Today is Saturday, but it is also Day 2 of Week 2 of the COP28. To get a sense of where things ended up after Week 1, it is sometimes helpful to go through the opening day of Week 2, because negotiators are now beginning to respond to where they believe things stand. “Believe”, because much of the already negotiated draft text was crafted to be acceptable without granting everyone’s ambitions, or to contain meaning that will only be crystallized later on. So, interpretations abound.
The biggest news from Week 1 may be the operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund, on Day 1 of the COP28. While funding levels are nowhere near the need, that the fund now has a clear pathway to full operations and mobilization of resources means the global community can now begin to respond to, address, and support the overcoming of climate-related loss and damage, improving lives in vulnerable communities, and reducing the burden of harm, cost, and injustice falling on those most at risk.
On the 2nd day of Week 2, there is still work outstanding from the Subsidiary Bodies—specifically on the Global Stocktake, the Global Goal on Adaptation, just transition pathways, the mitigation work programme (MWP), response measures, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and financial and technical support for Paris Agreement reporting requirements. Reports on further progress in these technical areas will be delivered today by 3:00 pm GST.
Our big news at the opening of Week 2 is the release of the 2023 Reinventing Prosperity Report: The Right to Resilience. The core concept is that we cannot afford to treat resilience as anything less than a baseline imperative. Too much is at stake, and costs of failing on that standard are too high.
A few key points from the report:
- Climate risk is not only about a marginal loss of steadily increasing value, as many still imagine it to be; climate risk is the risk of persistent, pervasive destabilization, and all the harm and cost that would follow.
- Resilience is another way of saying the possibility of enjoying security and prosperity.
- Business as usual is unaffordable.
- SMEs create rooted, relevant, durable business models that fit into everyday life and translate global-scale information and resource-flows into improved local conditions, making the right to resilience highly investable.
Considering the costs of inaction, the evidence that climate restoration will be more difficult if we breach 1.5ºC, and the record heat seen around the world in 2023, it is clearly in the interests of all nations to:
- Decarbonize as quickly as possible, while fostering inclusive, climate-resilient, and sustainable human development;
- Rapidly scale up investments in practices that protect and restore nature, and build ecological resilience;
- Rapidly scale up investments in coordinated adaptation and resilience measures that support everyday human security and prosperity;
- Treat resilience as a universal right, and a core measure of legitimacy, and incentivize all industries and trading partners to do the same.
The Global Stocktake negotiations are tense, but include the necessary insights to get a high-ambition outcome from COP28. A major takeaway from yesterday’s late-hour GST ministerial is that many, if not most Parties, are responding to the GST from a relatively narrow interpretation of national interest—in many cases treating the self-interest of particular energy producers as overriding all other areas of national interest.
- This warrants looking back at the Earth Diplomacy Leadership session on the Mutual Gains Approach to negotiations. Nations have many overlapping interests, extending to the more local and even personal interests of all of their people.
- National governments wield power, and are often close to other power-holders, but have unique responsibilities to defend and uplift the most vulnerable.
- The narrow energy-interest perspectives driving many interventions about the Global Stocktake, and where it should take us in coming years leaves most real-world national interest on the sidelines, and positions countries professing those narrow views far less able to lead.
We need everyone at COP28 to keep a clear head about this: The most advanced, latest, consensus science, repeatedly makes clear that we cannot afford to breach 1.5ºC. As UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell assertively reminded negotiators:
“1.5 is a tangible limit; it is not simply a choice. Passed 1.5 and we are likely to irreversibly lose ice sheets. If they go, there will be a 10-meter sea-level rise across the globe. This will flood central parts of most coastal cities and coastal areas, forcing hundreds of millions of people to relocate. Passed 1.5 and we’re likely to lose all tropical coral reef systems, which provide the sustenance and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of people. Passed 1.5, models predict that in less than 50 years, 2 billion people will live in areas so hot, they are beyond the human limit and are a threat to life. The transition we need to make is nothing compared to the one that will be forced on us if we let go of the 1.5 ambition.”
These remarks will be remembered by history. The decisions made now will set us on course for 1.5ºC of global heating or better, or else set us on course for ongoing pervasive, compounding harm and cost. It matters that the COP adopt language committing to eventual phase out of fossil fuels. It matters that phase out be coordinated, just, and considering impacts on vulnerable people, communities, and regions. It matters also that planned pathways to net zero emissions consider that the latest science projects even in the best-case scenario, we will likely breach 1.5ºC by 2040. Timelines need to accelerate; international cooperation needs to be catalytic, imaginative, and transformational.
In other words, it effectively impossible to represent the underlying interest of one’s nation, its people, and their collective future, if one is not working seriously to limit global heating to 1.5ºC or lower.
