Carbon Dioxide Removal, determining transformation opportunities in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals

Asia Pacific Climate Week (APCW): Side Event

 6 July 2021 at 15:30-17:00 (GMT+9) 

This event was recorded on 6 July 2021, and is also available with interpretation into 中文Español and Français.

Organised jointly by the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) to support track 1 of the Thematic Sessions of the Asia Pacific Climate Week (APCW) 2021, with focus on ’National Actions and Economy Wide Approaches’. The side event fosters an assessment of best practice in society-wide and economy-wide approaches to cutting greenhouse gases, building resilience and, how broad economic packages to enable recovery from the COVID19 pandemic can support the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals. The impact of these approaches on other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular gender equality, decent work and reducing inequalities and synergies will be identified.

 

Background

The impacts of climate change are undermining progress on the sustainable development agenda. Achieving the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement is vital to the achievement of the SDGs.  According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, to keep global warming under 1.5°C will require reducing emissions and removing large-scale CO2 from the atmosphere, through a range of approaches called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and net-negative thereafter.  CDR methods vary and include the use of nature-based approaches, such as afforestation and enhancing wetlands, or engineering-based approaches to directly capture CO2 from ambient air. They all carry potential benefits, risks and pose governance challenges for present and future generations. Apart from some nature-based approaches, no CDR techniques are currently ready to deploy at the speed or scale necessary to prevent overshooting the 1.5 – 2°C temperature goal.  Despite increasing discussions on these issues in the international community, important knowledge gaps remain, in particular on how CDR could be scaled through national planning and long-term climate ambition while ensuring that the co-benefits can be maximised and trade-offs be minimised with regards to other SDGs.

The side event will seek insights and perspectives from diverse experts on the following questions: 

  • What is the current status of research and policy discussions around CDR?  
  • What are the potential implications of a possible deployment of CDR at required scale and pace for delivering the SDGs?  
  • What knowledge/research gaps exist around CDR and its potential implications for delivery of the SDGs?  
  • How to scale CDR in the Asia Pacific region by taking into account specificities and development needs?  
  • What role could different regional actors play in addressing the governance challenges of CDR?  
  • What do young people, who will live with the consequences of choices and decisions made today, know or think about this issue?  
Agenda
Agenda item
Schedule
Time 
Speaker
Welcome 15:30 3 min Facilitator: Qi Zheng, Outreach Officer and Special Assistant to the Executive Director, Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G)
Keynote speech 15:33 10 min Mr. Stefanos Fotiou, Director, Environment and Development Division, ESCAP
Panel discussion 15:43 50 min

Moderator: Aneta Nikolova, Environment Affairs Officer, ESCAP

Panelists:

  • Oliver Geden, Senior Fellow, German Institute for International and Security Affairs
  • Jan Kairel Guillermo, young climate activist and artist
  • Saleemul Huq, Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development
  • Joyashree Roy, Bangabandhu Chair Professor, Asian Institute of Technology
  • Dechen Tsering, Director of UNEP’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific
Question & answer with the audience 16:33 25 min Moderator: Aneta Nikolova,ESCAP
Wrap-up 16:58 2 min
  • Qi Zheng, C2G
  • Stefanos Fotiou, ESCAP

 

 

Speakers

 

Dechen Tsering, Regional Director and Representative Asia and the Pacific Office United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Ms. Dechen Tsering was appointed as the regional director of UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Asia and the Pacific in March 2017. As the regional arm of UNEP, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, the Asia-Pacific office works with governments, local authorities and the private sector to develop and put into place cleaner and safer policies and strategies that encourage the efficient use of natural resources and reduce risks for humans and the environment.

Ms. Tsering has held management and leadership positions with the United Nations and has over 30 years of experience in national government and intergovernmental organisations. She has been actively involved in intergovernmental negotiations as a key negotiator for least-developed countries and contributed to the establishment of the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Least Developed Countries Expert Group. She also has experience in the management of complex development projects. She comes to UNEP from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, where she served as director of the Finance, Technology and Capacity-building Programme. In that position, she supported international co-operation on mobilisation of finance, technology development and transfer, and capacity building to enable countries to take enhanced action on climate change. Prior to that position, she was the deputy regional director of UNEP in Asia and the Pacific.

Ms. Tsering holds a PhD in forest economics and policy from the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. She also has a master’s degree from Georgetown University and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jan Kairel Guillermo, Young climate activist and artist

Jan is a youth leader and a staunch advocate of climate change from local to global. He survived Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) –the world’s strongest typhoon that ravaged the Philippines back in 2013.

He was once a government official for three years and lead of the Philippine delegation to various international gatherings. Currently, he is a communications intern at the World Meteorological Organization. Jan graduated Arts Management at Nanyang Academyof Fine Arts Singapore, and his work involves using the arts as a medium to educate young people about the climate crisis. He is currently serving as the COY Liaison of YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the UNFCCC and the lead of the Global Affairs Unit of the 16th UN Climate Change Conference of Youth (COY16).

Joyashree Roy, Bangabandhu Chair Professor, Asian Institute of Technology

Prof. Joyashree Roy is the inaugural Bangabandhu Chair Professor at Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). She lectures at the Sustainable Energy Transition Programme,  Department of Energy, Environment, and Climate Change under School of Environment, Resources and Development, AIT, Thailand. She was Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR) national fellow and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA. 

She has been one of two coordinating Lead Authors of the Chapter 7 of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), AR4, WGIII on “Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change”. She is also part of the IPCC Fifth and Sixth assessment cycles and was in the Land Ocean Interactions of the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) steering committee. In 2019 she was one of the  co-authors of  the report ‘The Ocean as a Solution to Climate Change: Five Opportunities for Action.’ of World Resources Institute.  

She was involved in the preparation of the Stern Review Report, Global Energy Assessment and many other national and global efforts. In her independent research capacity, she has authored books and written 137 articles in leading peer reviewed, professional journals and books. Professor Roy is the recipient of the 2021 Paradigm Award

Luiz Fernando Krieger, Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC)

Luiz Fernando Krieger is an Economic Affairs Officer at the Sustainable Development and Human Settlements Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC). He has a Doctorate in Geography from São Paulo University in Brazil. 

He specializes in Ecological Economics, international policies, environmental sciences and sustainable development. 

Oliver Geden, Senior Fellow, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Oliver Geden is Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. His work focuses on European and global climate policy, including the governance of carbon dioxide removal.

Geden has been a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), and the University of California, Berkeley, among others. During his time at SWP, he has been seconded to the policy planning units of both the German Federal Foreign Office and German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Geden is a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6 Working Group 3 on mitigation) as well as a member of the Core Writing Team for the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Humboldt University Berlin. 

Saleemul Huq, Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development.

Prof. Saleemul Huq is the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) since 2009 and Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment & Development (IIED) in London. He is also Senior Advisor on Locally Led Action, Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) and Advisor of Climate Change Programme at Brac. Before that Dr Huq was the Director of the Climate Change Programme at IIED and founding Executive Director at the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS).

He has worked extensively in the inter-linkages between climate change (both mitigation as well as adaptation) and sustainable development, from the perspective of the developing countries, with special emphasis on least developed countries (LDCs). He has published numerous articles in scientific and popular journals, was a lead author of the chapter on Adaptation and Sustainable Development in the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and was one of the coordinating lead authors of ‘Inter-relationships between adaptation and mitigation’ in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007). He has been named among the “World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy for 2019” for making a positive difference by The Apolitical, a London-based public servants’ networking group. 

Stefanos Fotiou, Director, Environment and Development Division, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP)

Dr. Stefanos Fotiou is the Director of the Environment and Development Division in the UN ESCAP. Stefanos is responsible for the planning and implementation of the UN ESCAP work on natural resources management, climate change, sustainable urban development and green economy. Highlights of his work in his current post include successfully leading intergovernmental negotiations resulting in specific normative outcomes, establishing new initiatives on technical cooperation and capacity development as well as ideating and steering analytical work in the substantive areas of his responsibility.

Prior to this Stefanos worked for 10 years in the UN Environment Programme in various roles in the Economy Division and in the Asia-Pacific office. Throughout his career, Stefanos has taken leading roles in international forums, has conceptualised and led the development of regional and national strategies on environment and sustainable development and his work has been published and referenced. He holds a PhD in Natural Resource Economics, a Master of Science in Information Systems, and a Master of Science in Forestry and Natural Environment.

Facilitator

Qi Zheng, Outreach Officer and Special Assistant to the Executive Director, Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G)

Qi Zheng is Outreach Officer and Special Assistant to the Executive Director at Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G).

Moderator

Aneta Nikolova, Environmental Affairs Officer United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP)

Aneta Nikolova is Environmental Affairs Officer at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP).

Highlights

“How could the United States Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) address the governance of Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Dr. Stefanos Fotiou
Director, Environment and Development Division, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP)

“Why are rich countries expected to go beyond net zero and what are the potential governance issues?”

Oliver Geden
Senior Fellow, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP)

“What is the potential use of Carbon Dioxide Removal in the Latin America and the Caribbean region?”

Dechen Tsering
Regional Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Asia and the Pacific

“What is the potential use of Carbon Dioxide Removal in the Latin America and the Caribbean region?”

Luiz Fernando Krieger
Economic Affairs Officer, Sustainable Development and Human Settlements, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC)

“What are the key considerations for financing Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Professor Joyashree Roy
Bangabandhu Chair Professor (inaugural), Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)

“How to scale up Carbon Dioxide Removal in the Asia and Pacific regions to reach net zero?”

Dechen Tsering
Regional Director of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Asia and the Pacific

“How is the Latin America and Caribbean region addressing the governance challenge of Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Luiz Fernando Krieger
Economic Affairs Officer, Sustainable Development and Human Settlements, United Nations Economic Commission for LAtin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC)

“What are the current policy discussions taking place in the European Union on Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Oliver Geden
Senior Fellow, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP)

“What conversations are young people having about Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Jan Kairel Guillermo
Artist and Climate Advocate, Philippines

“What are the key research gaps to inform policy making on Carbon Dioxide Removal?”

Professor Joyashree Roy
Bangabandhu Chair Professor (inaugural), Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)

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