At the UN Climate Change Conference in Marrakech in 2001 (COP7), the international community agreed to establish a climate adaptation fund, which was then launched in 2007. The Adaptation Fund celebrated its tenth anniversary at the 2017 Climate Change Conference (COP23), which was held in Bonn under the Fijian presidency – a good time to reflect on past successes and future developments.
The first Indo-German Dialogue on Sustainable Lifestyles during COP 23 in November 2017 in Bonn brought together Indian and German NGO representatives with an interest in sustainable lifestyles. Before discussing the potential of bringing the topic of sustainable lifestyles into the UNFCCC process, a mutually agreeable definition of sustainable lifestyles had to be found.
The decision announced today by the Higher Regional Court Hamm (Germany) to enter into the evidentiary stage in the case of Saúl Luciano Lliuya against the german utility RWE is of great legal relevance. It is the first time that a court acknowledged that a private company is in principal responsible for its share in causing climate damages. This applies if concrete damages or risks for private persons or their property can partly be assigned to the activities of the relevant company.
This executive summary of the report by Germanwatch and MISEREOR is all about energy – a sector that is inextricably linked to globalisation and is associated time and time again with human rights violations. The study explores the question of whether and to what extent German business and the German Government have implemented the demands of the UN Guiding Principles to date.
While the ongoing Fijian COP23 in Bonn and the coalition negotiations in Berlin capture media and public attention, Germany quietly released a self-review of their own fossil fuel subsidies as part of the G20 peer review process. The G20 fossil fuel subsidy review, pioneered in 2016 by US and China, is currently the only concrete step to make progress on the group's pledge from the 2009 summit in Pittsburgh to phase-out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that increase wasteful consumption”.
