1


Chapter 1. Introduction


Authors: Anne Olhoff (UNEP DTU Partnership) and John Christensen (UNEP DTU Partnership)


The year 2018 will most likely be the fourth warmest year on record since 1880, with the past five years the five warmest ever recorded (NOAA, 2018). In addition to increased temperatures, 2018 has experienced numerous other climate-related extremes, including devastating storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts, causing thousands of casualties and huge economic losses for citizens, companies and states. While it is difficult to attribute single events to climate change, the patterns are well aligned with the findings of the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (IPCC, 2018). The report details how climate variability and extreme events will escalate with increased global temperatures and determines that many impacts will be irreversible, even if temperatures decrease again in the long term. This Emissions Gap Report has benefited significantly from the IPCC Special Report and its underlying studies and scenarios.


In its decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), invited the IPCC to produce the special report on ‘the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related to global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty’.


The IPCC special report is a major scientific input to the political process of the United Nations Climate Convention, in which the Talanoa Dialogue plays a key role this year. Both the IPCC report and the Talanoa Dialogue are inputs to the stepwise ‘ramping-up’ mechanism of the Paris Agreement, created to address the huge gap between the level of ambition reflected by countries in their current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the level required to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement


specifies that countries must update their NDCs every five years and that each update should reflect progress in terms of enhanced ambition (UNFCCC, 2015). NDC updates will be informed by global stocktakes, the first of which will take place in 2023, leading to revised NDCs by 2025.


The 2018 Talanoa Dialogue1 is an important precursor


to the global stocktakes. It is convened by the UNFCCC as an inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue about future ambitions and current actions, designed to take initial stock of countries’ collective efforts and inform the preparation of new or updated NDCs to be communicated by 2020 (UNFCCC, 2015:4). The Dialogue consists of a preparatory and a political phase. During the preparatory phase, Parties and non-Party stakeholders are invited to submit inputs and participate in discussions addressing three questions: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there? So far, Parties and non-Party stakeholders have shared almost 500 stories, submitted over 280 written inputs and attended over 75 events (UNFCCC, 2018). This will be synthesized and presented at the 24th


session


of the Conference of the Parties (COP 24) in December 2018, where the political phase will take place, informed by the outcome of the preparatory phase, the IPCC special report and the forthcoming Yearbook of Global Climate Action (United Nations Climate Change Secretariat).


The Global Climate Action Summit held between 12 and 14 September 2018 in San Francisco was another significant event under the climate change political process. It brought together more than 4,500 local and regional government and business leaders and other non-state and subnational actors on climate change to showcase climate actions around the world (Global Climate Action Summit, 2018). The Summit resulted in more than 500 announcements to strengthen climate action by non-state and subnational actors.


1 Previously referred to as the ‘Facilitative Dialogue’, the Dialogue was re-named under the COP Presidency of Fiji in 2017.


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