Negotiators entered last week’s Bonn session with a lengthy to-do list. Whilst they struggled to get through it all, they did begin getting their teeth into some tricky issues. Parties begun sketching out the shape of the agreement, working together to address pre-2020 ambition and bringing clarity to an outcome for adaptation and loss & damage. The to-do list hasn’t gone away, there is still a lot to play for but never fear with the next Bonn session scheduled for the 19th of October we’ll be back before you know it.
Teamwork
The co-chairs made it clear from the get-go that only elements supported by multiple parties or blocks could go the distance to Paris. Progress wasn’t uniform and some elements were addressed better than others but there were a few glimmers of teamwork worth noting. The G77 presented a united front on the inclusion of loss & damage in the agreement. The EU began making up for its previous lacking attempts to work with allies in AILAC and vulnerable country groupings through a renewed and proactive focus on pre-2020 ambition and adaptation.
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2019 has only just begun, but it is already hard to imagine that there will be other extreme weather events with disastrous consequences such as cyclone Idai happening again this year. In all likelihood, such events will continue to occur as 2019 rolls on. Idai is, once more, proof of how devastating and toxic the mix of climate change, extreme weather events and poverty can be: Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe – countries that rank low in human development but contribute very little to global greenhouse gas emissions – suffer from some of the worst impacts of climate change.
adelphi has relaunched its exhibition Environment, Conflict and Cooperation (ECC) Exhibition to illustrate how unprecedented environmental changes interact with social, political, and economic risks to exacerbate conflict. We invite you to explore our online exhibition and to learn more about urgent issues of our time: climate, energy, migration, extractives, food and water.
Climate security risks are, by all interpretations, a global threat. But when it comes to setting a political climate security agenda, a handful of countries stand out. In an interview with Climate Diplomacy, Michaela Spaeth, Director for Energy and Climate Policy at the German Federal Foreign Office, highlights some of Germany’s goals and challenges in forwarding the issue during its 2019-20 membership in the UN Security Council.
The Planetary Security Conference 2019, which concluded on 20 February, saw a number of workshops being held on the Sahel region and specifically Mali, one of the Conference’s three spotlight regions. These workshops examined the region’s climate-water-security risks as well as the #doable actions and solutions to address these issues.