Keen watchers of the UN climate talks are used to turning their eyes to Bonn each June for the mid-year negotiating session. But this year, to watch European climate diplomacy in action it’s worth keeping an eye on the grand halls and garden parties in Brussels.
EU summits with Caribbean and Latin American leaders, China and African countries are all scheduled for June and July, following the G7 in Germany. This summer, European leaders can’t avoid joining the conversation on climate.
These summits offer quite a different opportunity to the normal UN climate conferences. Free from the contested policy detail of the negotiation corridors, these high-level discussions allow for more leaders to engage in more candid conversations with other statesmen and women. They are the perfect moment to share visions for the Paris deal and, more importantly, the international climate regime it should establish. The conversations between Heads of State and Government will inevitably focus on questions of national interest, and offer an opportunity to bridge the gap in understanding in motivations and expectations for COP 21.
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The impact of climate change is posing a growing threat to peace and security. Germany is therefore putting climate and security on the Security Council’s agenda.
Russia’s economic development minister warned last week that the EU’s plans to deploy a carbon tax at the bloc’s borders will not be in line with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, just as Brussels doubled down on the idea of green tariffs.
Few places have suffered more from the COVID-19 pandemic than southern China, the region where the novel coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan. But it turned out that the pandemic is not the only calamity to befall south China this year. The region has been inundated by heavy rainfall since late May, creating a risk of catastrophic flooding.
Natural resources-based conflicts are sometimes made complex by non-climate push and pull factors, like unemployment and political tension. These factors should be taken into account when developing and implementing a peacebuilding strategy, making sure all stakeholders are at the table – including those fueling the conflict. The online workshop ‘Integrating peacebuilding and climate change mitigation efforts in natural resource management’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex issue.