Island nation takes on the world’s polluters

Jaspreet Kindra in IRIN: A Russian film crew arrived in Palau at the end of 2013 to shoot the reality show ‘Octpob’ on one of the archipelago’s more than 500 islands. The show leaves contestants in isolated locales with limited water and food to test their survival skills. In 2004, the US version of the show, Survivor, was also shot in Palau.

Palauans welcomed the TV crew and its glittering cast of celebrities - it did, after all, bring in much-needed revenue. But the situation presented an uncomfortable irony: while Russian and American contestants have tested their survival abilities in Palau, Russia and the US have adopted strong positions at the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, which could threaten Palau’s own chances of surviving as sea levels rise.

The UNFCCC talks aim to come up with a treaty that assigns responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for the provision financial and technical support to vulnerable countries, like Palau, that have not contributed to global warming. The talks have met resistance from the developed world and emerging economies like China and India, which say they are not responsible for past emissions and should not be held accountable for emissions in the future.

Time is running out for low-lying islands like Palau. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a recent assessment, “if the world were to stay on the current fossil-fuel intensive growth model” dealing with the impact of changing climate in 14 of the Pacific Ocean islands, including Palau, could cost them 12.7 percent of their collective annual GDP equivalent by 2100....

NOAA image of shark silhouettes near Palau

Will fleeing home be the last resort as the climate changes?

Jaspreet Kindra in IRIN: ...Like many other Micronesian states, Palau is extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm surges - several islands are less than a metre above sea level. In other low-lying countries like Bangladesh, people have become used to the idea of moving, but "planned relocation" evokes strong feelings in this part of the Pacific.

Palau gained independence from the United States in 1994 and signed the Compact of Free Association, which will run until 2044. Under this agreement, the US provides substantial financial assistance to Palau, whose nationals can also travel to the US with relative ease and work there. Almost everyone has a family member in the US, but no one talks about moving there permanently.

...People in neighbouring islands like Kiribati and Tuvalu are being forced to move away from the constantly encroaching sea. Planning for possible dual citizenship, shopping for land, and providing new skills so their people can get jobs in another country are among the policy decisions that confront low-lying countries and islands.

"Some countries expressed reservations about the idea of having planned relocation ... since [they]...have hardly contributed to dangerous climate change, but would be asked to concede significant things like administration of viable populations and habitable territory - both key parts of sovereignty" But many Pacific islanders feel like Josephs. Tony de Brum, the
Minister in Assistance to the President of the Marshall Islands, told IRIN that the idea of planned relocation is not even being considered. “If we do that, it will be an admittance of failure in our part,” on two counts - adaptation and global mitigation efforts...

Aerial view of limestone islands of Palau, shot by NOAA

Progress on loss-and-damage and tech transfer at COP19

Bhrikuti Rai in SciDev.net: The UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, have made progress in several areas, including the contentious issue of loss-and-damage as well as the opening of the Climate Technology Centre and Network, which can now respond to requests from developing countries for advice and assistance on the transfer of technology.

“As nations put in the foundations, walls and ceiling of a new, wide-ranging and universal climate agreement, the Climate Technology Centre and Network represents a further building block towards that low-carbon future,” UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP executive-director Achim Steiner said in a press release (21 November).

...The conference also agreed to establish an international mechanism to provide the most-vulnerable populations with better protection against the loss and damage caused by extreme weather events and the slow onset events such as rising sea levels, with detailed work on the so-called Warsaw mechanism expected to start next year.

A recent report by UN University’s Institute of Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) has put a human face on the highly discussed mechanism on loss and damage by highlighting the constraints people face due to climate-change induced extreme weather events.

“The current levels of adaptation and mitigation efforts are insufficient, so we need to act with urgency to address the aftermath of powerful floods, typhoons, droughts and other extreme weather events,” says Koko Warner, lead author of the study and the head of the Environmental Migration, Social Vulnerability and Adaptation Section at UNU-EHS....

