The European Union: understanding and supporting NAMAs
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Although NAMAs refer to mitigation actions by Non-Annex I parties, Annex I parties have a crucial role to play in supporting such actions. Representing 27-member states across the European continent, the European Union (EU) is a key party with regards to Annex I parties’ approach to NAMAs. Following the Cancun Agreements, the two latest rounds of international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 1 , have been accompanied with workshops to discuss the further development of NAMAs. Although these discussions have not narrowed the gap between proposed and necessary actions to achieve the two-degree target 2 , it revealed what points require further attention in order to move forward. In the following, we describe a number of issues raised by the EU negotiators, most notably through a speech by the chief negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger, at the workshop on NAMAs held in Bonn 3 . The presentation and questions put forth by EU representatives to Non-Annex I parties during the workshop focussed on two main areas: the understanding of NAMAs and the support for NAMAs. Understanding of NAMAs The COP-decisions reached in Cancun in 2010 were an important step to include NAMAs in the international climate negotiation process, but the workshops conducted in Bangkok and Bonn in 2011 showed that a number of questions still remain unanswered. A prime concern is that it is by no means clear what NAMAs actually are. The scope for interpretation as to what NAMAs should contain although significant has led to a large variation in their design to date. The EU raised a number of questions in order to increase the understanding and thus increase its approach to support NAMAs. While the Non-Annex I parties are not obliged to submit economy-wide quantifiable emission reduction targets, a number of countries including China and India, have done so. A first issue in this respect concerns the assumptions used in these targets. Some countries have expressed their targets in relation to businessas-usual (BAU) scenarios. Such scenarios require assumptions, such as a baseline and expectations of future developments, and the EU consequently raised the question of how parties arrived to their BAU calculations. Also, some countries expressed a target based on expected gross domestic product (GDP) developments, for which the EU sought further clarification on assumptions of economic growth. NAMAs include propositions for mitigation action, but the expected impacts in terms of emission reductions from these actions are, however, not clear. Against this background, the EU expressed concerns regarding the estimation and communication of the expected impacts. A clearer view of the effects would bring important lessons of what is needed for implementation forward tailoring support to NonAnnex I parties in general and described actions in particular. Much work consequently remains to clarify NAMAs and understand how they are going to be implemented so that their potential can be unleashed. In this context, Runge-Metzger stressed a continuous dialogue between parties, in order to increase the understanding of NAMAs.
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