Draft from Strategic Planning Retreat

CAN 2015 Strategy

Draft from Strategic Planning Retreat

6-7 September 2012

Executive Summary/Introduction

On September 6-7, 2012, a group of approximately 40-50 CAN members met in Bangkok, Thailand to discuss a way forward for CAN’s strategy in the coming three years. The goal was to map out a strategy that will take can through 2015, also aligning with the global 2015 deal set to happen in the UNFCCC arena. This strategy session also met to strategically plan CAN’s larger involvement outside the UNFCCC, in order to integrate climate change in other arenas.

In order to do this, it was necessary to analyze the political landscape CAN operates in and determine where CAN has the capacity to operate in affecting countries or country groups, and other influence factors including the media, fossil fuel l industries, civil society pressure, renewable industries, etc. (see page ___, Gaines’ charts). This process also includes the different fora CAN can engage in. A timeline through 2015 was mapped out including but not limited to the country groups such as G20 and G8, international and national elections, SDG/MDG process, thematic process such as IRENA, MEF and Clean Energy Ministerial, International events, and of course the UNFCCC. (see page___, Liz and Harjeet’s chart)

Throughout the strategy session, results from the strategy survey sent out before Bangkok and filled out by various CAN members were analyzed and discussed. Questions ranged from, “Where should CAN-I focus efforts?” to questions regarding the feasibility of a Fair, Ambitious and Binding Agreement (FAB) and how to approach the short-term mitigation aspect to a FAB deal. Another key question looked at what CAN’s approach should be for a 2015 deal; answers varied drastically. (See page ____, Mark’s graphs)

There were several stages of break-out groups throughout the two-date session that resulted in CAN’s overall strategy goals up until 2015 (see page ___, Sam’s boxes), and also specific areas of focus (see page ___, start of discussion on strategies). The specific strategies are as follows:

Target: Corporations

Shifting Subsidies from Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy

Target: International Governments – Leaders’ Strategy

Target: IPCC

Top down deal approach

Low Carbon Development Strategy

Public Financing for Adaptation

Civil Society-Inside/Outside Approach

Movement Building

This document represents the overall CAN strategy in the next few years up until 2015, including some of the necessary next steps that need to be taken.

Strategy / Home for work in CAN / Lead person(s) / Other key people
Target: Corporations
Shifting Subsidies from Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy / New WG?
Target: International Governments – Leaders’ Strategy / PCG
Target: IPCC / ??
Top down deal approach
Low Carbon Development Strategy / Mitigation WG?
Public Financing for Adaptation / Adaptation and Finance WGs?
Civil Society-Inside/Outside Approach
Movement Building

What is our Vision for 2015? What will success look like in 2015?

What is the Political Landscape we operate in?

Is there an event that will be critical for international climate action missing? Please let and know.

Where should CAN-I focus efforts?

Results from CAN Member Survey:

What might our meta-approach to a 2015 FAB deal be?

Results from the CAN member survey showed that 97% of CAN member respondents thought we should aim for a FAB deal. 42% of CAN members thought that either a FAB deal, or a FAB enough deal is possible in 2015. 36% thought that a truly FAB deal probably isn’t possible, but aiming for it is important.

Only 3% thought that a FAB deal is unobtainable and therefore we should be realistic in international asks and rather focus on domestic efforts.

CAN member respondents were roughly split between a focus on getting the 2015 deal right, increasing pre-2020 ambition internationally and focusing on domestic action.

This speaks to CAN’s need to have strategies that focus on all three elements.

The stepwise approach, whether it involves a two step or an annual ratchet up, toward a 2015 deal was weighted more heavily by CAN member respondents (23% + 27%).

This would seem to be complementary to building expectations around 2015 as a deadline (17%). And somewhat less so for planning for a “big bang” political trade off in 2015 (11%).

Whereas the concept of not building up 2015 as a deadline for success or failure (10%), and focusing on short term, annual, achievements and de-emphasising the 2015 deal (6%) were less enthusiastically embraced, but not insignificant.

Whilst it does seem that there is most weight behind a stepwise approach to a 2015 deal, CAN obviously needs to explore this subject further.

