Searching for Equity
6 December 2012
ECO wants to remind the Parties that embedding equity in the climate regime is fundamental to any fair and ambitious outcome. While Parties have expressed their views on how to move toward operationalising equity, this aspect is reaching the vanishing point in the texts.
ECO thinks it would be pretty easy to measure, report and verify the disappearance of political will when Parties enter the negotiating rooms in the QNCC. That’s the real problem in these negotiations, as reflected in the weak language on equity in the latest texts from both the LCA and the ADP chairs. And that sends a very negative message to areas around the world struggling every day to survive against the adversities of climate impacts.
And yet, innovative and even transformative concepts are readily available.
Recently, Belgium and Sweden convened a rich and interactive meeting of experts and stakeholders in Brussels. Indeed, the ideas discussed in the Brussels workshop are immediately relevant and can be transformed into workable forms in the negotiations. Once again, the message from workshop participants was loud and clear: what we are facing is not a dearth of ideas or resources but instead a pervasive vacuum of political will.
One aspect of reviving momentum is to try out creative approaches. In Brussels, for example, the open exchange of views under Chatham House rules provided a tool for creating trust and opening up space for dialogue.
Before leaving Doha, negotiators must ensure that a safe space for equity discussions is created in a work programme on equity. That is crucial for ensuring a fair, ambitious and binding outcome in 2015.
ECO has consistently expressed the need for taking up the equity issue with a view to unpacking and eventually operationalizing equity in the various elements. Let us remember COP 17, where India championed the issue of equity and took a central role in tying together the Durban Package.
But now, the progress made in the ADP roundtables in Bangkok has been set aside in the discussions to date here in Doha. To be clear, equity principles need to be discussed in order to move them forward in terms of populating the ADP with content issues of operationalisation. Otherwise, equity will not move and we will yet again fall short of ambition. To say it clearly: there will be no ambition without equity – and no equity without ambition.