Paris Working Dialogue identifies key innovations for building Resilience Intel system
December 14, 2017
One day after the One Planet Summit, Resilience Intel partners Citizens’ Climate Education, the Geoversiv Foundation, and the International Centre for Dialogue and Peacebuilding, co-convened with the Kingdom of Morocco, a working dialogue to identify key areas of action for building the Resilience Intel system.
The dialogue focused on ways “to identify climate action money across the whole economy” and to address the escalating global problem that “if we do not succeed in making all finance climate-smart, then we will not succeed in sustaining shared prosperity in any nation.”
To ensure Resilience Intel operates effectively to produce qualitative analysis, contextual integration, and reliable regularly updated quantitative reporting, discussants identified these areas of action for follow-up:
- the local insight value of the Talanoa Dialogue Preparatory Phase,
- the high-resolution provenance tracking of distributed ledger technologies,
- and new more defined standards for compounded carbon risk disclosure.
One Planet Summit achieves transformational finance commitments
December 14, 2017
The One Planet Summit—co-convened on the 2nd Anniversary of the Paris Agreement by French President Emmanuel Macron, the World Bank Group, and the United Nations Secretary-General—was attended by thousands of non-Party stakeholders and more than 50 heads of state and senior government ministers. The work product of the Summit was:
- The launch of a One Planet Coalition, to keep connecting and scaling up the work needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.
- The delivery of 12 Transformational Commitments to innovate or scale up climate-smart finance through various strategies.
- The sharing of 20 Projects for Our Planet, through the Climate Agora, open to Summit attendees.
- The convening of Side Events and Working Sessions on issues related to the One Planet Summit’s areas of focus.
- The creation of new Climate Action Collaborations between attendees and Coalition partners.
Click here to read through, and follow links to, all the One Planet Summit commitments under 12 major areas of action.
COP23 opens talk about universal right to best-practice opportunity
November 20, 2017
After two weeks of formal and informal discussions relating to the need for escalating ongoing support for participation of stakeholders, innovators, and implementers outside of government, discussions about a year of consultation leading up to COP24 began to focus on the universal right to access best-practice opportunity.
- All people, communities, constituencies, and countries, should be able to access climate-smart technologies and best-practice tools, affordably, to ensure no one is left out of the mitigation-adaptation-resilience economy.
- Delay in the delivery of best-practice policy design, accounting models, technologies (for MRV, power generation and other priorities) adds cost to the parallel and intersecting processes of mitigating, adapting, and building shared, inclusive resilience.
- Early adoption of best-practices and careful planning for the eventual adoption of still over-the-horizon technologies adds value in all three major areas of national capital — monetary, natural, and human.
- Critical note: due to the borderless nature of the climate system, any nation’s exclusion from best-practice opportunity undermines resilience everywhere.
Talanoa Dialogue offers non-Party stakeholders everywhere a say in climate future
November 19, 2017
Among the catalytic outcomes of the COP23 was the adoption of the Talanoa Dialogue standard to fulfill the Paris Agreement’s mandate of an ambition-raising Facilitative Dialogue at COP24 in December 2018. The Fijian word Talanoa means that all are equals in an inclusive dialogue, regardless of status or influence outside the dialogue. The purpose is to build trust, ensure good ideas and shared values emerge, and make everyone smarter and more closely aligned.
The Talanoa Dialogue will include two structured phases:
- The Preparatory Phase — year-round, open to all people everywhere, with submissions from verified stakeholders accepted through an online portal.
- The Political Phase — at COP24, among Parties to the UNFCCC, the mandated Facilitative Dialogue, convened in the spirit of Talanoa, receiving inputs from Talanoa dialogues held throughout the year, by way of a Synthesis Report from the COP23 and COP24 presidencies.
America’s Pledge commits world’s 3rd largest economy to Paris goals
November 11, 2017
The launch of America’s Pledge means an economy larger than all others except the US and China is now committed to the Paris Agreement goals. The We Are Still In coalition—a coalition of non-Party stakeholders (subnational governments, businesses, and other non-governmental stakeholders)—made this unprecedented commitment to support, plan, inform, and carry out the implementation of a global climate agreement.
The US Climate Alliance is also being seen by delegates from other nations as a new model for how national governments might effectively coordinate nationwide commitments to a climate-smart future.
€500 million bond to advance green mortgage refinancing
November 10, 2017
The UK-based bank Barclays has issued a €500 million green bond for mortgage refinancing. The signal sent by this issue is significant, because it opens the prospect of spreading green finance to housing in a new way and because it was significantly oversubscribed, with €2 billion before issue. UK Climate Change Minister Claire Perry said the bond issue aligns with the aim of making the UK into a clean finance hub.
HSBC commits $100 billion to fight climate change
November 6, 2017
HSBC has promised $100bn of finance for low-carbon technology and sustainable development by 2025 as part of a package of measures to strengthen its commitment to tackling climate change and other “green” goals. The UK-based bank will also reduce support for coal-fired power generation and increase disclosure of “climate risks” in its lending book under new policies announced on Monday.
US Government Confirms Climate Change caused by Human Activity
November 4, 2017
Just days before the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, one of the most comprehensive, detailed climate science reports was released… by the Trump administration. The Climate Science Special Report (CSSR), drawn from the work of 13 US cabinet agencies, lays out the new science that will inform the 4th National Climate Assessment.
Among its findings:
- Global annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) over the last 115 years (1901–2016).
- This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization.
- There is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence aside from human activities–especially emissions of greenhouse gases–for the warming over the last century.
- Without major reductions in emissions, the increase in annual average global temperature relative to preindustrial times could reach 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century.
- Accelerating ice melt means chronic, long-duration hydrological drought is increasingly possible before the end of this century.
- The US has spent more than $1.1 trillion on extreme weather events since 1980, and the rate of that spending is accelerating.
The imperative for US negotiators to support speeding the global transition away from climate-forcing fuels is clear in the science of their own agencies. A wide cross-section of the diverse US economy will be in Bonn alongside the world’s negotiators, laying out strategies to help the US lead that transition.
Germany Produced So Much Wind Energy, Consumers were Paid to Use Electricity
October 31, 2017
From Bloomberg:
A stormy weekend led to free electricity in Germany as wind generation reached a record, forcing power producers to pay customers the most since Christmas 2012 to use electricity. Power prices turned negative as wind output reached 39,409 megawatts on Saturday, equivalent to the output of about 40 nuclear reactors. To keep the grid supply and demand in balance, negative prices encourage producers to either shut power stations or else pay consumers to take the extra electricity off the network.
Ending Extreme Poverty Not at Odds with Climate Action
October 26, 2017
A new study finds that the goal of ending extreme poverty does not require significant new investment in high-carbon-emitting practices. Ending extreme poverty means raising incomes and making food, water and energy more reliably available to the world’s poorest people.
Food production, transport, and refrigeration, could expand overall emissions, but this study found that global emissions can still remain below the threshold for 2°C global average temperature rise. More coordinated effort will be required to meet the more ambitious 1.5°C target.
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