All posts tagged NAPs

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May 18, 2012
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Beyond the Negotiations Climate Negotiations Intersessionals
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Adaptation negotiations stall as the rift between Rich and Poor grows

~by Graham Reeder

Today's adaptation negotiations took a turn for the worse as developed and developing countries started to disagree about implementation issues. The Bonn adaptation meetings have focused on two important pieces of the Cancun Adaptation Framework: the Work Programme on Loss and Damage and the support for the National Adaptation Plans. The Loss and Damage stream is important for making sure that countries are able to deal with the impacts of climate change related events like natural disasters, sea level rise, and drought. If they don't have help with these impacts, they will incur the costs of something they had no part in creating; this would be a grave injustice. The National Adaptation Plans (or NAPs) are to support developing countries to come up with and implement plans that will integrate medium and long term climate change adaptation into their development plans. The NAPs are supposed to build on the National Adaptation Programmes of Action for the urgent needs of Least Development Countries which are moving towards their implementation phase now.

The 'adaptation community', as they like to call themselves, are a small group of negotiators who work closely together on all the issues. The major players are from the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, Norway; Bangladesh, Bolivia, and Argentina for the G77; Nauru and the Cook Islands for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS); Bhutan and Timor Leste for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs); and Tanzania and Ghana for the African Group. The former US negotiator for adaptation, who has been around for some time, retired this year and her secessor is in her first meetings of these kinds. I haven't been able to gather any information about her, but she seems like an highly competent professional who seems to have a lot of experience in the adaptation field that goes beyond the UNFCCC, though she is a less experience negotiator, she will definitely be a force to be reckoned with in years to come. Ever since I started following adaptation negotiations in Cancun, they have moved along quite productively and have worked through disagreements and made compromises together.

Today, however, was a total change of atmosphere. It started off in the consultations on Loss and Damage, where the Canadian and Argentinian co-chairs presented their draft text that quite explicitly excluded calls from the G77+China to develop a mechanism to address Loss and Damage, when COA's very own Juan Pablo Hoffmaister ('07) for Bolivia pointed this out, developed countries retorted that  laying the foundations of a mechanism would be premature given that the work programme still needs to conduct 3 more workshops. This is a common tactic from developed countries: they call for more information, more workshops, and more academic exercises as long as developing countries want action and implementation and things aren't going their way, but as soon as they frame the debate in their own terms (read: more work for developing countries) they call for urgency of action. As developed and developing countries went back and forth on the issue of creating a mechanism, negotiations didn't seem to go anywhere, and the chair ended up proposing that the group meet again immediately before COP 18 in Doha, Qatar. This seems like a desperate effort to accommodate everyone, but is unfortunate given that reports from these meetings are supposed to reflect submissions from all parties, not just developed country parties.

The tension picked up again in the working group on NAPs. Philippines negotiator Bernarditas Castro Muller (one of the best negotiators for the G77 and the biggest thorn in the US' side, she really knows her convention and how to negotiate and has been called the 'Dragon Woman', the US tried to have her fired before Copenhagen, but Sudan hired her right back on) has been sitting in on NAP negotiations, which is unusual for a negotiator of her status. This gives us a clear indication that the issues being discussed are broader than they appear, namely, that they relate to finance. Bernarditas was there to point out that funds for adaptation need to be scaled up and that reform of the way that adaptation work is implemented (or isn't) by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) needs to happen. After noting that, she pointed out that the NAP process needed to not just be for LDCs, but for all developing countries and that developed countries were trying to shirk their responsibilities under the convention. This fight wouldn't normally come up so bluntly, it has been an underlying conflict since Cancun and a compromise of relatively vague language on this issue was reached in Durban, but her bringing it up so aggressively represents larger political manoeuvring at play.

I suspect that the source of this manoeuvring can be traced back to the last year of work on the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA). In today's AWG-LCA plenary, parties went through the agenda and decided what to move into contact groups, developed countries consistently got their way about what was to be discussed, and developing countries got few of their asks for contact groups, one of the larger arguments was whether to have a contact group on 'enhanced action on adaptation'. Developed country parties, led by Norway, argued that this was unnecessary because there were already adaptation negotiations going on (mentioned above) and the new adaptation committee that should be finalised in Doha will take care of the rest. Developing countries were quick to point out that there are all sorts of activities on adaptation that were supposed to be undertaken that have not yet occurred and that the adaptation committee has not yet been set in motion. There are still many significant gaps in adaptation work, particularly adaptation support for developing countries that are not Least Developed Countries, and Bernarditas' joining the NAP negotiations was a signal to developed countries that developing countries are tired of being pushed around on this issue and are ready to play hard ball.

The question for the future will be how well the G77 sticks together, adaptation negotiations are usually characterised by a very solid block of developing countries with the G77, AOSIS, LDCs, and the Africa Group consistently supporting one another's statement and the EU running around trying to figure out their own position, but with Sudan's plea to Bernarditas at the end of the NAP meeting not to hold this important issue for LDCs hostage, it is clear that the G77 will have to work to keep their group strong. Nevertheless, it is important not to blame the Philippines for standing up for all developing countries when the developed countries have done such a pathetic job of financing and implementing adaptation activities. Adaptation and mitigation are supposed to be equal under the convention, but because rich countries haven't figured out a sure-fire way to make money out of adaptation, they have mostly avoided the issue and stalled progress by calling for more and more expert workshops and research papers before anything can be done. It will be interesting to see how this stalemate gets resolved over the next week as parties are eager to have solid outcomes in Doha, it is clear that major compromises will need to be made on both sides.

