Independent Diplomat

RMI / CLIMATE CHANGE

ID's multi-faceted work on climate change focuses on providing direct and strategic diplomatic support, advice and assistance to the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in navigating international diplomatic processes on climate change. ID aims to help build momentum within and outside the negotiations towards the adoption of a global, legally binding and environmentally credible post-2012 agreement.

Background

Since early 2009, ID has worked with the RMI Mission to the UN and on the inside of international negotiations as a member of the RMI delegation, attending all international climate talks throughout the year in the lead up to, and including, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009.

While helping to pursue RMI's national priorities in the negotiations as an extremely vulnerable low-lying atoll nation, ID's work also aims to energize and strengthen the influence of AOSIS, a coalition of 42 island and low-lying coastal nations that are among the world's most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. For example, ID attended and contributed to a key strategy meeting of AOSIS negotiators in Grenada in July 2009, and assisted AOSIS Missions in New York with preparations for the AOSIS Leaders' Summit in New York on 21 September and the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Event on Climate Change the following day.

In the UNFCCC negotiations, ID's participation on the RMI delegation included leading roles with the AOSIS legal drafting and mitigation negotiating groups, advocating powerfully and persuasively AOSIS positions and proposals at the negotiating table, and helping to broaden support for the AOSIS policy platform.  On the legal drafting group, ID's efforts focused on the drafting and submission of the ‘AOSIS proposal for the survival of the Kyoto Protocol and a Copenhagen Protocol to Enhance the Implementation of the UNFCCC', the first elaborated proposal from any UNFCCC negotiating group for a new, post-2012, legally binding international climate regime.  

Given the group's negotiating stance and position at the front line of climate impacts, a stronger and more diplomatically nimble AOSIS - in both New York and in the UNFCCC - means a better chance of an ambitious, science-based and environmentally credible international agreement. While the outcomes at the Copenhagen Climate Summit were largely disappointing, and despite other political challenges ahead, enhanced advocacy by AOSIS of its proposal for a new climate treaty will be important for helping to rebuild political momentum in 2010.

In 2010 and beyond, ID's project aims to ensure that the post-2012 international climate change regime reflects and addresses the key concerns and priorities of RMI and the broader AOSIS group, in particular:

• limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels;
• seeking steep and deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions to at least 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050;
• a massive scaling up of, and simplified access to, financing for adaptation to the impacts of sea-level rise and climate-related loss of ecosystem services and key natural assets;
• ensuring the availability of international climate ‘insurance' to compensate island communities for slow-onset damage to coastal property, fresh water reservoirs and offshore coral and fisheries resources, as well as more immediate damage caused by more frequent and intense tropical storms; and
• highlighting the security implications of climate change, issues of territorial integrity, political boundaries (including maritime zones) and assistance for possible climate-driven and forced population relocation.

Other work

ID was commissioned in mid-2009 to produce a number of national economic and political analysis briefs for use by senior staff of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International in the lead up to various global and regional head of state meetings in the context of last year's international climate negotiations.