Author: Ceci de la Guardia

12/16/2023

Paraguayan-Cuban-American: reconciling different world views at COP

I was born and raised in Miami, Florida. My mom is Paraguayan and my dad is Cuban. I go to school at Duke (although I almost typed I “went” to school at Duke because I’ll officially be done with all my undergraduate assignments once I submit this blog post). I spent several summers researching sustainable development and the Itaipu Dam in Paraguay with Dr. Christine Folch, one of the leading experts in this field. I learned pretty much everything I know about the UNFCCC through this practicum in a U.S. university, which to its credit was a very diverse and international class. I attended COP with the delegation of Paraguay and watched the President of Cuba lead the G77 + China summit.

Throughout the whole process, I felt my brain flip-flop through all these different worldviews. Climate change is a very real and existential threat that we are running out of time to solve. I see so much hope in the technological advances we have seen in recent decades, such as solar, wind, batteries, and EVs coming down the cost curve. I believe we have a shot at getting this right, which is a big reason why I got into this space in the first place.

At the same time, it is morally bankrupt that the developed world rapidly grew their economies through fossil fuels, polluted the whole world in the process, and is now demanding that developing countries not use these same resources to develop. For all the hope that I have in technological leapfrogging, I see the real and pressing basic needs that countries like Paraguay need to address right now. Climate change is an understandably lower priority than goals such as poverty alleviation and food security. And in a country with limited resources, these can be very real tradeoffs in the short term.

I think there is a lot of hope for rapidly deploying low-carbon projects, such as renewable energy and energy efficiency. However, the key to stopping climate change is concurrently scaling back fossil fuel emissions. Our current suite of climate solutions is not a perfect substitute for the high-density and dispatchable energy that comes from fossil fuels. It is still a big ask to remove these from the development equation of a low-income country.

The developed world is not doing enough to assist the developing world in this transition. Funding pledges fall short and are seldom fulfilled. Protectionism is inhibiting real areas for collaboration and promotion of development. Concessionary funding has actually decreased in recent years, leading to even larger debt burdens for countries that did not create this problem to begin with. There needs to be a fundamental shift in attitude if the U.S. and other developed countries want to fully bring the developing world on board in this climate transition.

Article 6 – no final agreements, but countries forge ahead anyways

I want to wrap up my thoughts on my last blog post on Article 6. By the end of COP28, no formal agreements were reached on Articles 6.2 and 6.4. The parties agreed to resume talks next year. While this is a disappointing outcome, some have pointed out that no agreement is better than a bad agreement.

Article 6.2 is already being implemented by some countries based on the rulebook established in Glasgow COP26. Paraguay is actually a great example of this. During COP28, Paraguay reached agreements with both the UAE and Singapore to establish bilateral cooperative agreements under Article 6.2. These agreements will be finalized in the coming year, after which the UAE and Singapore will be able to purchase Internationally Traded Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) based on mitigation projects in Paraguay.

It is very exciting to see Paraguay be a pioneer in this. In July of this year, Paraguay passed a carbon credit law to strengthen is accounting, monitoring, and verification of carbon credit projects within the country. This law established a national registry that will ensure that projects are not double-counted. There are still open questions about how the country will prove additionality – meaning that the credit created new emissions reductions as opposed to paying for something that would have happened anyway.

Overall, these are positive developments for the Article 6.2 mechanism and prove that countries can already begin to implement it. It will be important to monitor advancements in these projects to ensure they comply with the highest levels of environmental integrity and human rights protection.

12/6/2023

Attending COP with the delegation of Paraguay

My client for this COP is the delegation of Paraguay. I am part of their “party overflow”, meaning I can assist them in their work and attend negotiations, but I don’t have the authority to speak on behalf of the country. My main work for them was keeping their team informed on Article 6 negotiations, which have to do with international voluntary carbon markets. My studies up until this point at school focused mostly on energy and economics, so I thought I was well-poised to understand what was going on in the negotiation rooms. I learned very quickly that the highly technical nature of the negotiations proved a high barrier to entry.

Article 6 background

Article 6 was introduced in the 2015 Paris Agreement as a set of market mechanisms used to accelerate decarbonization efforts. Article 6 aims to facilitate cost-effective emissions reductions and promote sustainable development while ensuring environmental integrity and preventing double counting of emissions reductions. The main theory underpinning this was that CO2 reduction is cheaper in some places than in others. Significantly, mitigation outcomes are usually cheaper to achieve in the developing world than they are in the developed world. Therefore, article 6 would enable a wealthier country to achieve its carbon reduction goals by purchasing Internationally Traded Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs).