Downtown Warsaw, shot by Marek & Ewa Wojciechowscy, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license

Indonesia reaction to climate talks

Dessy Sagita in the Jakarta Globe: Indonesia expressed mixed reactions following the conclusion of the Climate Change talks in Warsaw, Poland which reached a consensus on the commitment to a global climate change adaptation program.

“With the conclusion we can hope that UNFCCC (The United Nation’s Framework Conference on Climate Change) can provide the opportunity for the developing countries to end our vulnerability when it comes to the climate change adaptation program,” Ari Muhammad, the Secretary Working group on Adaptation to the National Council on Climate Change (DNPI), said.

...In the Warsaw text, negotiators notably replaced the word “commitments” for nationally-determined emissions cuts, with “contributions”. Ari said if developed countries want the developing countries to proceed with their climate change adaptation program, there must be a serious commitment from the richer countries to support their efforts. “Developing countries and the developed countries are in dire need of support and global commitment from developed countries,” he said.

Ari said there was one pressing issue that did not find a solution during the talks. “In adaptation, there are four main agendas — National Adaptation Plan, Lost and Damage, Nairobi Work Program and the Adaptation Committee — that we unfortunately did find an agreement in term[s] of lost and damage,” he said.

Developing countries including Indonesia, he said, believe that an institution specifically dealing with loss and damage because of climate change must be set up while the developed countries think that such an institution will not be necessary. “Regardless the effort to tackle the impact of climate change, loss and damage because of global warming have happened. Look at typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines or the Forest Fires in Riau,” he said...

Bangladesh's climate compensation push a ray of light after dismal Doha

John Vidal in the "Povertymatters" blog at the Guardian (UK): The dust settles, the delegates have recovered from their marathon talks and the full significance of the Doha climate round can be assessed. Clearly, it was an extraordinarily weak result – no new money was put on the table, no new commitments made to cut emissions and there is no certainty the key 2015 agreement will be any stronger.

But despite little evidence of the spirit of international co-operation, there were important decisions made for developing countries. The most significant and symbolic was extending the Kyoto protocol for a second period. This brought to a close years of attempts, led by the US, to ditch it. Kyoto survives, weaker because Russia, Japan and New Zealand have decided not to join in the second period and Canada has left completely, but important because it remains the only treaty that forces rich countries to cut emissions. The 36 countries still in represent only 15% of emissions – but the principle it enshrines of the rich being legally bound holds.

Finance, as so often, was the biggest disappointment. Britain, France, Germany and a few others pledged $6bn to fill the gap between the imminent end of the "fast start" finance and 2020, when the green climate fund supposedly kicks in, but the reality is that developing countries have little or nothing to help them adapt.

But one landmark agreement changes all future climate politics and takes countries into a new era. Countries agreed to the principle of "loss and damage", to help victims of climate change. The door is now at least half open for countries to be recompensed for slow onset events such as rising sea levels, continual droughts and storms...

Dealing with loss and damage

IRIN: In a formal letter to Qatar - host of the 18th conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - a coalition of 40 NGOs, backed by academics, has called for urgent action on loss and damage caused by climate change. The NGOs have drawn up a framework to help country negotiators address the contentious issue.

The proposed framework opens the door for developing countries to possibly receive compensation for losses and damages that are incurred when efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change have failed. 

Policy frameworks provided by NGOs have proven handy in past climate change talks. In 2010, a framework put together by a similar coalition of NGOs paved the way for the adoption of the Cancun Adaptation Framework; this was a significant breakthrough for developing countries and NGOs trying to draw attention to the need to adapt to climate change.

Two key objectives of the framework are: the prevention of loss and damage through mitigation and adaptation efforts, and compensation and rehabilitation following the occurrence of loss and damage. These objectives receive equal footing in the document.

“We don’t want the UNFCCC process to give up on mitigation and adaptation, hence our equal emphasis. We have to keep the cost of loss and damage down,” explained Harjeet Singh of ActionAid, one of the contributors to a briefing paper on the framework....