Critical action insights for the Bonn negotiations

The SB60 negotiations can create new momentum for the climate value economy. Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops provide critical insights for cooperative acceleration.

Ahead of the SB60 round of UN Climate Change negotiations in Bonn, the Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops highlighted actionable insights that could support better outcomes, and faster mobilization, in a number of ways. This insight brief provides an overview of these emerging insights, and suggests attention be put to the five areas previously identified as shaping the Journey to Baku:

• The Illusion of Immunity — Some people, countries, and businesses, might be safe from serious climate damage for some time, while others experience danger, but such selective safety can be misleading. By the time the privileged and protected experience danger personally, extreme climate destabilization and nature breakdown will have advanced so far as to be unrecoverable.
• Extreme fossil fuel subsidies are a sign of industrial, commercial, and political failure. Healthy dominant industries should not need, seek, or extract windfall profits from record subsidies, and governments should not be left with no choice but to reinforce such schemes. Transition strategies need to include smart subsidy shifting and pollution pricing.
• Climate-smart economies are good for everyone. We need to evolve economies that meet human needs and aspirations. This is critical for the climate, but also for restoring trust in governance overall. Climate-degrading activities are degrading our ability to work together, to solve problems, both in the everyday and at planetary scale. Nations that make the shift more quickly to climate-smart, inclusive sustainable development will be stronger, more prosperous, more trusted, and more secure.
• Funding to address Loss and Damage is an area of overwhelming need, and the last area where financial arrangements should generate additional debt. Funding for loss and damage response should include direct access, with less room for money going to something other than the needs of the vulnerable. Vulnerability-sensitive debt relief is critical for facilitating the transition and for building trust among nations.
• Transparency is legitimacy — All nations need factual information about progress toward climate goals. Underlying international law is the implicit requirement that legal commitments, even voluntary ones, are made in good faith, and all Parties will act to achieve the healthiest collective outcome. Future success for everyone depends on actions that meet the moment, now.

The Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative is a series of preparatory workshops co-coordinated by Citizens’ Climate International and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in collaboration with the Climate Value Exchange. Learn more at EarthDiplo.org – Image credit: CCI.

The Pre-SB60 workshops produced these critical insights, among others:

