The four partners of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda – Peru, France, the UN Secretary General’s Climate Change Support Team and the UNFCCC secretariat – briefed delegates at the Bonn Climate Change Conference on Monday 19 October on their plans to amplify the wealth of global climate action already underway.
Speaking at the event, Laurence Tubiana, Special Representative for the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, explained that the goal of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA) is to show that the global transformation to a low-carbon economy is happening, and that it can be accelerated after Paris.
With less than two months to go until COP21, Ms. Tubiana said state and non-state actors are responding to the call for an action-oriented COP.
Cooperative climate-action initiatives are gathering new members and setting high targets. The LPAA partners have seen and assessed more than 100 initiatives and 30 are already registered on the LPAA website. For example, the En.lighten initiative is speeding up the replacement of incandescent bulbs with more efficient bulbs by more than 60 governments and regions. A switch to efficient on-grid and off-grid lighting globally would save more than $140 billion and reduce CO2 emissions by 580 million tonnes every year.
Companies are taking new commitments in the run-up to the COP and using the NAZCA platform to showcase them. Half of the 4,279 commitments on NAZCA were made by companies: 60% of them have quantified individual commitments. The value of these companies is equivalent to the combined GDP of Japan, Germany and France.
Sub-nationals have seen growing mobilization throughout the year, with more than 1,700 sub-national individual commitments on NAZCA, from 582 cities and 98 regions or states. More than 10 initiatives have strong commitments, including the Compact of Mayors, New York Declaration on Forests, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, the Compact of States and Regions and the Covenant of Mayors.
Civil society organizations are also part of the LPAA dynamic and active in a large number of initiatives. For example, as faith-based communities or universities own financial assets, they can publicly commit to invest into renewables or energy efficiency.
Romulo Acurio, the Deputy Representative of Peru for Climate Change, spoke about the LPAA events at COP21 in Paris. He said a series of events throughout the two-week conference will present the major changes that will drive transformation and how the LPAA initiatives concretely contribute to that change. The events will also assess progress of initiatives launched at the Climate Summit, showcase new cooperative initiatives and feature concrete results.
On 5 December, the LPAA Action Day in Paris will see non-state leaders present a vision of the future.
Halldor Thorgeirsson, the UNFCCC secretariat’s Director for Strategy, said it is important that the new universal agreement gives a strong sense of direction. That’s because direction will mobilize action in the long run. Action Day, he said, is an opportunity to focus on the actors who are going to make the global transformation to a low-carbon economy happen in the long run.
