COP21

The contours of Turkey's climate policy have remained almost intact over the past two decades. Being an Annex I party without any mitigation commitments, Turkey maintains a peculiar position under UNFCCC. Subsequent to 12 years of delay in signing both the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, Turkey had the highest rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions among the Annex I countries with 110.4% upsurge in the period 1990 and 2013. Yet with the new climate regime now in place, the country's mitigation pledges fall short of expectations both in terms of realistic projections and its ambition to step up in the post-2020 period. Climate policies in Turkey, an EU candidate and OECD founding member with a growing economy, remain under-investigated. Although the country has a wide range of policies and institutions in place, it shows limited progress in addressing climate change. Based on evidence from the literature, we observe that climate policies operationalize in Turkey insofar as they do not directly confront developmental ambitions, leaving policy diffusion with limited success. To provide a historic overview, we focus on climate policy development, actors, processes, and contemporary trends. Evidence shows that these are highly ridden with the politics of special circumstances: a notion that Turkey employs to refrain from bindings commitments. In order to go beyond special circumstances discourse, we argue the need for a bold policy shift in Turkey, a country subject to adverse impacts of climate change and high-carbon lock-in risk due to development policy preferences.

The new report published by NUPI, jointly contributed by its partner institutes in all ten ASEAN countries, analyses the consequences of climate change and climate policy toward international affairs in ASEAN. Both climate change and climate mitigation are likely to affect international affairs in ASEAN—in ways that are both good and bad—for example through forced migration, strains on food production, accelerated dam construction on the region’s international rivers on reduced dependency on fossil fuel imports. Major analysis and assessment in term of global energy transition, international climate-policy commitments of ASEAN countries, ASEAN's role on climate and energy policy as well as recommendations were put forward.

My contribution was more in part of how Cambodia has responded to the latter (including the country's perspective toward COP21; commitment, progress, and achievement; INDCs; major challenges and constraints).

The links between climate change and human rights are more widely accepted than ever before. The Human Rights Council has adopted a series of resolutions calling attention to the effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights, and the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC has also recognised that ‘the adverse effects of climate change have a range of direct and indirect implications for the effective enjoyment of human rights.’ While climate change impacts have implications for the human rights of individuals in all parts of the world, it is well established that the rights of those in already vulnerable situations are at particular risk. As sea levels rise and extreme weather events increase in frequency and magnitude, more and more people in such situations are expected to be displaced by disasters, some of them across international borders.

And yet, despite a growing recognition of the human rights implications of climate change, including in the context of human displacement, and despite an understanding that adherence to international human rights commitments and principles can help to strengthen policymaking in response to global warming, relatively few concrete steps have been taken to bring a human rights perspective to climate negotiations. Likewise, beyond expressing concern about a possible human rights protection gap for the increasing number of people who are expected to be displaced across borders in the context of climate change, the international community has not done enough to consider how to fill that gap. This Policy Report is an important step towards clarifying what UN bodies can and should do to begin to safeguard human rights against the effects of climate change, including in the context of human displacement.

