Topic: UNFCCC

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2005 is a comprehensive view of global, anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The chart in this working paper is an updated version of the original chart, which appeared in Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy (WRI, 2005).

As country representatives meet under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to forge a new climate agreement, a major challenge dominates discussions: how can a system be created to assure that countries are held accountable for their commitments and actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and their obligations to provide technology, finance and capacity building support? This working paper seeks to facilitate progress on this critical component of a successful climate agreement. It aims to help policy-makers, UNFCCC negotiators and civil society groups navigate the complexity of the “MRV” challenge by focusing attention on central questions in advance of the December talks in Copenhagen and presenting country positions to date.

Technology is one of the four “pillars” of a post- 2012 climate policy laid out in the Bali Action Plan (BAP). In practice a multilateral climate agreement will not be the primary driver of clean technology development, deployment, and transfer. But given the central importance of this issue in the BAP, the provisions for technology in the evolving climate agreement will have a major bearing on the success of negotiations. Designed correctly, they may also play an important complementary role in facilitating the adoption of clean technologies.

This paper reviews Party submissions to the UNFCCC and identifies emerging areas of consensus and debate that may offer constructive grounds for negotiations going forward. The paper explores how an international agreement might facilitate and encourage a range of technology cooperation efforts by channeling funding, providing a forum for capacity building and learning exchange, and creating a framework for measuring, reporting, and verifying support and actions.

This working paper aims to clarify the issues around insurance mechanisms designed to improve resilience among the poor to climate change impacts. We hope the analysis will inform the ongoing insurance discussions at the UNFCCC in the build up to the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in December 2009.

This paper seeks to facilitate progress on the provisions in the BAP by examining how Chinese climate change policy and the implementation of these policies is monitored at the domestic level and may offer insights to the international community as they consider an international structure for measuring, reporting and verifying developing country actions. China provides a rich set of examples of such policies due to its active efforts to cut its growth in energy use and reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. The paper therefore looks at mitigation policies and measures in China across a variety of sectors and at policies and measures that employ both qualitative and quantitative measurement systems.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change employs a system of national communications and greenhouse gas inventories to monitor implementation of the Convention. This analysis examines the strengths and weaknesses of that system in the context of a post-2012 international climate change agreement, considering the Bali Action Plan provisions on measurement, reporting, and verification. It concludes that while the existing system contains elements that can support some parts of a post-2012 framework, a significant retrofit, accompanied by new processes, will be needed to measure, report, and verify the obligations envisioned in the Bali Action Plan.

This report looks beyond quantifying emissions reductions at a more flexible approach for recognizing mitigation actions being taken by developing countries in the forest sector. This approach ensures that countries with high historical emissions are not necessarily favored for support, and it allows for a broader set of MRV criteria to capture country’s efforts to change the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation.

Even though climate change affects countries differently, all countries will need to perform many of the same adaptation functions, such as climate information management and public engagement in adaptation planning. At the end of 2008, the World Resources Institute convened a technical workshop in Bellagio, Italy to begin enumerating a shared set of critical adaptation functions. The resulting “Bellagio Framework” can help identify strengths and gaps in adaptation capacities in a given country, as a basis for prioritizing adaptation actions and investments.