Get the Slides Out – But Don’t Tell Us Something We Already Know
7 June 2011
As Parties prepare their slides for the two upcoming mitigation workshops, ECO invites Parties to leave out those slides that do not contain new information but focus instead on what will help closing the gigatonne gap.
We would like to see on the first slide of each presenting developed country Party, the true emissions in that country in 2020 – after taking into account assumptions on LULUCF accounting, AAU carry-over and carbon offset use. Countries should further be explicit about what efforts they intend to make domestically.
Developed countries, with pledges below the 25-40% IPCC range, should show on their second slide which developed countries are going to compensate for their gap by making higher cuts instead, and how that goes along with a fair share of the globally needed mitigation effort. ECO believes that would guarantee some interesting discussions.
The third slide could include information on specific national circumstances. For instance, ECO is already sharpening its pencil awaiting anxiously a slide by Canada, that explains how a pledge that is even lower than Canada’s Kyoto 1 target constitutes progress. Or take Ukraine’s (or, say, Russia’s) third slide, that, ECO suggests, should show how a target designed to bring in millions of tonness of hot air into the system will help close the gigatonne gap. Or, have the EU explain its continued refusal to move to a 30% emissions reduction target (or, better, the 40% that ECO understands gets the EU closer to its fair share of international action in line with the cold hard facts of science), despite growing consensus underpinned by economic studies that doing so would create net economic benefits for the EU even in the absence of increased action by others.
Generally, ECO encourages all developed countries that have pledged reduction ranges to show, on a fourth slide, under which conditions they will move to the high end of their pledges, and in particular what part of these conditions has already been met and what would it take to get away with the rest. ECO would be very interested to hear from countries like Australia on preliminary assessments of the fulfillment of such conditions.
ECO has some ideas for slides from developing countries, too. They should clarify their assumptions on baseline projections until 2020, for both emissions and underlying key factors such as energy use or population growth, and principally any additional information that allows experts to assess what the emissions will be in those countries. ECO believes that a slide illustrating the expected impact and listing costs of all envisaged measures would help other Parties understanding the offers and needs of each country, i.e. what countries can do on their own and what support they need for doing the rest. And ECO is looking forward to see presentations from countries like Turkey, DRC and Thailand to name a few, that, as ECO has been assured, have their own domestic targets and measures but have yet to insert them into the famous INF documents.
Following the workshops, Parties should fully incorporate their findings into the formal negotiations. After all, the purpose of these workshops is to better understand each others’ pledges, to identify the size of the gigatonne gap, to get developed countries move to the high end of their pledged ranges (as a first step), and launch, in Durban, a process that would actually mandate further talks to agree on further action to close the gap to 1.5°C.