There were three main sections of interest for the Article 6 negotiations in this COP. Article 6.2 is a decentralized mechanism where, for example, two countries can agree on a bilateral cooperative approach to trade ITMOs between them. Article 6.4 is a centralized, project-based mechanism with global oversight. Article 6.8 outlines non-market approaches that countries can take to increase mitigation outcomes globally, such as capacity building and technology transfer.

Article 6 has made some progress since the Paris Agreement but is not fully implemented – or “operationalized” in COP speak – yet. COP26 in Glasgow and COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh saw significant progress in Article 6. Countries agreed on avoiding double counting of emissions reductions, sharing proceeds for adaptation, and completed a rulebook on operationalization. However, there remains work to be done in this COP to fully implement Article 6.

Progression of negotiations

At this stage, Article 6 negotiations are highly technical and difficult to follow without deep knowledge of the history of the negotiations and the significance carried by key words in the document. I did not know I was going to be following Article 6 until I got here, so I tried my best to catch up quickly.

The 40-page document pertaining to Article 6.2 will be, by far, the most difficult to work through. The level of technicality is such that countries are debating on the contents and wording of drop-down menus on the Agreed Electronic Format (AEF) that will be used to register these ITMOs.

One of the most difficult things that countries are trying to balance is ensuring environmental integrity while giving countries flexibility to implement Article 6 in a way that makes sense for their individual circumstance. Everyone wants this new carbon market to be very credible and transparent, given the difficulties the current voluntary carbon market faces. However, Article 6 will not be a one-size-fits-all approach.

The process of negotiations is very slow. The co-facilitators set the agenda to discuss one specific section of a document and won’t move on until every negotiating group or country that wants to speak is able to do so. It seems like parties have very strong opinions on nearly every paragraph, and it is difficult to find places of consensus. Parties are also very repetitive with each other, slowing down the negotiations further. After sitting in several of these meetings, it is unclear how anything gets done at COPs. I suspect that many areas of consensus are found in the final hours when delegates have gotten almost no sleep for two weeks and compromises are presented as “take it or leave it” offers.

We’ll see how the negotiations progress in the next week. Hopefully, this COP will take a solid step forward for Article 6 operationalization.

Today was the first day of COP28. Before arriving, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I gathered as many stories as I could from people who attended past COPs. What events should I go to? How should I structure my day? What is with all these different zones? And how do I get the most out of all of this? While I got a lot of good advice, nothing quite prepared me for the feeling of arriving at the COP.

While this is my first COP, something tells me that the experience in Dubai is at a whole new scale. The conference is at the Expo City, which was built for the World Expo 2020. It is a small, experimental city that you can walk across in 15 minutes. Countries from around the world built gorgeous buildings reflecting their heritage and local architecture. This sets an impressive stage for the conference. Walking around and seeing people from all over the world in this futuristic, global setting is quite a unique experience. To be confronted with how diverse the world is and all the different backgrounds that are present in the COP negotiations reminds me of how difficult the task ahead of us is. How can we get ~200 countries to agree on anything, especially topics of such great importance as adaptation, climate finance, and mitigation?

I started my day at the G77 + China coordination meeting. I am fortunate to be attending the COP in support of the Paraguay delegation with a “Party overflow” badge, which affords me greater access to negotiation and coordination rooms. I felt that this nearly 3-hour meeting was an appropriate introduction to how painstaking these negotiations must be. The meeting was set to coordinate the opening statement of the G77+ China group for the conference. The chair of the meeting went through each paragraph inquiring if any parties objected to the language of the text. Some paragraphs had no objections; others took 30+ minutes to debate. Parties would add a sentence, remove a word, and add commas, all to emphasize the point they wanted to get across. The chair continued to remind the group that this was just the opening statement, not a legally binding document, and that we needed to move forward with the agreement. It made me think about how slow the legally binding negotiations with all countries must be.

It also encouraged me to reflect on the role of language in the UNFCCC’s process. So much of these negotiations are focused on small language changes. However, for most G77+China delegates, English is not their first language. There were points throughout the meeting when delegates publicly asked anyone else with better English to check the grammar and meaning of the sentence. Delegates must grasp the nuance in words to successfully execute these negotiations – for example, using the word “especially” versus “primarily” was discussed for some time. It is important for me to recognize the privilege of speaking fluent English and reflect on the additional mental labor made by so many delegates who are not speaking in their native tongue.

I look forward to seeing how these negotiations progress in the next two weeks. I’ll be paying particular attention to climate finance and Article 6.