1. The AR6 finds we will likely breach 1.5ºC by 2040, and above 2040, some critical regulating structures of the stable climate system may be lost-including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, ice sheets, and permafrost carbon, as well as ocean temperatures conducive to current sea levels.
2. “By the end of this century, 3 to 6 billion individuals … might find themselves confined beyond the livable region encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change.” (2023 State of the Climate report)
3. Total cost of inaction by 2070 is estimated to be between $178 trillion and $700 trillion, globally, with U.S. financial regulators projecting climate disruption will collapse the financial system and undermine the wider economy.
4. Incomes are projected to decline, across the world, by 20% by 2050, even as prices rise due to major disruptions and declining secure supplies of food and water. The collapse of livelihoods, local economies, and everyday affordability, will be one of the main drivers of climate-related socio-economic and political breakdown in countries at all income levels.
5. Human rights are essential to the wellbeing of both people and nation states. Disruptions due to climate change will require careful, consistent attention be placed on prioritizing and protecting human rights; local and national climate plans will need to demonstrate legitimacy by including affecting communities and ensuring consistent enforcement of human rights law.
6. The Enhanced Transparency Framework is an opportunity to support evidence-based upgrading of NDCs, build trust, and bring substance to negotiations around the new collective quantified goal on climate finance. Linking what we know about danger, and early warning, to what we know about global action, and what is needed to avoid risk, can help inform the most efficient rapid realignment of financial flows.
7. The Global Stocktake shows far more work is needed on mitigation-both to decarbonize industrialized economies and to prevent rapid expansion of emissions in developing economies. The Convention called for an immediate decrease in emissions; negotiations in 2024 might integrate new work toward a target date for peak emissions, both in NDCs and globally.
8. COP28 outcome language committing to “transition away from fossil fuels” and recognizing the importance of sustaining “the integrity of all ecosystems” is aligned with legal obligations under the Convention and Paris Agreement, and other Conventions; so-called “loophole” language is not grounded in law, but in contingency-permissible only under the most ambitious global program of successful implementation.
9. The structured phase-out of fossil fuels, through cooperative non-proliferation, enforced by local, national, and multilateral incentives and cooperative innovation and investment mechanisms, could be a critical tool for supporting the best-case future development strategy for most countries-especially given how late we are starting the process of overall mitigation of global emissions.
10. Oil-dependent countries like Azerbaijan or Nigeria can help to advance the low-carbon economy, by intelligently and deliberately mapping out a process of diversification of their own economies, emphasizing local economic thriving through climate-smart practices. A major risk area in the process of transition to climate-smart practices is the ongoing dependency of so many states on revenues derived from global heating pollutants.
11. Integrated, holistic and balanced action, toward climate-smart trade, development, and finance, will require common understanding. There is still work to do in the negotiating process to build common understanding around the meaning of Paris Agreement Article 2.1c (aligning financial flows), 6.8 (multilateral cooperation, trade, and work “across instruments and institutional arrangements”), 7.1 (the Global Goal on Adaptation), 12 (Action for Climate Empowerment / civics), and other elements of the agreement.
12. The Global Goal on Adaptation, in particular, has potential to become the signal high-ambition organizing target-if it is sufficiently ambitious. If nations agree that no person or ecosystem should suffer preventable harm due to human-caused climate damage, then all other areas of policy, investment, industry, and innovation, can be aligned to speed up the transition to climate-smart standards and practices.
13. Participation and inclusion raise ambition. Communities can work miracles. By including affected parties, future solutions are more likely to align with prevention of harm; Action for Climate Empowerment is key to getting the best future for trade, food systems, national economic development, and financial returns in the public and private sectors. Microfinance successes consistently show that targeted additional resources for marginal communities, especially for women, can generate major improvements in local conditions.
14. Indigenous and traditional knowledge is proven by centuries or millennia of practice, in context; it contains climate-relevant information, and should be treated not as a marginal form of information but a reservoir of high-value insight into workable innovations.
15. Demarginalization will be a critical piece of the climate crisis response: Stakeholders (people and communities), ecological understanding, sustainable and regenerative practices, and non-financial value considerations, all need to be brought closer to the core of mainstream decision-making.
16. Early warning systems are becoming more and more essential, as shock events fueled by global heating proliferate and intensify; sharing of scientific data, technology, and know-how is not only about innovation; it is about saving lives and securing nations.
17. Systematic observation-access to data, including translated information relevant to early warning, long-term planning, and everyday decision-making-will be critical for any country’s best climate future.
18. Integrating climate-related insights into everyday decision-making will create the opportunity for climate-smart investments in small and medium-sized enterprises in rural and marginalized communities, diversifying and revitalizing those communities and helping to prevent the worst of unchecked climate change.
19. Share insights, and listen to others; communications and insight-sharing makes the process smarter, and sets all of us up for success. The process is coded, layered, nuanced, and shaped by language artfully crafted to allow “constructive ambiguity”; this means reading between the lines is essential. Listen, withhold judgment of individuals, look for openings to make ambiguity into a clear mandate for higher ambition and accelerated action.
20. Trade can be a lever for climate-resilient development. Climate justice, vulnerability-sensitive debt relief, and just transition considerations can be factored into multilateral arrangements, to advance climate-resilient development and trade, for all parties.
21. Difficulty around securing mention of fossil fuels in decision text means many provisions that could benefit oil-rich economies in the transition are left unattended. It is hard, for instance, to secure agreement around non-fuel uses of carbon-intensive mineral resources-the clean processing of which some nations might pursue as a way to develop without generating global heating pollution.

Macrocritical finance-finance that shapes the overall potential of the climate-smart economy-may become a key lever of action, on the way to COP30. New strategies for prioritizing investment in practices (energy, industrial, agricultural) that:

• a) generate no global heating emissions,
• b) protect and restore nature,
• c) reward small-scale actors for climate-smart activities, and
• d) diversify and revitalize local economies, advancing climate-resilient development in line with the 1.5ºC maximum global heating threshold.

This means the SB60, opening the space for progress in Baku in November, should be a moment to advance the climate value economy -an everyday experience of policy, investment for impact, and local goods and services that supports reduced risk, enhanced resilience, and the generalized benefits of investing consistently to achieve both.

Originally published at http://climatevalue.exchange on June 3, 2024.