Three panels carried out this Thursday (14), in the Regional Climate Foundations Pavilion, addressed different strategies to obtain better responses to the climate crisis. On “The Crux of Bolder NDC” debate, think-thanks representatives from three different continents showed their strategies to assist policy-makers on designing solutions to adaptation and mitigation.
The first tip for getting an output is to get different stakeholders together to talk about it. “What I really love about this job is that we connect the dots, to put these people used to be stuck in their bubbles to dialogue”, explained Joanna Maćkowiak-Pandera, CEO at Forum Energii, from Poland. A characteristic only feasible if your organisation is really independent, she added.
The second is to support the conversations with reliable data, evidence, and analysis. “This is critical to build confidence among the policymakers, and set up bold policy targets”, said Marco Giuli, Project Manager at Climate-Neutral Industry EU. Make the right questions is also essential: “Public policies’ failure occur because the state doesn’t address the problems in details”, said Tracy Ledger, a leader at Public Affairs Research Institute. “The role of think-thanks is to ask the questions that have been forgotten by the state”.
The third suggestion is to be aware of the specific reality that you want to change — a policy that worked in Indonesia might not be the best one for a community in South Africa. “The perfect policy in the paper is only a paper if doesn’t work in the reality”, completed Ledger. And it is important to know how to present the question to the policymakers, that are usually people that need a “narrative” to pursue the voters. If climate change doesn’t matter for the majority of the population, for example, organisations can push an energy transition policy by the economic argument, in the case they cost less.
This was the strategy used by Bishal Thapa, Senior Director India Program at CLASP. With 38 consecutive days in New Dehli with temperatures of 45 celsius degrees, he realized that the population would expand all their economies in air conditioners: the demand for electricity would increase and, with it, the country’s carbon footprint. It gets worse: the air conditioners available on the market were inefficient and expansive. So, he worked to improve technology on this equipment, that reduced the cost and increased the efficiency.
The energy transition was also the subject of the panel “Accelerating tripling renewable energy”, moderated by Isabelle de Lovinfosse, head of diplomacy at Tara Climate Foundation. In the debate, the speakers presented successful actions in four different Asian countries that are pushing to achieve the goal defined in COP28.
Zou Ji, president and CEO of Energy Foundation China, Kairos Dela Cruz, executive director at the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities in Philippine, Khalid Waleed a researcher at Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Pakistan and Tomomi Hirakami, from the Japan Climate Initiative, told to the audience local cases in that the governments were able to induce energy transition policies in theire contries.
“There were progresses in achieving the Paris Agreement goals, but a significative gap of 30% behind the goal remains. The solution is renewable, renewable and renewable”, told to the audience Zhou. “This is also very critical, because without achieving the targets we can’t expect high ambition”, concluded.
Metrics matter
The last panel on this subject, “Climate Adaptation in Global South Countries: Metrics and Financing”, claimed for more comprehensive metrics to measure the progress on climate targets. “For now, what we have is a list of several indicators that cover seven domains, as health, food, water, infrastructure, ecosystems. But we need much more complex indicators that can be address the progress in a crosscut system”, says Andrêa Ferreira, a senior researcher at the Brazilian scientific institute Iyaleta.
Almost ten years after the Paris Agreement, the speakers highlighted they don’t have the best metrics to measure the impacts of the adaptation agenda — which is complicated because it depends on local solutions, but that must be measured in a global picture, to allow comparison of the progress of each action. “At that moment it isn’t clear how we can deliver together a global goal, using local experience”, pointed out Maria Pilar Del Bueno Cunha, from the Argentinian Adaptation Research Association.
“Every day a solution is implemented, but they do not inform the big picture. Isolated, local experiences don’t tell the story globally”, reinforced Marcia Toledo, who is the director of Adaptation and Resilience at the UN Climate Champion Team. “It is critical to know how we navigate complexity at the same time doing it manageable”, completed.
The solution, agreed the panellists, it is to bring together science, evidence, experience. And do collective work. “We need to create evidence to support decision make, develop indicators to track progress in the adaptation agenda. But we must do this remembering that the main objective is to eliminate inequities”, explained Ferreira.
According to the speakers, the centre of climate action and resilience is people, and so, the metrics should be able to measure social and economics layers, in a way that they could cross many subjects. They are all concern about how to measure the impacts for specific populations, using metrics related to gender or ethnics, for example.
A concrete case was given by Lucas Nassar Sousa, a director at LabCidade, an organisation from Belém do Pará, where the next COP will be. “This is the first time in history that mostly people live in cities, not in the rural areas. For 2050, it is expected that this amount increase in extra 2.5 billion persons. How can we think good cities for all these people in so short time, without metrics”?
The answer, he added, could be hidden under the Amazon forest: the huge ancient Amazon communities that are being discovered right now thanks to aeroplanes equipped with sensors. “We now have a lot of archaeological evidence that existed hundred of cities before the Portuguese came, and that more people lived in those cities than the current population in the Amazon. They had an infrastructure that our cities don’t have right now, and all was so synchronized with nature, that we need technology to discover it. We have a lot to learn with them”, he said.
“We need to reduce the number of indicators, and create new metrics that can aggregate several dimensions to use in the negotiation rooms”, claimed Ferreira. “This would only possible if many experts with different backgrounds work together, focusing on the complexity. So then we can move to achieve a goal, make society more resilient, and without leaving any people behind”, concluded.
