Taking Stock, Upgrading Ambition, Acting Together
CCI Briefing Note on what is at stake at the SB58 round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations in Bonn, Germany
The SB58 is the latest round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations that will shape our future capability to sustain a livable world for humankind. 2023 features the first comprehensive Global Stocktake of climate action progress since the Paris Agreement. We already know this much: overall commitments remain inadequate, and decarbonization is not happening fast enough.
Vulnerability is increasing in all regions, along with major obstacles to progress, like deep income inequality, sovereign debt distress, and rising costs of emergency response. We are mid-way to 2030, when success or failure across the Sustainable Development Goals will likely determine whether a future of shared safety and prosperity will remain within reach.
We are not repeating the same old refrain when we say: The SB58 will shape the future, and we need the outcome to be historic, ambitious, and real. That is simply where we are. It is too late for slow-walking, too late for fair-share brinkmanship, too late to argue that pollution should drive development for anyone. So, what can the SB58 do to set the world on a better course?
Global Stocktake
2023 is the year of the Global Stocktake (GST) — a critical moment in which nearly 200 nations will formally assess national and global progress toward the shared mandate of the Convention and the Paris Agreement, to prevent dangerous human-caused interference with the climate system. The process of evaluating national and global performance against science-based climate goals needs to point to strategies that will:
- upgrade national commitments;
- accelerate implementation;
- expand International cooperation;
- mainstream climate-smart innovation;
- support economy-wide climate alignment.
The ‘integrated and holistic’ standard laid out in the Paris Agreement needs to become the accepted global standard. That means:
- All advisory and resource mobilization bodies, and venues for related negotiation should recognize the importance of integrated and holistic approaches, across instruments, across institutional arrangements, and across conventions.
- Climate policy, incentives, and investment, need to become economy-wide strategies for integral human development, aligned with science-based climate goals, while actively reducing vulnerability, especially for the most vulnerable.
- Opportunities for making these diverse, complex, and overarching connections practical and concrete, like investments in climate-smart food systems, should be recognized and acted on.
- By expanding engagement in the GST to non-Party stakeholders and also to marginal, vulnerable, and front-line communities, the stocktaking process can more readily achieve a comprehensive, fact-based, and actionable assessment.
Cooperative Implementation
It will be critical for international cooperation guided by Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement to advance, allowing market-based approaches to provide both acceleration and transition risk relief, where appropriate. Non-market approaches, however, under Article 6.8 hold a more far-reaching level of promise.
Article 6.8 calls for multilateral cooperative non-market approaches that raise ambition and accelerate action, foster economy-wide transformation, and support action across areas of international commitment — on climate, but also across conventions. Climate, nature, food, and development priorities should align with success on climate. If NMAs advance to the highest level of ambition, trade will become increasingly climate-smart and oriented toward successful climate-resilient development, for all.
Our SB58 Briefing Note on Non-Market Approaches settles on four key messages:
- Non-market approaches (NMAs) in line with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement are cooperative best-future strategies.
- Complexity is opportunity — NMAs need roots in everyday life and should interact and compound each other’s positive effects; engage stakeholders to accelerate action.
- ‘Integrated and holistic’ means working across conventions and across the whole economy to achieve multidimensional sustainability. Act in more places to make more good happen.
- No excuses — Low ambition is irrational and unaffordable; design NMAs to be engines of ambition, mobilization, and wellbeing.
The Briefing Note outlines prototypes of potentially transformative non-market approaches, including three hypothetical cases and three examples already in progress.
Finance
As always, the finance is agenda is vast and complicated. Four things we know:
- The future of human success, in all regions, depends on our ability to align future financial activity with practices that do not generate global heating emissions. There is an active campaign for an agreement to end all public finance for fossil fuels, everywhere.
- The total volume of climate-smart finance needs to expand rapidly to unprecedented scale. Work toward a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance should set high baselines, facilitate early action, and support action across mitigation, adaptation, resilience-building, and loss and damage.
