Week Two Delegation_Cindy Isenhour Introduction

By Cindy Isenhour 

The view from one of the apartments. 
The conference venue is the blue and green structure

Hello everyone! Greetings from Katowice, Poland!  I would like to start with a BIG thank you to Anna McGinn, Will Kochtitzky, Molly Schauffler and David Shauffler for their help securing awesome apartments for our delegation - right next to the conference center (many, many delegates are staying up to an hour away)!

So with that, a brief introduction to my focus here at at COP24.  As a University of Maine faculty member with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Climate Change Institute, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to be here to continue my research focused on the climate impacts of linear production-consumption-disposal systems — AND our efforts to address the associated emissions.  We've long understood and accounted for the emissions associated with energy production, but the attribution of mitigation responsibility becomes more ethically and technically complicated when the energy used to produce goods is emitted in one place, but the associated products and/or profits are accumulated in another. In these cases of internationally traded goods, it becomes more complicated to figure out who should be responsible for the associated emissions.   

I am specifically interested in proposals for alternative emissions accounting frameworks - designed to help international trading partners more equitably share mitigation responsibility all along international production-consumption chains and perhaps stimulate more aggressive mitigation. 

So, as with last year at COP23 in Bonn, Germany - I continue to follow developments on two articles of the Paris Agreement - in order to track the extent to which concerns about trade-embedded emissions make their way into official process:

Article 6: This article is focused on creating market and non-market mechanisms for international cooperation, including through Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (IMTOs - which allow countries to invest in and claim mitigation outcomes generated in other countries - often where assistance is needed, and where costs are lower). 

and…

Article 14: This article concerns the "global stocktake" - a central element of the Paris Agreement's bottom up model.  Mandated to take place every five years, the global stocktake is designed to assess national and collective progress and inspire increased ambition in the case of deficiencies. 

I am interested in these two articles, in part, because they present the clearest opportunity for parties to more equitably share mitigation responsibility.  Unfortunately, since my arrival on Monday morning, the negotiating streams centered on these issues have been closed to observers.  I will attend two sessions on Article six this afternoon - so should have an update for you soon!