Week 1 was historic for a number of important breakthroughs on food systems. Not only have food and agriculture, and value chains, been included in discussions about decarbonization, finance, climate-resilient development, adaptation finance, and rural economic diversification, linked to climate action. 134 nations signed onto a COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action, with more joining since the launch of the Declaration.
The Declaration includes several important steps forward in the global cooperative climate crisis response:
- Recognizing the degree to which food and agriculture, affected by climate disruption, affect lives and livelihoods, especially in vulnerable and marginal communities;
- “Noting the essential role of international and multi-stakeholder cooperation, including South-South and Triangular cooperation, financial and funding institutions, trade, and non-state actors in responding to climate change”;
- Linking food-related climate action to other conventions, including: the SDGs, Biodiversity, Desertification, the UN Food Systems Summit, and others;
- Committing to integrate food and agriculture into national plans, policies, and investments, on climate, biodiversity, and other agendas.
More than $2 billion was committed by the signatory countries to act on this agenda, and a new financial de-risking mechanism was launched by the UAE Presidency, called Financing the Future of Food (F3). The mechanism will support issuance of bonds linked to sustainable food systems transformation, and aims to crowd in private capital to scale up public and multilateral resources.
Today, we will also co-convene a side event on cooperative finance and shifting incentives to drive food systems transformation, together with the Good Food Finance Network. A major item on the table in that discussion will be progress toward creation of a global co-investment platform for food systems transformation, the Good Food Finance Facility.
Data was a subject of many discussions, both inside the negotiations and in pavilion and side conferences, every day of Week 1, for various reasons. As we have noted before, the launch of a new Net Zero Data Public Utility is a major breakthrough, in terms of facilitating the mainstreaming of climate science data and monitoring and verification capabilities. It promises to refine and detail the kind of performance insights available to guard against greenwashing, and to inform more pro-active, competitive, durable, and investable decarbonization strategies.
We also see increasing opportunities for linking integrated data systems to international cooperative arrangements as described in Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement—not involving emissions trading, but effectively welcoming all other areas of multilateral cooperation to advance climate action and sustainable development. We are finally seeing real conversation at the table, during the COP, about proactive use of multilateral “non-market” cooperative approaches to reconfigure trade relations to favor decarbonization and climate-resilient development.
The latest draft outcome for the CMA5 agenda sub-item 14(c) on Article 6.8 non-market approaches is now available for download. Some important language in the draft text:
- “[…importance of strengthening the rights of Mother Earth and Mother Earth centric approaches…]”
- “potential of non-market approaches… [to support Parties in achieving their nationally determined contributions] [in supporting the implementation of nationally determined contributions];”
- “[Invites Parties to consider non-market approaches, including domestic fiscal measures [such as carbon pricing, as a tool for implementing climate policies that are coherent across countries;]]”
There is much more in the document, and it is worth noting that carbon pricing is double-bracketed, but this is a further important breakthrough—noting that fiscal measures to price carbon domestically can form part of multilateral cooperative arrangements. This makes room for high-ambition negotiation of trade provisions and responses to policies like the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Even if fiscal measures and/or carbon pricing do not appear in the outcome text, all countries have the sovereign right to implement such policies. Inclusion of fiscal carbon pricing here simply makes it easier to negotiate a level playing field and a coordinated, dynamic, and just transition.
The draft Article 6.8 text also puts forward a suggested CMA5 decision to: “establish round tables for non-market approaches as independent, focused events for enhancing the engagement of relevant stakeholders, including , in non-market approaches…” CCI welcomes this as a signal that the diversification of multilateral climate action under Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement will be an opportunity to consider and respond to the needs of stakeholders and to activate the Capital to Communities approach to participatory decision-making around climate finance flows and climate-reseilient development strategies, including at the supranational level.
We would like to conclude this midway-point dispatch from COP28 with the news that our great friend and colleague Michael Terungwa David—CCI Africa Coordinator and Founder and Executive Director of the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Protection (GIFSEP)—is featured in a documentary that premiered here in the Blue Zone this past week, focusing on shifting power through informed, engaged, civic participation.
- He explains the motivation of his quest for climate justice in Africa, saying “We must preserve this beautiful land that we have; it is our heritage.”
- He shares the experience of working with a coalition of 80 women to halt destructive coal mining in their community, and to pursue healthier, more sustainable modes of local economic development.
- He adds some wisdom, saying: “When you start to develop empathy and imagination, the whole world opens for you,” adding that “The only way to predict the future is to have the power to shape it.”
Additional resources
- If you want more information on what’s happening in the negotiations, don’t forget to check the Earth Negotiations Bulletin from IISD for daily reports.
- IISD has also produced a detailed COP28 Halfway Point Webinar.
- Explore our COP28 Resource Library.
- CCI COP28 activities are outlined at cci2040.org
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