Leveraging climate finance for implementing Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) has been one of the biggest challenges for NAMA developers in the past years. A new financial package up to €85 million by the NAMA Facility invites NAMA support project outlines by 15 July 2015 and beefs up existing NAMA finance to about €150 million.
Following the temporary suspension of the controversial CDM hydroelectric project Barro Blanco in February, Panama’s government acknowledges “recurring administrative flaws and improper handling” by the company in charge. After its dismissal, a new roundtable is now convened to analyse how the project can continue under a new management and “in accordance with the well-being of the communities”. The crucial decision to continue financing the project is now up to the German and Dutch development banks.
This week, European policymakers have provisionally agreed on a fix for the EU’s carbon market that is suffering from an oversupply of pollution permits and yielding record-low prices. While this is a great step forward, a permanent solution to tackle the glut of pollution permits is needed as part of the upcoming legislative proposal to overhaul the EU’s carbon market for the period after 2020.
This week, the European Commission released new data on the number and origin of carbon offsets used in 2014 by companies in the EU’s carbon market. Despite new eligibility criteria to incentivize investments in poor countries, the majority of offsets come from China, Ukraine and Russia. Moreover, lack of transparency gives a carte blanche to companies to choose projects with negative environmental and social impacts. As policies for large scale mitigation investments are currently being designed, these findings can provide valuable lessons.
As the EU and Switzerland are about to conclude the technical negotiations to link the EU and Swiss carbon markets in the coming months, a new policy brief and report by Carbon Market Watch show that the EU must increase its climate target to avoid diluting domestic emission reduction obligations with foreign allowances from the Swiss carbon market.
6 May 2015, Brussels. European policymakers provisionally agreed to start implementing the reform of the EU’s Emissions Trading System on 1 January 2019 and put the pollution permits that were due to come back to the market by 2020 directly into the new Market Stability Reserve. Carbon Market Watch welcomes this first step to fix the EU’s carbon market but cautions that the upcoming revision of the EU ETS will need to permanently tackle the glut of pollution permits.
5 May 2015, Brussels. As the EU and Switzerland are about to conclude negotiations to link the EU and the Swiss carbon markets, a new report shows that benefits of linking carbon markets may be outweighed by the risks, such as reduced overall emissions abatement, lower domestic investments and co-benefits as well as a loss of public funds. The report also finds concerns about public participation and transparency provisions and provides recommendations for the EU ETS revision.
The inclusion of international flights into the EU’s carbon market was one factor that created momentum for a global, rather than regional, measure to address aviation emissions. Recognizing Europe’s potential importance in the ongoing negotiations towards a global market based measure, open letters from fifteen NGOs across Europe were sent to EU’s transport and environment/climate ministers, calling on them to step up in promoting emissions reductions from aviation – a fast-growing and polluting sector.
During the Geneva session of climate negotiations held in February 2015, 18 countries made a joint pledge to extend the integration of human rights in the climate change regime by including human rights expertise in their climate delegations. This initiative offers an opportunity to support the inclusion of references to human rights in the Paris 2015 climate agreement.
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