Come on EU

In a press release issued in the last hour Environment NGOs have responded to the recent Norway proposal by calling on the EU to fight back with the least developed countries and others who still believe that a strong deal is both necessary and possible.

Norway’s proposal sends responsibility for action on bunkers back to ICAO and IMO without any sense of urgency or commitment to absolute reduction targets other than a vague reference to keeping warming below 2 degrees. There is also no reference to the pivotal role that bunker revenues can play in climate finance. Norway’s proposal risks continued inaction and political paralysis. The whole idea of raising the aviation and shipping issue in Copenhagen was to use the occasion of wider negotiations to break the political deadlock and agree a fast track to introduce reduction measures. That chance is now slipping away as is the likelihood of releasing billions of dollars of urgently needed additional climate finance.

In order to break the bunkers deadlock, environmental NGOs call on:
* All delegations to act on the urgency of the situation and have Copenhagen link early global action to reduce bunker emissions to a significant program of climate finance for developing countries.
* The Copenhagen Agreement to set the level of ambition, the framework for revenue distribution and a fast track timeline to agree on global measures in ICAO and IMO.
* The United States to declare its willingness to use revenues from bunker mitigation as climate finance. Such a declaration from the USA would quickly trigger a developed country (Annex 1) offer of climate finance in return for global bunker mitigation.
* Emerging economies to agree to participate in a global bunker mitigation process or see regional measures imposed by the EU and USA without any access to the revenues generated.
* Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to support bunker measures on the condition that routes to their countries will be exempted and revenues will flow to the most vulnerable states.
* Latin American countries to accept that any trade impacts will be low for them and, in any case, more than compensated by access to climate financing.
* OPEC to support bunker measures provided a proportion of revenues are used for clean technologies within the sector.