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December 5, 2011
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Climate Negotiations COP17
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A New Adaptation Framework: Don’t hold your breath for this empty shell

by Graham Reeder

This past week (and year), I’ve been following the issue of adaptation. As many of you know, Climate Change is not just a long-term threat that is looming in the horizon; it is being experienced by people now in a very real way.  The World Health Organisation estimates that climatic changes are causing 150,000 deaths annually; the vast majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of the major, but unpublicised outcomes of Cancun was the groundwork for a new adaptation framework. The Bali Action Plan from 2007 laid out a track for mitigation and adaptation to be considered equally, but this has obviously not been the case. Laying out the Cancun Adaptation Framework is basically the first real step in doing anything sincere about adaptation under the convention. Having said this, the first step has truly been a baby step.

Negotiators have been working out how to incorporate the existing elements of adaptation under the convention, namely the Nairobi Work Programme that sets out to research how adaptation to climate change works and where the vulnerability lies, to fit into the new framework. It looks like the overarching body to oversee adaptation is to be the Adaptation Committee, a group of negotiators who will be responsible for creating coherence among adaptation activities and holding workshops. The composition of that committee is still being worked out; parties disagree about whether emphasis should be on the countries who will be doing the adaptation (developing), or the countries who will be financing that adaptation (developed, but not really). Under the Committee, there will be three branches, the first will be the Nairobi Work Programme, viewed as the scientific and technical arm of adaptation that will mostly do research, the second will be a work programme on Loss and Damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, and the third will be the formation of National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). All of this will be nicely tied together by the Adaptation Fund, which will work with the Green Climate Fund and other partners to finance all of this bustling activity. But wait; don’t get too excited about all of this action yet, remember that the GCF isn’t operationalized, and probably won’t be for a while, and even if the Adaptation Fund gets operationalized, it remains nearly empty. Rich countries aren’t happy that they don’t have more say over where and how the money in the Adaptation Fund gets spent, so they stubbornly don’t fill it despite their obligation to do so.

But enough about finance, there will be plenty more on that from my colleagues who follow it more closely. There have been some very interesting arguments between parties about the 3 elements of the adaptation framework, work is still being done in back rooms about the adaptation committee, but the chair of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (Robert-Owen Jones from Australia) is adamant that negotiations should be as transparent as possible and has kept his meetings on adaptation open to observers.

The group of negotiators who work on adaptation (the adaptation community, as they call themselves) are pretty much the same on all issues. A handful of strong negotiators from the US, Australia, the EU, Norway, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, the Cook Islands, and Timor Leste dominate most of the talking space. COA’s very own Juan Pablo Hoffmaister (07), one of the founders of Earth In Brackets, is the lead negotiator for the G77+China (a group of 131 developing countries) on issues of adaptation and works tirelessly to coordinate the group and keep it strong. The adaptation community is forwarding several decisions to the COP on the three components of the framework. They have developed a more solid plan for the work programme on loss and damage, after negotiating serious compromise between AOSIS (the Alliance of Small Island States) and the US/Australia on the issue of creating a mechanism to actually do something about it. The US doesn’t think they’re ready to commit to doing anything about loss and damage, saying that they need another year to learn about what it really means and how to deal with it before deciding on anything, while AOSIS is saying that they don’t need another year of sitting around a conference table twiddling their thumbs, they are suffering in terms of millions of dollars and many lives and need the issue to start being addressed as soon as possible. They have ultimately reached a compromise in which the possibility of a mechanism is mentioned, but there is no commitment to actually creating one.

On National Adaptation Plans, the fight has been a little bit more nuanced. Initial division was between developed and developing countries over involvement of the Global Environment Facility as an interim financer until the Green Climate Fund is created, developed countries wanted the GEF to have nothing to do with NAPs because the last round of adaptation programmes (National Adaptation Programmes of Action) that were focused on urgent and immediate adaptation needs were supposed to be implemented by the GEF and still haven’t been 3 years later. Developing countries also wanted to be clear that NAPs couldn’t just be a planning process, but needed to have an implementation component. The Least Developed Countries are sick of seeing money go towards plans that don’t get follow-through. The latest fight is within the G77 itself though, Least Developed Countries (a group of mostly African countries that also includes parties like Bangladesh and Afghanistan) and “particularly vulnerable countries,” a broader group that also includes some Latin American countries are disagreeing about including mentions of particularly vulnerable countries in the text. The LDC group have always been privileged in adaptation text because their capacity to deal with adaptation themselves is the lowest, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones who are vulnerable. This is where finance becomes important, this fight wouldn’t be happening if there was enough money in the pot to go around, but countries are scrambling over the scraps that rich countries have made available. Because of this, the G77 isn’t united on NAPs, making it a lot harder for them to negotiate strongly on the issue. This is most assuredly part of an EU and US (particularly the UK) tactic to divide and conquer the G77.

On the Nairobi Work Programme, most of the fight has been figuring out how to bring it under the Cancun Adaptation Framework. Because it is the only piece of this puzzle that predates the framework, parties are squabbling over how it should fit into the picture. While most developing country parties want to see them report to the Adaptation Committee and start a new phase that is focused on more applicable adaptation needs, developed country parties are happy with the way things have been going and like that it has mostly produced a bunch of academia on adaptation that can’t be applied in very many contexts. After some tough negotiations, negotiators have agreed to start a new phase (the Durban Phase) of the work programme that will have a few of the elements that developing countries wanted, but still won’t be focused on implementation.

Overall I’ve gotten the impression that adaptation negotiations have been going well, they’ve made progress on issues and have (for the most part) worked in the spirit of compromise. That being said, there is absolutely no way that the work that is being produced by the adaptation community reflects the urgency and needs of climate change adaptation on the ground. In my SBI intervention yesterday I tried to stress that youth and other particularly vulnerable groups really don’t have time to sit around and wait for them to squabble over the placement of commas and that what practitioners already know about adaptation needs to be both implemented and funded.