Mr. Ross Fitzpatrick:

I would like to comment briefly on the guardrails relating to tied aid and conditionality being placed on climate finance. It is a massive issue. The single biggest guardrail, as Ms Curran already touched on, is ensuring that in the COP decision text and in the decision text relating to the NCQG, we have very strong language indicating that public finance which is untied needs to be at the core, rather than this very ill-defined vague notion of mobilised climate finance, which is everything and anything. One of the real issues with climate finance is that there is no internationally agreed definition of what it actually is. This has resulted in countries counting whatever they deem to be climate finance as climate finance. It is unlikely that countries will come together and agree on a common definition at this COP but one thing we could at least have is a list of what does not count as climate finance. Essentially, this would be an exclusion list. This could include carbon credits. One of the big issues is that we need a narrative shift as to what counts and what does not count, not only through an international agreement on what it is or is not.

Much of the debate on Article 6 is that climate finance is the solution and we need to home in on existing initiatives such as carbon credits. Multiple investigations have been carried out, some by The Guardian. One of our partners, Power Shift Africa, produced a report last year at COP28 which showed the host country, the UAE, was buying up vast tracts of land in African countries in order to sell carbon credits to major polluters and was displacing people from their land in the process. This is deeply unjust. At the same time, it does not achieve real emission reductions. It is not the solution. This narrative needs to be brought to the fore by countries such as Ireland, which, to be frank, is currently not doing this. Major developed countries are pushing this as the solution. We need to outline what the false solutions are as well as looking at the actual solutions.

With regard to civil society organisation participation and human rights more broadly, the three most recent COPs have been held in petrol states with very questionable human rights records. Unfortunately, given the nature of the COP process, it is very unlikely we will ever have a COP in country with a perfect human rights record. This is not to say Ireland should not take a stance and acknowledge the fact there are human rights issues in all of the COP host countries. In terms of looking ahead to next year, one thing Ireland can do is raise this with the presidency next year. Brazil will host COP next year. We should advocate for greater inclusion of civil society in Rio. We should also advocate for greater transparency around the inclusion of fossil fuel lobbyists. If I am not mistaken, last year for the first time we had a register to determine the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP and we now know how many there are.

What we need in addition to this is a cap on the number of fossil fuel lobbyists. At the very least, I do not think any single delegation should be smaller than the number of fossil fuel lobbyists present at the COP. This is something on which Ireland can push a bit.