Climate solutions that disregard human rights are not solutions at all. Including proper social and environmental safeguards in climate mitigation and adaptation is crucial for ensuring just, ambitious, and effective climate action.
In Bonn, Germany, climate experts are coming together for the latest session of the UN climate negotiations. This is their first meeting since the adoption of the (partial) Paris Agreement Rulebook, a set of guidelines on how to implement the Paris Agreement, last December at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Katowice, Poland.
However, despite their efforts to have all the rules done in December, Parties failed to agree on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, instead punting a decision to a future COP. Over the next two weeks, Parties will be meeting in Bonn to make progress on how to implement Article 6. And CIEL is there too, advocating that Article 6 respects, protects, and promotes human rights, since this is the final opportunity to strengthen the rulebook to ensure it delivers on the Paris promise.
What is Article 6 and why should we care?
Under the Paris Agreement, each country submits a national plan for how it will take climate action, including how it will reach its individual emissions reductions goals within a certain timeframe. These goals are called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. Article 6 sets up ways for countries to cooperate to meet their NDCs. Rather than doing it all on their own, “cooperation” may entail one country buying another’s “surplus” emissions reductions or financing mitigation projects in another country to get credits.
This means that instead of cutting your own emissions you can use markets to buy carbon credits (hence the name “Carbon Markets”). But this is risky. Market approaches risk undermining the urgent need to ramp up ambition by allowing high emitting countries to buy their way out of taking the necessary action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and end our reliance on fossil fuels.
Article 6 outlines three approaches for this cooperation: 1. internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs), which will set up a market for trading carbon credits; 2. a “Sustainable Development Mechanism” (SDM) where countries can finance mitigation projects in another country to earn carbon credits; and 3. non-market cooperative approaches to sustainable development, which has been largely undefined, but could include, for example, integrated water management or energy efficiency schemes.
Experience with the Clean Development Mechanism shows is that the rules for any new market mechanisms will endure – unchanged – for decades. When those rules do not adequately safeguard human rights and the environment, the damages can be significant. With the CDM likely to end in 2020, the SDM, as part of the Paris Agreement, is poised to replace it. Because mechanisms like the SDM are going to exist, we have an urgent opportunity to ensure that Parties get it right before their rules are locked in to the Paris implementation guidelines. Done wrong, Article 6 could undermine ambition, violate human rights, and prevent us from keeping global temperature rise to below 1.5C degrees.
What does it mean to “get it right” in Article 6?
Cooperative approaches to mitigation commitments must learn from past mistakes or they will repeat them, at great cost to local communities, as in the case of the CDM-registered Barro Blanco dam that flooded indigenous lands and forcefully displaced communities in Panama. That’s why CIEL is advocating for:
- Robust human rights-based social and environmental safeguards
- Access to information and public participation
- An independent, equitable, accessible, legitimate, rights-based, and transparent grievance mechanism that allows communities to seek remedy when projects under the mechanism cause harm
Together these safeguards can not only help prevent harm, but also provide redress when and if harm occurs. Plus having a social license and a better designed projects are better investments and more sustainable.
What’s the hold up?
In Katowice, the biggest obstacles to reaching agreement included differences on how to deal with double counting (read: multiple countries counting the same reductions towards their own mitigation goals) and what the transition from the CDM would mean for countries that had accumulated surplus carbon credits and wanted them to count under the new mechanism. Many of the surplus credits represent emissions cuts that would have happened anyway, which could undermine ambition and decrease overall reductions at a time when we need to be ramping up ambition to stay under 1.5 degrees.
Thus far in Bonn, progress has been slow. We will keep you posted as the negotiations unfold, and in the meantime, follow @ciel_tweets on Twitter for updates in real time.
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By Erika Lennon, Senior Attorney
Originally posted June 20, 2019