I had the opportunity to talk to Ms. Li from World Wildlife Fund (WWF) last month. Ms. Li works at WWF China’s Climate, Energy, and Green Finance department, where she focuses on low carbon city development. Speaking of COP, Ms. Li told me that the engagement in international climate negotiation is definitely a big part of their work. As an NGO, WWF involves in communicating the agenda and latest negotiation progress to the public, attends=ing side events to catch up the latest trend in the industry and sharing with the public what it has done to promote sustainable development.
There are a variety of issues that WWF has been focusing on that are in high relevance to COP, including climate change and risks, renewable energy, adaptation, forest conservation, and low carbon transition. Recently, WWF has added a focus on carbon market and climate finance, which is also under heated discussion under Article 6. With this range of focuses, WWF intends to serve not only as a campaigner and a communicator, but also as an idea generator, to coordinate and promote the implementation of negotiation results in its region and drive a more ambitious NDC.
To be more specific, public will normally regard NGOs as parties to organize events and call upon people’s awareness to a specific climate issue. This is true. An NGO like WWF will often organize campaigns and workshops to educate and drive public engagement in reducing carbon emissions and paying more attention to the impact that climate change could bring. But there are many other actors that an NGO will collaborate with. Ms. Li told me an example under her group’s focus. The low carbon city team has been working with Chinese local government to show more transparency in GHG emission data disclosure and enhance Chinese city’s presence in carbon reduction, which is certainly a global effort. The way they engage, and advocate is to invite Chinese cities to participate in a global event called One Planet City Challenge (OPCC), which is similar to C40 but is non-governmental. Cities disclose their emission data, show their efforts in low carbon transition and share experiences with each other.
While WWF tries to encourage Chinese cities to disclose and report emission data, it is not only local city government that they need to persuade. They also need to have dialogs with CDP, which is the reporting platform, and thinktanks, to work out a reporting scheme that is localized for Chinese cities. Because in reality, there are many different scenarios that you need to work with. In the case of China, it is very sensitive to disclose some of the emission inventories asked by the organizer (which is a big reason why Chinese cities didn’t join C40). Therefore, specific changes need to be made to increase level of engagement. WWF also works with other IGOs such as C40, to learn from their past experience and leverage on some of the resources to push things forward. This really impressed me. I never thought before that the work of NGOs involves so many actors. From government to private companies, from thinktanks to other NGOs and IGOs, the way we think of the role an NGO can play should not be limited to merely a campaigner or a communicator.
Ms. Li also told me that WWF has been actively joining the side events in every year’s COP. In terms of her team, Ms. Li used to join as an observer. In COP 25, she and her team hosted a workshop and presented their latest progress on building low carbon city pilot project in China, to help the country and the city achieve its goal in carbon neutral and early peaking. In fact, this is also a key focus for them in COP 26. With China’s president Jinping Xi announced China’s ambitious plan to reach carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutral by 2060, it is important to see what steps the country can take to achieve this goal. Also, China will roll out its national ETS by the end of 2020, which is also a key issue to be focused on in COP 26. After fully roll-out, the carbon market in China is expected to double the size of EU ETS. Ms. Li and her organization are attentively working on the roadmap that China can take to achieve its emission goals and seeking for possible mechanisms for China’s carbon market development.
