Topic: UNFCCC

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.

This discussion paper describes the state of play in the international negotiations at Poznan, Poland as Parties work to ensure an agreement on technology and financial support that enables mitigation in developing countries. It unpacks and analyzes Parties’ submissions on the topic to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) under the Convention as of December 2008. The analysis reveals some convergence and significant differences in views. Resolving these differences will require Parties to elaborate on their ideas, seek to understand the needs that underlie each others’ positions, and work together toward agreement on areas of common interest.

This paper focuses on what should be included in a new financial agreement under the UNFCCC; more specifically it proposes five specific components of a “new deal” to address technology barriers in developing countries. The paper reflects on ideas on technology and finance as put forth by countries in submissions to the UNFCCC secretariat as summarized in UNFCCC 2008. These submissions are summarized in a complementary WRI discussion paper titled From Position to Agreement: Technology and Finance at the UNFCCC (WRI 2008). We have also considered two UNFCCC documents that synthesize information on technology needs and financial barriers faced by non Annex 1 Parties to the Convention.

This paper explores key provisions of the Bali Action Plan (BAP), adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2007, that begin to address these questions as part of a road map to a post 2012 agreement. We review existing international climate change agreements, national climate change strategies, Party submissions to the international climate policy negotiation process and other background literature. We first discuss how developing countries frame nationally appropriate mitigation actions. We then consider what forms of technology, financing and capacity-building might support them, and how both mitigation actions and support might be made measurable, reportable and verifiable (MRV) in the context of an international agreement. We suggest that a robust MRV framework for mitigation actions and support can make an important contribution to equitable and environmentally effective mitigation. We therefore propose that the development of a set of principles to guide the inclusion of MRV in the international climate policy framework may help achieve this crucial outcome.

Note: This paper will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming book Climate Change and Global Poverty: A Billion Lives in the Balance?, by the Brookings Institution Press in 2009.