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This report analyses the international climate negotiations at the UN climate conference in Durban in December 2011. The conference revolved around two key sets of issues: What will be the overarching long-term framework of international climate policy and what near-term action will be taken to combat climate change? Accordingly, the first part of the report is devoted to the negotiations and outcome on the legal form of the future climate regime while the second part discusses near-term action along the "building blocks" of the Bali Action Plan.
Ahead of the Conference of Parties (COP) 24 where countries will first take stock of climate action post Paris, this paper assesses India's progress on its nationally determined contribution (NDC) targets and future energy plans. We find that, although India is well on track to meet its NDC pledges, these targets were extremely modest given previous context. Furthermore, there is considerable uncertainty around India's energy policy post 2030 and if current plans for energy futures materialise, the Paris Agreement's 2 degrees goal will be almost certainly unachievable. India's role in international climate politics has shifted from obstructionism to leadership particularly following the announcement of withdrawal by the United States from the Paris Agreement, but analysis reveals that India's "hard" actions on the domestic front are inconsistent with its "soft" actions in the international climate policy arena. Going forward, India is likely to face increasing calls for stronger mitigation action and we suggest that this gap can be bridged by strengthening the links between India's foreign policy ambitions, international climate commitments, and domestic energy realities.
European coal mining regions face massive transformational challenges. The necessity of climate protection only intensifies a trend, prevalent in all of Europe: coal mining has been losing its economic importance over the last decades. Fewer and fewer people are employed in the sector. Coal regions face the challenge of how to facilitate a just transition, and which perspectives to develop for a future beyond coal.
Against this background this study analyses the current situation in four key European coal mining regions, namely: Aragon in Spain, Lusatia in Germany, Silesia in Poland and Western Macedonia in Greece. The study provides a brief summary of the regions' socio-economic structure, including the respective role of coal mining. An assessment of how existing European structural instruments, specifically the European Structural and Investment Funds (the ESI Funds) are utilised in the region, forms the core of the study.
This report analyses the international climate negotiations at the UN climate conference in Doha in December 2012. The report is structured along the three main tracks of the negotiations: the agreement on a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, the closure of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention, and the start of negotiations on a new comprehensive climate agreement that are to be concluded by 2015.
As part of the discussion on a new international climate agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by 2015, the European Commission conducted a stakeholder consultation, to which the Wuppertal Institute contributed. The Wuppertal Institute suggests that Parties should revisit the widely shared assumption that there is a trade-off between climate protection and economic well-being. The problem is not so much the macro-economic outlook. The problem is that climate policy causes substantial distributional impacts and thus naturally leads to resistance. The Wuppertal Institute recommends to reconsider the political wisdom of the quantity-based approach that climate policy has so far been based on. As long as emissions are seen as inextricably linked to economic well-being, framing commitments in terms of emission reductions directly triggers the perspective of seeing climate protection as an economic loss. Commitments should ideally be multi-dimensional. Possible types of commitments to consider may include scaling up certain climate-friendly technologies, improving energy efficiency, limiting fossil fuel use and fossil fuel extraction, or emission price commitments. The strongest mobilisation of political support might perhaps be achieved by framing commitments as a joint international undertaking to provide universal access to sustainable energy services by a specific date.
The objective of the concept paper is to propose an operational definition for what transformational change means in the context of NAMAs, taking into consideration ongoing discussions among NAMA experts, and to give an overview of theoretical approaches to sustainability transitions and transformational change, exploring their possible applicability to NAMAs. The theoretical approaches are the basis to propose hypotheses for the dynamics, indicators and success factors that foster transformational change, which is necessary to assess whether a NAMA intervention has been or can be transformational to achieve low carbon and sustainable development goals. This paper will serve as the basis for further exploration of a framework to assess the potential for transformational impacts of NAMAs.
Global climate
(2014)
In what has become normal procedure at the international climate negotiations, the 2013 United Nations climate conference in Warsaw (the nineteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 19) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ninth Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 9)) once again seemed on the brink of collapse and concluded more than one day behind schedule, in the evening of Saturday 23 November 2013. However, on most of the key issues it made only scant progress.
This report lays out the main developments in Warsaw and assesses the main outcomes. It starts with the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement by 2015 and increasing short-term ambition and subsequently covers the issues relating to near-term implementation of previous decisions in the areas of emission reductions and transparency, adaptation, loss and damage, finance and technology.
This report analyses the international climate negotiations at the UN climate conference in Warsaw in November 2013. The report covers the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement by 2015 and increasing short-term ambition as well as the issues relating to near-term implementation of previous decisions in the areas of emission reductions and transparency, adaptation, loss and damage, finance and technology. The report concludes that Warsaw once again starkly highlighted the sharp divisions and lack of trust among countries. Industrialised countries' collective lack of leadership strongly contributed to re-opening the traditional North-South divide. As a result, on many issues the outcomes hardly go beyond the lowest common denominator. The conference only agreed on the bare minimum to move the 2015 process forward and also made no headway in strengthening short-term ambition. Some progress was made with the establishment of the "Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts" and the completion of the rules for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. However, here as well further substance, in particular financial support from industrialised countries, is required to actually fill these mechanisms with meaning. If countries want to escape from groundhog day, they will have to start seeing and utilizing the UN climate process rather differently.
Based on a description of the starting position and the aim of the research project "Further development of a concept for monitoring and reporting of the International Climate Initiative (ICI)", this final report summarises the results generated in this endeavour. It also describes the key activities which were conducted to work out the results. In two years time, the project aimed to develop a scientifically sound and at the same time practical monitoring and reporting concept which should deliver information about the impacts of the ICI. It started from an initial analysis of the current ICI approach and of the monitoring and reporting approaches applied in other climate finance instruments.