« La gouverance globale des enjeux climatiques et ses limites » Diplomatie n°84, Janvier Février 2017, pp. 86-90 Climat – géoéconomie Entretien avec Jean Foyer et Lucile Maertens 1-Près d'un an après la signature de l'Accord de Paris peut-on parler d'un succès pour la COP21 et si oui comment l'expliquer ? JF : Parler de succès à propos de la COP21 dépend des critères que l'on se fixe et de quoi on parle. En tant qu'événement international de la gouvernance de l'environnement oui, sans aucun doute, la COP21 a été un grand succès au sens où elle a donné à la problématique climatique une visibilité qu'elle n'a probablement jamais atteinte. Comme nous l'avons analysé avec notre collectif de chercheur, la COP de Paris a été un grand moment de climatisation au sens où durant ces 15j, tous les problèmes du monde, des questions énergétiques aux questions religieuses en passant par les problèmes de sécurité ou d'alimentation ont été pensés à travers la grille climatique. La question climatique est devenue absolument incontournable et la conscience sociale du problème climatique s'est probablement aiguisée et renforcée, ce qui représente une avancée déjà considérable. D'un point de vue diplomatique, et il faut ici féliciter le travail considérable qui a été réalisé par la diplomatie française avec Laurent Fabius à sa tête, la COP21 est probablement un événement majeur au sens où elle a réanimé un multilatéralisme environnemental moribond. L'accord est, du point de vue des équilibres géopolitiques, un des meilleurs qui ait pu être signé. Les ratifications massives et l'entrée en vigueur très rapide du traité montrent qu'une dynamique politique internationale existe sur le climat, ce qui est également un signe positif. En revanche, et ça peut paraître paradoxal par rapport à ce que je viens de dire, si vous me demandez si l'accord de Paris est à la hauteur du problème qu'il est censé encadrer, je serai beaucoup plus prudent. Tout d'abord, on peut avoir des doutes quant à la solidité de l'accord signé et à sa vie future. Ce n'est pas seulement que l'accord et les engagements pris ne permettent absolument pas d'atteindre l'objectif fixé – un monde qui ne se réchaufferait pas au delà des 2°-c'est surtout que, pour le dire un peu sèchement, l'accord de Paris est dans une très large mesure un cadre flou et relativement vide qu'il faut désormais remplir en profitant de la dynamique de Paris qui serait irréversible. C'est la fameuse prophétie auto réalisatrice dont parle régulièrement Laurence Tubiana. Non seulement cette dynamique est loin d'être irréversible, mais ce manque de contenu est une limite évidente. Comme l'ont bien souligné mes collègues Stefan Aykut et Amy Dahan, le régime climatique international a fonctionné ces 20 dernières années un peu de manière autoréférentiel au sens où il apparaît chaque fois plus découplé avec des évolutions d'un commerce mondial et d'un développement toujours plus énergivore au Nord comme au Sud. Est ce que au delà du vernis diplomatique, l'accord de Paris a « les dents » pour combler ce déphasage en engendrant des changements nécessairement structurels dans les manières de produire et consommer l'énergie notamment ? Je ne crois malheureusement pas mais j'aimerais me tromper. La COP22 de Marrakech a déjà montré toute la difficulté à donner corps à cet accord dès qu'il s'agit de sujets plus difficiles comme l'agriculture ou bien les financements, et pendant ce temps, les projets basés sur la production et la consommation de CO2, de la construction de grandes

En la COP21 se lanzó el Fondo Climático de la Península de Yucatán, un instrumento para financiar acciones que reduzcan emisiones en el sector agropecuario y forestal, promuevan la adaptación al cambio climático y la movilidad sustentable. El lanzamiento del fondo es resultado de la Alianza México REDD+, una iniciativa de cooperación internacional financiada por USAID y ejecutada por organizaciones de la sociedad civil en el país.

This article explores the phenomenon of the use of ICT for climate change activism in the Pacific. Climate change activism in the Pacific is characterised by the use of ICT tools such as social media. The article draws on semi-structured interviews and an analysis of social media sites to examine the use of social media in Pacific climate change campaigns. While other campaigns such as relating to West Papua have also been facilitated by social media, it has been generally NGO, citizen-led and varied in Pacific government support. In contrast, climate change campaigns in the Pacific are fully supported at the NGO, citizen, and state levels. Furthermore, while early Pacific ICT-based climate change campaigns used iconic images of Pacific Islanders leaving their homelands, more recent campaigns have leveraged social media to depict Pacific Islanders not as victims but as 'warriors'. This new imagery aims to empower Pacific Islanders and engender a regional Pacific identity that shows strength and solidarity on the Pacific's stance towards climate change.

Climate change is often seen as a remote, complex or ‘unobtrusive’ topic by the general public – a topic about which many people acquire information mainly from media reporting. However, media landscapes are changing rapidly, particularly with the growth of the internet and social media. A number of new media organisations are challenging traditional media and have gained significant audiences for their environment content. We analyse the coverage by three of these – Huffington Post, Vice and BuzzFeed – of the COP21 summit in Paris at the end of 2015, and compare it with that of traditional media. We show that while the general spectrum of themes is similar across media outlets, there are differences in the volume of the coverage and in the emphasis that is laid on different themes by some, but not all, of the new players compared to traditional media.