitement, discussions, music and even dancing while the official negotiators remained locked inside windowless rooms arguing about commas and words!

In many ways this embodies the shift since we adopted the Paris Agreement, in the relative importance between the official negotiators and the actual implementers with the latter being more important than the former from now on.

Originally this article was published on  November 22, 2017 at Daily Star. The author Dr. Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Email: saleemul.huq@icccad.net

I have just arrived in Bonn, Germany to attend the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held here for the next two weeks. The annual COP takes place in November or December each year and is hosted by a country in a different continent each time.

This year it is the turn of Asia Pacific and the official host is Fiji. However, since Fiji could not accommodate around 20,000 participants from all over the world, the Government of Germany has kindly offered to physically host the meeting in Bonn while Fiji is the official host. The prime minister of Fiji is the COP president.

Not every COP is equally important in terms of decision-making and COP23 is a relatively low-key COP where the focus will be on developing the details of implementation of the Paris Agreement (PA) which was achieved at COP21 in Paris, France in December 2015 at a very high-level COP with over a hundred heads of state in attendance.

The PA has set the long-term global temperature goal of staying well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible, as well as agreeing to develop a global goal on adaptation and to treat ‘loss and damage’ as a separate issue from ‘adaptation’.

COP23 will discuss how to implement the agreement by developing the PA rule book, and arranging a facilitated dialogue in 2018 and a global stock-taking in 2023. Here are some of the issues to look out for at COP23.

The question on everyone’s mind is, what will the US do? While the US government has formally given notice of its intention to withdraw from the PA they are still in the UNFCCC and their withdrawal from the PA will take two years to come into force. Hence the US will indeed be sending a delegation which will be able to participate fully, although it remains to be seen how they behave in the negotiations.

The second major issue that has already been highlighted by the prime minister of Fiji is the issue of ‘loss and damage’ from climatic events around the world which can be attributed to human-induced climate change. The series of devastating natural disasters in 2017, including the severe floods in Bangladesh and South Asia, represents a tipping point in terms of the impact of human-induced climate change.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes that hit Texas (Hurricane Harvey), Florida (Hurricane Irma) and Puerto Rico (Hurricane Maria) this year. The fact that there were hurricanes was quite normal but what was abnormal was the elevated sea surface temperature in the Atlantic and Caribbean which caused each hurricane to be much more intense and devastating than it otherwise would have been. The total loss and damage in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico is estimated to be over USD 300 billion which the US Congress will now have to consider for their reconstruction. The US, like many other countries, has a system of compensating states for loss and damage but there is no such agreement at the global level.

In COP19 held in Poland in 2013, we did agree to set up the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for Loss and Damage and under it an executive committee was formed which developed a five-year work plan that will be discussed in Bonn. However, the work plan does not address the issue of raising funds for compensation for loss and damage.

So, in Bonn, under the leadership of Fiji and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and support from the least developed countries (LDCs) group and the Africa group, the issue of innovative financing for compensation for loss and damage will be a contentious issue (as it is likely to be opposed by the developed countries).

Finally, it is important to realise that even though the main task of the COP is for government delegations to negotiate and make important decisions, there are various non-governmental observers from civil society and business community, including the youth, indigenous people, etc., who hold hundreds of side events all over the city. And often these events are far more interesting than the boring “official” negotiations! Over the next two weeks, I hope to issue commentaries on the COP23 negotiations, as well as on the side events in Bonn.

Originally this article was published on  November 08, 2017 at Daily Star. The author Dr. Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Email: saleemul.huq@icccad.net