Tag Archives: COP19

by | 2013-11-22 · 08:55

Climate Update #5: Global civil society walks out from deadlocked Warsaw climate talks

By Tetet Lauron, 21 November, 2013. Source: IBON International

With only two days to go until the 19th Conference of Parties wraps up, and growing increasingly disappointed that this year’s climate summit will not deliver meaningful climate action, around 800 members of global civil society walked out of the Warsaw Climate Conference.

Wearing white shirts with signs that said, ‘#cop19 polluters talk, we walk’, and ‘#volveremos, we will be back’, the mass walkout included social movements, grassroots organizations, trade unions, women, youth, indigenous groups, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The statement read at the press conference immediately preceding the walkout said that civil society was voluntarily withdrawing from the Warsaw climate talks and would instead focus on mobilizing people to push governments to take leadership for serious climate action.

Ten days into the climate summit, sentiments are rife that the negotiations seem to have been excruciatingly slow, if not bogged down, on substantive issues such as agreeing on more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, as well as the provision of climate finance for countries that are most vulnerable to and actually being impacted by extreme weather events such as the recent super typhoon Haiyan that ravaged the Philippines.

Civil society groups lament that what should have been a key moment to steer the world away from climate catastrophe has so far been off tangent in making big and bold decisions to solve the climate crisis. On the one hand, the Warsaw Climate Conference has seen the aggressive backtracking of developed countries such as Canada, Japan, the US, Australia and the EU on commitments to climate action and financing. Corporate sponsorship from big polluters, a high-level coal summit endorsed by Poland, the host government – these were signs not just of the lack of commitment to transition to a sustainable future, but also of the growing corporate influence over the UNFCCC, which was denounced by civil society. Continue reading →

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by | 2013-11-20 · 09:25

IBON International: Update #3 from Warsaw climate negotiations

By Tetet Nera-Lauron, 20 November 2013. Source: IBON International

cop19UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon urged the ministers gathered at the 19th Conference of Parties (COP 19) to take ‘tougher action’ to reach a global deal to address climate change in 2015. While recognizing that the world’s leaders faced a steep climb ahead to arrive at an arrangement for an international climate deal, he cautioned that ‘people now face and fear the wrath of a warming planet’, in obvious reference to super typhoon Haiyan that ravaged the Philippines more than a week ago. He challenged governments to ‘set the bar higher’ in committing to climate action.

Ban-Ki Moon also called on governments, especially from the developed countries, to step up aid to help poor nations slow their rising greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of global warming. He alluded to the issue of climate finance, currently the subject of intense debates with disappointing results, and said that ‘I sincerely hope the developed world should keep their promise so all the nations of the planet Earth can move together.’

Negotiators from many developing countries indicated that this year’s summit will be the ‘finance COP’, meaning they expect to resolve long-standing issues and disagreements on the amount of resources that will be actually committed to enable particularly vulnerable countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. A High Level Ministerial meeting is being convened for that purpose, but this will remain a token gesture of dialogue if no concrete flow of resources (to countries affected by climate change) will materialize. This is the most likely outcome of the meeting, especially in the wake of Australia pulling out of its earlier pledge for climate financing, and with the United States ruling out any new pledges in the light of its own fiscal problems.

Meanwhile, Venezuela convened a meeting for civil society organizations and its head of delegation Mrs. Claudia Salerno gave a briefing on Venezuela’s organization of a Social Pre-COP in Caracas in October 2014.  They envision the Social Pre-COP to be a process that will involve diverse actors from civil society and governments from all over the world, and which will result in an outcome that, while carrying the issues, analysis, and aspirations of social movements and grassroots organizations, will also be able to feed into the formal UN climate negotiations. This initiative by Venezuela, i.e. bridging the disconnect between the voices of people from the ground and the language of the negotiations, is a bold move that has never been done before. Mrs. Salerno said that now is the ‘time for craziness, because we have tried so many things in the official process (of climate negotiations) and it didn’t work, so we are going to try to do something else. We don’t have anything to lose, but we need to try everything we can for the world to have ambitious aims.’

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by | 2013-11-19 · 09:39

IBON International COP19 Climate Update 2

By Tetet Nera-Lauron, 19 November, 2013. Source: IBON International

Activists drop a banner of the Polish Economy Ministry in Warsaw on Monday, Nov 18th, the opening day of the World Coal and Climate Summit. Photo: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

Activists drop a banner off the Polish Economy Ministry in Warsaw on Monday, Nov 18th, the opening day of the World Coal and Climate Summit. Photo: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

‘Coal power can be part of the solution to tackling global warming. If there’s a will, there’s a way.’

This was the message of UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at today’s opening of the 2-day World Coal and Climate Summit. While stating that her presence at the Summit is ‘neither a tacit approval of coal use, nor a call for the immediate disappearance of coal’, Figueres enjoined the coal industry to ‘change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake.’

The 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body tasked to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change, stated that the world will overshoot the internationally agreed goal to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius if energy demands are met in the same way as it had been in the past. The UNFCCC Chief outlined the parameters of this ‘paradigm shift’ for the coal industry: (a) close all existing subcritical plants; (b) implement safe carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) on all new plants; and (c) leave most existing reserves in the ground. Continue reading →

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