CRIBs (Climate Relevant Innovation-system Builders): a powerful new focus for international climate technology policy

This briefing suggests some key ways in which the UNFCCC architecture could be extended in order to strengthen National Systems of Innovation (NISs) to achieve more transformative rates of climate technology transfer and development via the creation of “Climate Relevant Innovation-system Builders” (CRIBs). This policy briefing builds on an invited presentation by one of the authors at a workshop on NSIs convened by the Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It identifies policy recommendations for consideration of the TEC. The intention is both to inform possible recommendations by the TEC to the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) and to highlight potential areas for future work that the TEC could undertake on this issue

Improving technology transfer through national systems of innovation: climate relevant innovation-system builders (CRIBs)

The Technology Executive Committee (TEC) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recently convened a workshop seeking to understand how strengthening national systems of innovation (NSIs) might help to foster the transfer of climate technologies to developing countries. This article reviews insights from the literatures on Innovation Studies and Socio-Technical Transitions to demonstrate why this focus on fostering innovation systems has potential to be more transformative as an international policy mechanism for climate technology transfer than anything the UNFCCC has considered to date. Based on insights from empirical research, the article also articulates how the existing architecture of the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism could be usefully extended by supporting the establishment of CRIBs (climate relevant innovation-system builders) in developing countries – key institutions focused on nurturing the climate-relevant innovation systems and building technological capabilities that form the bedrock of transformative, climate-compatible technological change and development

Climate Finance: Fears and Hopes for Developing Countries

This article looks at the current climate finance architecture and its impact on developing countries climate change responses. The primary aim is to capture the contradictions that exist in the climate finance architecture particularly between those recommended by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and those advanced by developed countries otherwise known as non-UNFCCC climate financing mechanisms. The overall observation is that once non-UNFCCC climate financing mechanisms emerged and the more they were justified using the UNFCCC, the global response to the climate change problem was fatally wounded through a procedural derailment of UNFCCC objectives. This article calls for a review of non-UNFCCC with the aim of divesting them of the profit factor which in this case is the problematic. Keywords: Climate, Finance, Mechanisms, Governance, Privatization, Stalemate

A Copenhagen Collar: Achieving Comparable Effort Through Carbon Price Agreements

The global financial crisis proves how unforeseen macroeconomic conditions can affect policies aimed at reducing and stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. It has made voters uneasy about potential climate policy that could raise energy costs and unemployment. To improve the political stability of any policy agreement emerging from this December’s annual meeting on the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, and to ensure the comparability of commitments and ease the inclusion of developing countries, the authors propose that the UNFCCC supplement emissions targets with a price collar. This paper outlines an example that shows that a price collar can have a negligible expected impact on the outcome that matters most for the climate—increasing emissions.

Analysis of the Copenhagen Accord pledges and its global climatic impacts‚ a snapshot of dissonant ambitions

This analysis of the Copenhagen Accord evaluates emission reduction pledges by individual countries against the Accord's climate-related objectives. Probabilistic estimates of the climatic consequences for a set of resulting multi-gas scenarios over the 21st century are calculated with a reduced complexity climate model, yielding global temperature increase and atmospheric CO2 and CO2-equivalent concentrations. Provisions for banked surplus emission allowances and credits from land use, land-use change and forestry are assessed and are shown to have the potential to lead to significant deterioration of the ambition levels implied by the pledges in 2020. This analysis demonstrates that the Copenhagen Accord and the pledges made under it represent a set of dissonant ambitions. The ambition level of the current pledges for 2020 and the lack of commonly agreed goals for 2050 place in peril the Accord's own ambition: to limit global warming to below 2 °C, and even more so for 1.5 °C, which is referenced in the Accord in association with potentially strengthening the long-term temperature goal in 2015. Due to the limited level of ambition by 2020, the ability to limit emissions afterwards to pathways consistent with either the 2 or 1.5 °C goal is likely to become less feasibl

Staying on Track from Paris: Advancing the Key Elements of the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 provides essential building blocks for universal action to address climate change. Now, much work is needed to breathe life into the provisions and commitments of the Agreement in order to realize the globally agreed vision to limit temperature rise, build the ability to adapt to climate impacts, and align financial flows toward zerocarbon and climate-resilient development. The Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must continue to cooperate effectively to unpack and clarify the key tasks and activities outlined in the Agreement in order to provide a well-defined pathway to implementation. This paper takes an in-depth look at the Paris Agreement, highlighting important outcomes and the tasks and activities that now need to be undertaken to elaborate and develop the critical rules and processes under the Agreement. Ensuring that these rules and processes are strong and effective will be essential to promoting ambitious climate action and accelerating it in the coming years

The UN local communities and Indigenous peoples' platform: A traditional ecological knowledge-based evaluation

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.This review evaluates the potential of the proposed local communities and Indigenous peoples’ platform to effectively engage traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for climate policy. Specifically, we assess the platform's potential to enable greater representation and participation of Indigenous peoples (IPs) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). An analytical framework based on the extensive TEK and environmental management literature is developed, with a set of criteria identified against which to evaluate the platform. We find that although the process of designing the platform appears to be inclusive of Indigenous views, the structure itself does not recognize the roles that unequal power relations and colonialism play in marginalizing IPs. Limited attention is paid to the institutional barriers within the UNFCCC and the drawbacks of pursuing knowledge “integration” as an end in itself. Based on this, recommendations for improving the platform structure are put forward including using a rights based framing, giving greater decision-making power to IPs, and developing mechanisms to ensure the holistic integrity of TEK and build the overall resilience of climate mitigation and adaptation systems.Ye