ECO 8, COP25, English

From the Maldives to Costa Rica, Senegal to the Marshall Islands, communities and Indigenous peoples of countries that are members of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF)  live on the front lines of climate impacts.

Kill, invade, cut, burn it down. Repeat. The sad fate of Brazilian forests at the hands of gangs of land-grabbers have just gotten another hit from President Jair Bolsonaro, who never tires of inventing schemes to replace the forest with pasture and soybean plantations.

Week 2 at COP is “rumours week”, and delegates turn into gossip-producing machines when it comes to predicting deals. One rumour in particular has made ECO’s heart skip a beat: let’s put all the old junk CDM credits in a reserve and only allow countries to use them if they don’t meet their NDC target. 

Over the last week, we’ve heard a lot of talk about Article 6, and a lot of it has been very technical, including critical rules for ensuring global emissions are reduced globally, preventing double-counting, and what share of proceeds should go to the Adaptation Fund, amongst others.

The Gender Action Plan (GAP) has been a critical driver of progress and action on gender responsive climate change, and there is an urgent need to renew GAP now.

Increasing climate ambition during this COP25 is one of the most anticipated results. This ambition must be effectively brought to action; in addition to climate finance and mitigation commitments, we need social conditions that facilitate implementation and ensure that the people most affected by climate change benefit from climate responses. 

Week 2 at COP is “rumours week”, and delegates turn into gossip-producing machines when it comes to predicting deals. One rumour in particular has made ECO’s heart skip a beat: let’s put all the old junk CDM credits in a reserve and only allow countries to use them if they don’t meet their NDC target. 

The COP Presidency’s text for the principal decisions from COP25 is now into its second iteration, and the contours and fault lines are becoming clearer. 

ECO keeps hearing about “finance that’s available for loss and damage” under the Sendai framework via disaster risk reduction (DRR), humanitarian assistance, and the SDGs. ECO calls bollocks on this idea. The amount of finance available for loss and damage is COMPLETELY INADEQUATE when compared to the scale of loss and damage being suffered.