 and welcome everyone, welcome ladies and gentlemen to SCI. This used to be my home for about five months until I left the Stockholm office for the office in Oxford which is equally nice but very different. But it feels very, very good. It feels a bit like a homecoming for me to be back here at the institute. So to start off with Jakob already introduced the background of the report that we're launching today and the project that we've done. But I wanted to give a little bit of detail and I also wanted to express some of the thanks that Jakob already mentioned mainly to the Nordic Council working group of climate negotiators and we have pretty much the whole working group present here today and we have a few of them who will comment on the report and on the topic at hand today as well. But we of course very much like welcome them here at SCI and thank them for supporting this research also from a very personal perspective I found tremendously interesting. It's not only timely but I think there's really some a lot of let's say issues to be discussed and to be explored in much more detail and hopefully what I'm presenting today will give you some teaser as to what we found in the report. What I already mentioned the report itself there's one copy at the back but it's been launched yesterday so it's basically being printed in Copenhagen right now. We also have a number of policy briefs in the back which you can take so basically you can start reading right after the seminar. And then finally I also wanted to reiterate what Jakob said and then to thank in this case Horkensselen from Cicero who is here with us but also someone who couldn't make it today that's Peter Powell from the German Development Institute and it's been a very pleasant collaboration with these colleagues to get this report done by today. So before I go into some of the more technical details I want to give a little bit of background why we're doing this report what the topic of the report is. Then I want to highlight some of the key findings and messages from the report and basically open the room for discussion that we will have with the panel later. There might be questions that you have about the report and about my presentation. We'll have a quick opportunity for questions right after this presentation but I think most of the discussion will be useful to have this afternoon in a broader group. So as many of you will know 2015 is a very important year for climate change. It's not only a very important year for climate change it's also a very important year for addressing sustainable development more generally but as most of you will know is that by the end of this year in December there will be the 21st conference of the parties to the UNFCCC so basically one of the key climate change meetings to come up with the new agreement under the UNFCCC an agreement that is applicable to all parties so not only just developed country parties like the Kyoto Protocol but of course before we get to Paris it's useful to know a little bit where we started from and this is not even showing let's say the real start let's say from the 1919 onwards when the UNFCCC was negotiated but basically how the negotiations have evolved since 2011 so in 2011 parties launched the so-called ad hoc working group on the Durban platform on enhanced action and with that they launched these negotiations on a 2015 agreement to come up with a universal climate change agreement that really covers all the countries and to really get all the countries to take action on climate change mitigation and adaptation but beyond these negotiations or beyond the launch of the negotiations there were still quite a bit of there were a lot of question marks around the specific architecture of the 2015 agreement but in the last few years more and more details have become known about this and I think a key moment here was in 2013 when a new acronym was introduced in the climate change negotiations and if anything the climate negotiators and the climate change community is very good at introducing acronym and in this case let's say the acronym du jour is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs please remember this because they will refer to them quite a few times in the next slides as well but basically countries were invited to come forward with pledges to take climate action under 2015 agreements at the same time there was not a tremendous amount of clarity about what these INDCs actually were and I'll get to that in the next slides but in Lima in December 2014 so just a few months ago parts at least agreed on a bit more information of what could possibly be included under these INDCs and I think by now in February the first INDC was submitted and in March the second one followed by now we start to get a bit of a better idea of what countries actually mean with this acronym and the whole idea is that by December there will be a range of these contributions of these INDCs that can then be included in the Paris Agreement the question is though whether all the INDCs of all the countries will be ready in time for Paris obviously I'm not showing here that the error continues also well afterwards Paris is not the end point of international climate change action Paris is a very important point but at the same time of course Paris will not agree on all the details the parties will still elaborate the details also in the coming months so Paris is a crucial point for now but it will not be the end point so then what are these INDCs and a few months ago there was a lot of discussion about what this could actually mean whether it would include let's say mitigation contributions but also contributions in the context of adaptation and now that the first ones have been submitted there's at least a little bit more clarity so the first INDC that was submitted the best kid in class was Switzerland in February which pledged to reduce its emissions by 50% by 2030 and by 35% by 2025 the EU a few weeks later also agreed on its own internal goal of reducing emissions by 40% by 2030 or at least 40% there's some other similarities between the two contributions one is that both the scope of both these INDCs are economy-wide and also include land use land use change in forestry another one of these acronyms they use the same base year although they differ in the use of international carbon