Cop 21: EU burden-sharing call provokes division

OREANDA-NEWS. December 09, 2015. A demand from the EU that richer developing nations such as China commit climate financing for mitigation and adaptation in poorer countries is creating divisions at the UN climate summit in Paris.

The EU and a number of developed countries want emerging economies to share the cost of curbing climate change from 2020 onwards, when a new global climate deal will come into effect. But less developed countries oppose this, arguing that industrialised nations are evading their historic responsibility, whereas poorer nations already contribute more than their fair share.

The current draft Paris agreement contains provisions for all countries "in a position to do so" to contribute climate finance to the developing world. The EU would like this to be compulsory, EU climate action and energy commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said. "How strong the language should be is up to the negotiators," Canete said.

The EU is emerging as even more of a hardliner than the US on climate finance, aid and development charity Oxfam's director of advocacy and campaigns, Celine Charveriat, said.

Developing countries want financial pledges to be reviewed regularly and scaled up, just as mitigation commitments will be under a proposed five-year review mechanism.

The EU has said it will consider such a mechanism for finance, but only if those countries "in a position to do so" accept a legally binding commitment to contribute. There is no other better way to kill a proposal than to demand a cost that is clearly not politically viable, Chaveriat said.

But the EU maintains that while it will continue to provide climate finance, other countries must contribute their fair share.

"It is very clear that some of our partners will need support to participate in the global effort. The EU is fully prepared to play its part in this," Canete said, citing examples of planned EU climate funding.

Some 18 EU member states have announced their intention to continue scaling up climate finance in the coming years, he said. And the European Commission has undertaken to more than double climate finance grants from the EU budget to €2bn/yr (\\$2.2bn/yr) by 2020.

Richer nations will continue to provide climate finance to poorer countries and they will meet their \\$100bn/yr by 2020 pledge, Canete said. But all those who can participate in the development effort should do so, and offer support according to their capabilities, he said. The more countries that contribute to the effort, the more we can help, he said.

The world's economic landscape has changed dramatically since 1992, when the Kyoto protocol divided rich and poor nations into annex 1 and non-annex 1, Canete said. Six of the 10 richest countries in terms of GDP per person are not classed as annex 1. At the same time, 35 non-annex 1 developing countries have higher income per person than the poorest annex 1 country, he pointed out.

The EU has an historic responsibility, but the Paris agreement needs to reflect today's economic and geopolitical reality, Luxembourg's environment minister, and one of the EU delegation's lead envoys, Carole Dieschbourg, said.

The EU accepts that climate funding should be scaled up from a floor of \\$100bn/yr to more ambitious levels beyond 2020, but it also wants the base of donor countries to be enlarged.

South-south co-operation — where richer developing countries provide financial support to poorer developing countries — is already a reality, Canete said, in reference to China's \\$2bn commitment to the South-South Co-operation Fund. And eight other developing countries have also committed finance to the UN's Green Climate Fund, although many are unwilling to have binding commitments under the proposed Paris deal.

But some developing nations concede that the long-standing division between industrialised and non-industrialised countries, established under the principle of common-but-differentiated-responsibilities-capabilities, needs to be revised.

Least developed countries (LDCs) support differentiation that takes into account past, current and future responsibilities, Gambia's environment and climate change minister, Pa Ousman Jarju, said.

"There is a paradigm shift [on differentiation] — we have realised it is in the collective interest of everybody," Jarju said.

A future regime has to account for cumulative historic as well as future emissions, so those who will be emitting more need to take responsibility, the minister said. Top emitter China has signalled that it is taking responsibility by funding south-south co-operation, he added.

In terms of the provision on climate finance, the formulation of "willing and in a position to do so" implicitly applies only to developing countries, according to Jarju. "No developed country must start talking about national circumstances [or] economic situations — it is an obligation for them," he said

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who is serving as the president of the 21st Conference of the Parties (Cop 21) summit, has hinted that contributions may come from a broader origin, but still said this would be "on a voluntary basis".

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Christiana Figueres, has also repeatedly said that while voluntary contributions from richer developing states would be welcome, the onus remains on rich nations to meet their mandatory obligation of providing \\$100bn/yr by 2020.

Meanwhile two facilitators, Gabon's minister of foreign affairs Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet and Germany's state secretary for the environment, Jochen Flasbarth, are overseeing talks on implementation, which includes finance, technology transfer and capacity building.

Fabius is pushing ministers to have a draft text ready by 9 December. The UN summit is scheduled to end by 11 December, although Cops often run past their intended closing date.