Cross Cutting GST for Climate Ambition

4 May 2018

In the GST negotiations, Parties have set themselves the task of better organizing their thoughts as currently captured in the co-facilitators” informal document. One way of doing this would be through clarity on which issues should be dealt with in separate work streams, and which should be considered cross-cutting and thus should be dealt with under all work streams.

 

One clear example of this is means of implementation and support (MOI). ECO believes that MOI should not be siloed into its own workstream. MOI is issue-specific and therefore, MOI for mitigation must be looked at in the mitigation workstream, MOI for adaptation in adaptation, MOI for making financial flows consistent with climate resilience and low-GHG development in the financial flows workstream. Clearly, none of these issues can be considered in isolation from the MOI needed to enable them.

 

Best available science and equity (that’s equity between countries, not just procedural equity and other such things!) are other important cross-cutting issues. Each of the workstream issues has their own specific ways in which equity must be taken into account and it must therefore be present in each of these work streams.

 

Finally, while ECO thinks a dedicated workstream for Loss and Damage (L&D) could be a good idea to ensure that L&D is taken up by the GST, it may be a better idea to deal with it in a cross cutting manner as well. Indeed, all the elements of Art 2.1 of the Paris Agreement have clear and distinct links to L&D and therefore it could make sense to deal with it in each of the workstreams.

 

ECO would like Parties to produce a text that reflects this cross-cutting nature of these issues, for example by adding provisions to these issues in all the relevant places for inputs and modalities.