Lucas Frye: Almost Out of Time (COP24 Day 6)

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​            The end of the first week of the COP drawing near, facilitators were becoming visibly more anxious to produce streamlined documents to present to the environmental ministers set to arrive for week two negotiations. This was evident in the sixth day’s APA agenda item 7 talks, where there was a good bit of tension between the co-facilitators who had produced a second iteration of the draft document and the Parties who weren’t too fond of it. As an attempt to move towards a “landing zone” or a document with fewer options and less bracketed texts which could get in the way of consensus further in the process, the draft conclusion was significantly slimmed down and Parties took turns berating the removal of their respective preferred sections and the general loss of balance in the representation of their views. In addition, many delegates were annoyed by the late release of this document, a mere thirty minutes before this session began. As such, few had had the chance to fully parse the document and the position of the co-facilitators was essentially “you have the room; work on finding solutions until our next meeting this afternoon”. Of course, the hour would instead be spent with the Parties asking for guidance on how to move forward (with many insisting that it simply could not done with such essential elements removed) and asking for the options in the first iteration back in the negotiating text. After each intervention, the co-facilitators attempted to calmly remind Parties of the rapidly approaching deadline for the completion of the working group’s agenda item and pleaded with them to use that time to find common ground with one another. I was unable to attend the second session of the day, but it would become clear that the effort of the co-chairs of the APA to push things forward faster met with similar pushback in the other agenda items.
            I attended another side event, this time at the Indonesian pavilion. Several countries and organizations operated pavilions in an area separate from most of the meeting rooms, where side events and exhibits were held to demonstrate those nations’ specific contributions to sustainability technology and climate policy. These spots were also well-populated due to the free food and merch goodies available to event attendees, like cappuccinos at France, exotic meat samples at Poland, and ornate bags and bottles of powdered ginger at Indonesia (I wasn’t just holiday shopping, okay?). The event I attended, which followed a traditional dance routine in an open area of the pavilion, was titled “Traditional Society Actions in the Changing Climate” and detailed the role of indigenous knowledge and rights in reducing domestic carbon emissions. The first speaker was Mina Susana Setra, Deputy to the Secretary General of the Indigenous People Alliance of the Archipelago-Indonesia, who explained her organization’s work in getting the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to recognize indigenous people’s customary lands. According to the ministry’s requirements for this recognition, it is estimated that 5.7 million hectares of customary forest has the potential to be recognized and this organization has worked to map out these areas and assist in the paperwork required for local governments to maneuver the process. This work was underscored by the large carbon sequestration potential from these large swaths of land and the high economic value that their ecosystem services can provide to indigenous communities given proper management.
            Next was Agung Wibowo, Senior Researcher at The Association of Community- and Ecology-Based Legal Transformation, who discussed frameworks for dealing with customary forest in Indonesian law. The legal system in Indonesia, in accordance with the third amendment to its constitution, recognizes adat, or the customary law of indigenous peoples within the country. This and several key constitutional court decisions have also created a process for territories and forests to be granted back to these peoples, in a process which has accelerated under the current president, Joko Widodo. In the future, this association hopes to augment the land rights of indigenous peoples by the further reform of land rights law, increased recognition of human rights within the country, and harmonization of policies affecting different sectors. Following Wibowo was Aristia H. Wanjaya, Program Manager for the IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative. If you’re curious, IDH also means Sustainable Trade Initiative, but in Dutch. This presentation focused on the various ways sustainable production and trade can benefit people economically. By assisting local communities with implementing agricultural best practices, capacity-building for production and protection of ecosystem-specific commodities, and access to markets and finance, this organization has sought to benefit the capability of these groups to grow their economic output and prosperity. In Indonesia, these efforts have focused on improving the sustainable production of mangrove honey and coconut charcoal as trade commodities and operation of ecotourism ventures.
            Next in line was Vadis Vik, Environmental Counselor at the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C., who gave a brief overview of the Indonesia-Norway REDD+ Agreement. REDD+ is perhaps the most marvelous acronym I came across at this conference, because the plus operates like Hermione Granger’s bag, holding far more words than any reasonable initialism would normally allow. The full expansion is “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries”. How neat is that? Anyway, this agreement provides pay-for-performance financing, that is, Norway gives Indonesia up to US$1 billion for achieving verified GHG emissions reductions. After gracefully sidestepping a question about future amendments to this agreement, she gave the floor to the final speaker of the event, Monica Tanuhandaru, Executive Director of Kemitraan: The Partnership for Governance Reform, who spoke of her group’s efforts to work with civil society organizations and government agencies to—you guessed it—reform governance. Her presentation focused on the local wisdom and traditional knowledge held by indigenous groups about preserving forests. Many villages in Indonesia depend on the forest and the services it provides for their livelihood, but have disproportionately less access to that forest and the rights pertaining to it relative to corporations and the state. This discrepancy is made that much more important by the increased vulnerability of these local communities to the effects of climate change. Social forestry efforts in the country aim to legalize access by local peoples to the forest by the issuance of management and use permits. Another major effort is to simplify regulations that pose a barrier to the return of farms to their customary claimants. Social forestry is implemented in national policy as part of Indonesia’s NDC, due to the high carbon value in forested area (deforestation would reduce in huge net emissions growth). In addition, forest upkeep provides income for poor communities and thus fits into the country’s sustainable development efforts. Social forestry also provides a platform for testing possible incentives for sustainable forest management. As an example of the successes of this program, key examples of the improvement of degraded forest by returning the land rights to indigenous peoples were presented. Further, it was shown that long-term facilitated social forestry sites have led to greater economic benefits than new forests. Recommendations from the talk included delegating parts of the permitting process to local governments to accelerate application review, formulation of a multi-stakeholder working group on social forestry to speed up development and verification of proposals, increased financial support from the central government, and stronger cooperation between different bodies within the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. As someone who went into this conference with very science-minded interests, I felt I learned a lot about the role of traditional knowledge in sustainably managing ecosystems, something rarely encountered in the academic study of environmental science.
            Later, at an APA stocktaking meeting, where the APA co-chairs checked up with progress on all of the discussed agenda items, I heard more of what the Parties at the APA 7 meeting had expressed earlier: the new iterations of draft proposals went too far in eliminating options. Nearly every single negotiating group went through a laundry list of issues with the work of the co-facilitators, which in their view had thrown concern for reflecting the Parties’ views out of the window. Saudi Arabia and the US went so far as to suggest that their ministers would not even participate in discussing a document that did not meet certain criteria. Even Switzerland, which expressed many of the same concerns as the co-chairs that progress was not quick enough, slipped in a couple of points about paragraphs they needed to see back in the documents. Despite the co-chairs’ best efforts at urging the Parties to be “solution-oriented”, it seemed that for the moment, such solutions were still out of reach. This second-to-last day of the first week of negotiations (and my time at the COP) seemed to be a microcosm of that charge of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 °C, that we are almost out of time, but not yet out of time.