IEMA at Bonn Day 2: Global Stocktake - what it means for IEMA members

IEMA’s Climate Change and Energy Policy and Engagement Lead Chloe Fiddy looks at the Global Stocktake and unpicks what it means for IEMA members.

The Global Stocktake (GST) process was established under article 14 of the Paris Agreement and requires Parties to the agreement to take stock of their progress towards meeting its goals. The first stocktake deadline was set for 2023 and will be reviewed every five years thereafter.

The data collection stage is complete and the technical assessment and political negotiations are now ongoing and the political stage – with actionable decisions – is due to be finalised at COP28.

Future pledges in Nationally Determined Contributions will be informed by the GST and unsurprisingly it’s a big topic in many of the events in Bonn this year. Technical and formal discussions and engagement with stakeholders are on the official schedule, while the theme continues in many of the side events. These include consideration of the GST from all angles. The list is long, but particularly of interest to IEMA members include sessions on capacity planning, energy sector pathways, the role of data in monitoring and validation and reporting of emissions and biodiversity, climate finance and of solutions-oriented views of system change – amongst many others.

There’s certainly a rich sum of knowledge in the building, especially visible in the Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) session which is focused on education, public awareness, training, public participation, public access to information and international cooperation. All these topics are relevant to IEMA as the professional body for those in the climate sector. The workshops (I attended one facilitated by representatives from the Dominican Republic delegation) are a vibrant exchange of ideas and experiences from different nations on how they’re approaching these matters, and how they’re overcoming many barriers. The discussion is granular and practical rather than high level and conceptual.

In developed nations we take access to good data as a given and it’s easy to see the barriers as just a lack of will to be addressed by education and skills and we mustn’t forget that in less developed nations the baseline data to create useful sets of indicators can be missing.

The GST synthesis report is due for release in September 2023, although the headline findings that the world is far off track from achieving its climate goals won’t be news to anyone. This fact has been well covered by the IPCC 6th Assessment Report, and is self-evident to anyone looking at the gaps between what we need to do and what is being promised (never mind delivered) by the collective Nationally Determined Contributions.

My initial thoughts were that the GST looks like a duplication of the work already done by these other reports, but with good engagement and knowledge exchange from all Parties, it does actually have the potential to provide a useful pathway. Even if, in great part, it highlights gaps in baseline knowledge.

So what does this mean for IEMA members? Depending on the sectors that we’re working in we do need to keep an eye on the GST. Those of us already in roles engaging with the process must push for ambitious yet actionable pathways. Those of us not directly engaged in negotiations can nonetheless play a positive role in the pathways through our day to day work. Hearing the (mostly young) people in the room working so hard on all of this does bring a huge amount of hope that business as usual won’t last forever and that positive change will eventually come.