In addition to the excellent think piece from Mark, Tasneem, Jaco and Sandeep, some additional points made at the Retreat to consider in our ongoing discussion include:

·  Latin American NGOs have difficulty engaging in an incremental process – partly because of language and also finances. Therefore a process with fewer key political points will be more effective in engaging civil society to put pressure on their governments.

·  There will be many potential opportunities to take advantage of in the next 3 years, some of which will be pivot points, and that should plan for a variety of outcomes from.

What specific strategies will we implement to achieve our 2015 Vision?

These strategies were identified at the Strategy Retreat, 6-7 September. They are in relatively early stages of development and require additional work. If you are interested in helping to develop our work on a strategy, please get in contact with or .

Target: Corporations

Strategies to change the investment landscape:

·  Persuade Investors to shift from FF to renewable

·  Incentivise investments in RE

·  Pressure companies to increase EE & RE

·  Pressure companies to fully reflect climate risk on books

·  Sue the Bastards!

·  Insurance & climate risk issues

Target fossil fuel companies

·  Name & shame/praise FFF companies/clean companies

·  Sue the Bastards!

·  Beyond FF campaigns (Beyond Coal, Beyond Oil, Beyond Gas)

·  Expose FF industry lobby power

Encourage green technology companies

·  Develop safeguards for “green” technologies

Consumer campaign

·  Mobilise consumer purchasing power to affect corporate behaviour

Corporate responsibility standards

·  Corporations to adopt Emission Reduction targets

Shipping & aviation campaigns

Anti-deforestation campaigns

Transition strategy

·  How to deal with tax revenues from FF companies to governments?

Next Steps:

·  Mapping

o  Who is doing what on corporations within CAN?

o  Who is vulnerable? In what ways?

o  Who is bad on climate?

§  i.e. US coal industry-FF industry, financial sector, transnationals (timber etc), Aviation and shipping, biofuel

o  Who is good in climate? Didn’t figure this out yet.

o  Powerful individuals (i.e. Forbes list) and their links to bad corporations

o  Sympathetic institutional investors

o  Arctic-new frontier. Others? Africa?

o  Analysis of demand/supply chains. Who is supplying and where is the demand?

o  Conflict over natural resources – companies involved

·  Calculate life-cycle emissions of target companies (TBD)

·  Considerations

o  Cross-cutting issue, part of many other strategies including domestic government strategies

o  Need to prioritize mapping

o  Connect with social movements

o  Explore CAN regional collaborations

o  Lawyers

o  Involve lawyers and economists fighting these battles at national level

o  Relationship with institutional safeguards. i.e. IFC, Financial Intermediaries

o  It all starts with USCAN

·  Comments:

o  Run accountability campaigns ex. Greenpeace in the Arctic and Shell, BeyondCoal in the US. Good place to start to attack the bad actors.

o  Definitely want inside work with good companies to make them better.

o  Need to understand the energy access problems because there is a climate and social angle.

Immediate Next Steps

·  Who is taking this forward in a big picture view and small items:

o  Susan is going to take this back to USCAN and continue having a domestic focus group.

o  Create an international group?

o  Poll the members if they want to be involved and have a conference call. If any members are doing this then send this around to CANtalk to see what’s already going on.

o  CAN Nodes do a survey to see who is interested.

Shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy

·  Energy subsidies, green, -> how can be WTO-compatible

·  How to influence through consumer base?

a.  New media campaigning through consumer base?

·  Rights-based approach

a.  Implicates energy access, health, water, food, etc

·  Need to understand country-specific circumstances (groupings) - key players

a.  energy access, market failures

b.  demand + supply assumptions

c.  regulatory framework, other incentives

Target: International Governments

Build alliances toward a FAB deal

·  Need for a “green group” (eg the one who helped get the Berlin mandate)

·  Durban alliance

·  Overcome the BASIC conflict

·  Isolation strategy for US

·  Is this really CAN’s role? Do we have political capacity?

Leader engagement 2014-2015

·  Depends on election outcomes

·  Risks and benefits of deep engagement, but on the final form/night they will have to be involved and important to have them properly educated

·  Some questions only leaders can answer

·  SDG summit – can this integrate “low carbon development = sustainable development”

Finance Ministers engagement

·  Important for $ and tech transfer

·  Timing depends on economic crisis

·  Vulnerable developing country host and day trip for ministers? Media?