- The work to establish a Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) needs to address human need at the human scale, starting now. Vulnerable people and communities need a rapid scaling up of support through existing institution and funding flows, and for the LDF to pull together and mobilize sufficient resources to address and prevent harm, wherever needed.
- International finance must evolve to be vulnerability-sensitive, both for reasons of fairness and because it will be more effective that way. Debt relief and restructuring, the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, and efforts to deliver capital to communities must value both experience and decision-making at the human scale.
Parties should recognize the opportunity to use cooperative non-market approaches, multidimensional metrics supported by integrated data systems, and international finance reform to reconfigure food systems and other vital segments of the everyday economy. Parties should aim to establish grounding in legal decisions to support efforts like the Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation, to open the best possible future for their people.
Energy Transition
Integrity matters. The intergovernmental negotiating process needs to recognize that global heating pollution cannot continue to be part of the mainstream economy after mid-century. The IPCC finds that industrial and high-emissions economies must reach net-zero no later than 2040.
The movement to agree a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has clear and relevant precedent in efforts to reduce the threat of weapons that could create a global cataclysm. Similar non-proliferation standards have been used for small arms as well. Where they are operating effectively, the positive progress is evident.
A non-proliferation agreement could be grounded in, supported by, or achieved by language outlining the necessary targets, steps, and mechanisms. Cooperative implementation, international financial reform, emerging financial regulatory requirements, and the organic market response of insurers to rising disaster risk, all point to the operability of such an approach.
The SB58 can significantly raise both the ambition and the credibility of the negotiations at COP28 by agreeing draft language, and relevant institutional mechanisms, to affirm a time-bound, cooperative phasing out of global heating pollution. Countries that see fossil fuel phase out as a threat to their future will be see transition risks reduced by a universal commitment.
The Right to Work for a Livable Future
At CCI, we are clear that a livable future is a human right. Human rights are difficult to uphold and to live in a world so stressed by climate breakdown that the lines between nation states become blurred, and mass migration becomes the norm. That is precisely what is expected if food systems fail, if critical financial backstops cannot support a climate-stressed everyday economy, if institutions have not developed the needed response to vulnerability.
Article 6 of the Convention and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement outline standards for design and implementation of policies that can affect our climate future. By those standards:
- Information and evidence need to be available to the public, so an informed public can support inclusive, participatory, and evidence-based decision-making.
- International cooperation should support capacity-building, resource-mobilization, and sharing of technologies.
- Centering stakeholders’ voices is the only way we can be sure we are getting the whole picture and responsibly designing policies that work, have roots, and can sustain progress over time.
- Decent work and sustainable communities need to be supported by real-world capacity development, technology allocation, and training to do the work of building a climate-smart sustainable future.
Parties need to move beyond the view that public engagement is a complication. Public engagement enhances policy design and operational efficiency, by considering local needs and capacities and mobilizing much needed capacity for transformation at the level of communities and local economies.
Additional Resources
- Article 6.8 Reading List — resource library curated by Citizens’ Climate International, focusing on efforts to create transformational multilateral non-market approaches
- CCI Briefing Note on Article 6.8 — Briefing note for negotiators, observers, and relevant institutional arrangements, prepared by Citizens’ Climate International
- Climate Action Network International SB58 Briefing — an expression of inputs and aims from a global network of 1,500 civil society organizations
- Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative — ongoing series of workshops, check-ins and thematic discussions co-coordinated by CCI and The Fletcher School at Tufts University
- Earth Negotiations Bulletin — daily reports from the conference venue, produced by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)
- Independent Global Stocktake (iGST) — consortium of civil society actors working together to support the Global Stocktake (GST)
- SB58 Conference Page — UNFCCC-hosted portal for all threads of the ongoing negotiations
- Talanoa Dialogue for Climate Ambition — CCI-hosted global sharing of stakeholders’ aspirations, experiences, and perspectives.
Watch the Talanoa Dialogue video:
