CAN Intervention – AWG-LCA Opening Plenary – May 17, 2012

Distinguished delegates,

My name is Sunil Acharya and I will speak on behalf of the Climate Action Network. With the LCA's mandate extending till the end of this year, Parties must ensure that outstanding issues will be dealt with promptly, and any remaining matters transferred to the ADP or SBs without loss of work.

 

Parties must agree to a peak year by COP 18 in order to put global emissions on a pathway and keep warming below 2 C and to keep 1.5 C within reach.  Moreover, Parties must urgently agree upon the structure and technical input required as part of the review of the adequacy of the long-term goal to begin in 2013.

 

To ensure the peak year and global goal are respected, Parties must also make progress on clarifying the assumptions behind their targets and actions – a process crucial to raising the level of ambition by COP18 and beyond as part of both the LCA and ADP.

 

As the FSF period is in its last year and the GCF on the way to being operationalized, Parties’ attention should now turn to scaling up towards the $100 billion, and capitalizing the Fund with a significant portion. 

 

This year’s Long Term Finance (LTF) Work Programme provides a critical opportunity for focused and constructive engagement under the UNFCCC on mobilizing and scaling up climate finance, especially from public sources. In order to enable progress towards concrete decisions, previous efforts should now inform a process under the UNFCCC where all Parties can participate in defining the way forward. 

 

The Work Program should contribute to decisions at COP 18 that identifies and advances promising sources of finance especially public sources, provides a roadmap for agreeing to specific pathways for mobilizing $100 billion by 2020, establishes a shared understanding of developing country needs and explicitly commits to providing financing from 2013 onwards. Both the new market mechanism and the framework on various approaches must ensure the high environmental integrity of all carbon markets and not lead to double counting or a “race to the bottom.”

 

Thank you Chair