Environment Ministers strategy

·  Using them to get a clear mandate at 2013 for a 2015 deal: Legal form, principles, workplan for 2014

·  “Greenland”-style process on back of 3 IPCC reports. 40 Ministers talking about reports and how to respond. Opportunity to raise impacts, risks, importance of adaptation, mitigation (WGIII).

Power analysis, elections etc country by country

·  United States – lot of international pressure, “create a Kyoto moment”, push Canada to join as well

·  Latin America – keep positive role: Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile. Brazil could be a good party to try and champion climate change (hosting Soccer World Cup 2014, ?G20?, maybe they will want to host COP?)

·  South Africa – election uncertainty. Push another BASIC country to champion process from here to 2014.

·  Russia and Saudi Arabia – minimise their influence and avoid their blocking, neutralise.

·  India – equity important

·  China – new government and 5 year plan opportunity

·  Australia, New Zealand and Japan – so far going bad, but might be able to push for change in next 3 years

·  Sth Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia – push them to more proactive.

·  Africa

Key elements

·  Convergence between SDGs and climate deal

·  Governments emotionally and scientifically exposed to realities

·  Pressure from different fronts

Finance

·  Scandinavian leaders, UK, France, Germany

·  Doubling fast start finance

·  Fossil fuel subsidies

Information strategy

·  Contrasting facts in countries

·  Mapping out important meetings – how to use them to build pressure.

Groups engaged in these processes

Regular

Key bilats

G8-G20 BASIC

WWF GP Oxfam WRI

Food Security

SDGs

Social media fossil fuel

strategy subsidies

Labour, Trade unions, Progressive Companies, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, World Council of Churches, youth Groups, ICLEI, Scientists, Provincial governments, Universities

G20 and regional strategies

Anyone interested in developing strategies aimed at these forums please contact or .

Next steps

·  Group to develop this strategy further in next month

·  Reach out to our current contacts who follow these issues

·  Conference call in the next weeks to invite others in CAN to contribute (Enrique & Ola)

IPCC

·  Environmental Ministerial process (see point above)

·  Media & public awareness – disseminate findings

·  Propose and lobby for post IPCC ministerial

o  Need champions/drivers? UNEP? Countries: eg Norway, Costa Rica …

o  Who to invite?

o  Link to 2013-15 review / mitigation

o  Opportunity to raise profile of risks/impacts => adaptation

·  Clarity of what the IPCC is and what it does, what it cannot do, timeline and how it relates to us for inside and outside public mobilization strategies

·  IPCC comes out in 4 sections. Science comes first before 2014 COP (science is real and happening), then the impacts, then …

·  The key thing is how this will be intertwined into the Communications/outreach strategy. Find out how other regions are going to do this. Then come to Doha with ways to develop a strategy.

·  We need to start rolling this in 2013, need to have the material to prep the media next year

Next Steps

·  Tasneem will write up and document next steps/ defined plan.

·  Pat will email out the notes and then coordinate the next meeting with the IPCC, but will not coordinate this going forward in terms of a messaging point of view.

·  Pat will write a note on what’s involved within 2 weeks, and will volunteer to send this to all the CAN people that have any previous IPCC experience to see if we can pull them in.

·  Consider using CAN-Comms; nodes context for impacts, keeping in mind low current capacity of southern nodes on comms.

Compelling argument about why a top down deal is crucial. Political & public narrative.

NB: we consider top down legally binding and rules based regime to be integral to this work stream

Key Elements:

·  Evidence base on both top-down and rules based regime - includes:

Ø  What Kyoto has achieved? - facts and figures

Ø  How other international regimes have aggregated ambition

·  Argumentation – what resonates politically in different contexts and with different targets

·  Effective communications strategy – both reactive and proactive

Ultimate Targets:

·  Developed Countries

Ø  Primary targets (i.e. – need more persuasion) - US, Japan, Canada and Russia

Ø  Secondary targets (i.e. – strong push back in certain constituencies) – EU and Australia

·  Developing Countries – strengthen the rules based argument

Critical Messengers: we don’t always want NGO finger prints on this

·  Institutional Investors – Pension Funds, Southern Sovereign Wealth Funds

·  Progressive Business – Renewables and Insurance

·  Security Community – works in some settings, not in others