In Marrakech, on the middle Sunday of the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the COP22), the high-level dialogue series Accelerating Progress, Advancing Innovation brought together leaders in government, business, science, and policy advocacy together to outline pathways for accelerating national climate action. This dialogue was convened under the Chatham House Rule, to allow for the most open possible sharing of information and brainstorming for innovative solutions.

The nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement do not yet include pledges ambitious enough to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5ºC by mid-century. Many critical areas of action will need to be addressed, both at the level of policy, and in the realm of everyday action, to move national climate action strategies onto a course to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5ºC.

Participants in this dialogue examined some of the issues at stake in Marrakech, specifically:

  • How to deliver financing to projects that transform markets, allowing them to decarbonize rapidly or to rapidly develop using low-carbon practices?
  • How to ensure cutting edge low-carbon technologies and business models can spread to all economies in a cost-effective way?
  • How to build long-term resilience and routine low-carbon business practices into national budget priorities and infrastructure development?

Themes & Recommendations

Areas of policy action, investment focus, and business model change explored in this dialogue, include:

  • Decentralized power generation
  • Business models that empower local entrepreneurs
  • Policy options to build macro-critical resilience
  • Carbon Pricing policies optimized to local economic needs
  • Investment for human-scale solutions

Participants explored ways in which the overlap between the Sustainable Development Goals and the commitments inherent in the Paris Agreement align to incentivize the flow of new investment to climate-smart business models in the context of specific post-Paris NDC priorities.

Preparations & Outcomes

Online Forum: This high-level dialogue was preceded on Friday, Nov. 4 — Climate Finance Day 2016 — with a Global Online Forum on Climate-Smart Finance to Drive Local Action. This global online forum event focused on highlighting avenues of action that motivate entrepreneurship to build local capacity and empower people to participate in the expansion of climate-smart business practices and investment.

Human Rights: On Sunday, Nov. 6, Citizens’ Climate Education joined a conference hosted by the National Human Rights Council of Morocco, on the role of National Human Rights Institutions in the global response to climate change. The CCE presentation introduced the idea of Climate Solvency and outlined why it is a human right and how it can be supported through policy and through examination of rights protections.

Carbon Pricing: Building on discussions regarding the policies required to efficiently restructure market incentives, we opened consultations with dialogue participants and key partners to outline early action strategies for effective carbon pricing. As an input to the preparatory meetings for the Carbon Pricing Summit of the Americas, we put forward Four Ways to Accelerate Carbon Pricing.

Fiscal Resilience: Recognizing that economy-wide adoption of climate-smart strategies requires better understanding of the interactions between natural systems, market incentives, consumer behavior, and financial decision-making, we convened a dialogue on the sidelines of the 2017 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, on Building Fiscal Resilience.

COP22 Presidency Collaboration

The COP22 Presidency worked openly with partners across the global negotiating process to ensure robust, interactive, multisectoral efforts to advance climate-smart finance and to accelerate the pace of climate action at the local, national, and global levels. We invited input from the CNDH Maroc and the Moroccan COP22 Presidency team, and worked to align the action-oriented outcomes of the 2017 Acceleration Dialogues with priorities of the COP22.

As a result of the Marrakech dialogue and the spring dialogue in Washington, DC, we were able to produce:

Related COP22 Outcomes

The COP22 Climate Finance Pathway was developed by the Moroccan Presidency to address priority areas of action, as identified during the 2nd Biennial High-Level Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Finance, for increasing the flows of climate finance with a particular focus on scaling up adaptation finance, and on funding high-impact actions in favor of the Global South.

The Marrakech Pledge is a call to action for all African Capital Markets Regulators and Exchanges willing to act collectively in favor of sustainable development, and to have an actual impact on fostering Green Capital Markets in Africa, within respective local markets and as a region, to promote climate-resilient investments and drive capital into the green economy.

The Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action aims to address the universal recognition that if we are to realise the goals of the Paris Agreement, we must catalyse and support climate action by Parties (government) and non-Party stakeholders in the period from 2017-2020, to ensure a better, more resilient and more equitable lifestyle for our fellow citizens of the world.

Co-Coordinated & Hosted by:

Founding co-convener
The International Center for Dialogue & Peacebuilding

Founding co-convener
Citizens’ Climate Education

Technical partner
The Geoversiv Foundation

In collaboration with
The Norwegian Nobel Institute

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