credits where the EU has clearly said no we will not use any carbon credits to achieve our targets Switzerland has left that option open but then these are just two let's say the first two that have come in what's going to happen when more of these INDCs are coming and I just want to highlight the two likely INDCs or the two likely contributions that will come from the United States and China two of the major powers in international politics especially in the area of climate change what you see here is that the US has pledged to to reduce its emissions of 26 to 28% by 2025 below 2005 thus so maybe comparable in the sense that it's an absolute emission reduction target but it uses a different base year and China has a different contribution altogether which is focusing on peaking CO2 emissions rather than absolutely emission reductions and then there are other points that it's about 20% of energy supply needs to come from non fossil fuel sources so you can imagine that given the fact that there's no let's say complete streamlines idea of what these contributions will be that the variety between them theoretically is going to be quite large even though as you can see with the EU and Switzerland they can be quite similar then a related question there is that also adaptation might be included for some of the INDCs and we can particularly think of developing countries who say well the action that we've taken on adaptation is our contribution to the tackling climate change so this is what we're going to see in the next few months and it's not yet entirely clear what the INDCs or all the different countries is going to look like but what is becoming quite clear is that it's going to be difficult to see whether all these INDCs will come in time this is a graph made last month by the New Climate Institute which shows a bit of the progress made by the different countries on developing their INDCs and as you can see some have already submitted and some are planning to submit in March already but most of them are actually going to submit only in September at least most of the countries they have surveyed and for even some countries there's no internal planning process at all at the moment so the question is well when will these INDCs come in might it be just one or two months before Paris or might it be earlier at the moment it's not completely clear for all countries yet so it's important to know this as a background yes we are going to look at the contributions and how they're being reviewed but it's important to know what these contributions actually are and when they're coming in so why then is assessment and review so basically the topic of our report why is that important and here I think there's a number of reasons so first of all we argue also in the report that assessment and review can be crucial in identifying to see whether we are on track to meet our collectively agreed targets but also to see whether the contributions made by different countries and different parties are actually fair so both from a point of view of effectiveness as well as fairness the assessment and review process can be of crucial importance then also assessment and review can help basically uncovering the information and the assumptions underlying these contributions so it can also enhance the credibility of these contributions by increasing transparency and finally by sharing this information widely not only among parties but also among other stakeholders with NGOs, with businesses with the research organizations it can basically enhance accountability accountability of the actions taken by parties so over all these aspects effectiveness, fairness, credibility transparency and accountability they form the foundations for trust building for international cooperation and climate change so that's no mean feat but as was reformulated in the report in a world that is increasingly moving towards a top-down system the review forms let's say the last bastion of the top down increasingly moving towards the bottom-up system the review system forms let's say the last bastion of this top-down system so that's why at least we think that the rationale for the report is justified so when we did research one of the first things that we encountered was that there was actually quite a high level of confusion of actually what is meant by assessment and review and there were a lot of discussions at the time on there's on one hand ex-ante review and on the other hand there's an ex-post review and we're trying to disentangle these aspects and the types of review that that's parties but also observers have been talking about so on the one hand you can make the distinction between a review of individual contributions so a review of the contribution by Switzerland for example and on the other hand you can look at the review of parties collectively so for example what parties are pledging in aggregates does that live up to globally read those but then at a similar or at a different level you can also make a distinction in terms of the timing of the review and when people talk about ex-ante review they are most of the time talking about that's in the top left corner they're talking about review of contributions before they are somehow being anchored or inscribed in a 2015 agreement or maybe in a future agreement in a future contribution cycle but at the same time there are already ongoing processes of review that have been taking place since the very beginning of the UNF triple scene the process of monitoring reporting and verification and I will talk a bit about a few of them which are more focused on how well are parties implementing their contributions and then finally there are processes which basically after the fact or after let's say a certain commitment period has ended look at well did a country or did a party comply with its commitments and this is normally what is referred to as the ex-post collectively you can make a similar distinction you can look at the collective contributions in advance or you can look at it at a slightly later date or during the implementation so in a report what we did is before we wanted to look at the options of assessment and review under 2015 agreement we really wanted to make sure that we covered well what is already out there and any review processes under 2015 agreement is not going to start on a blank slate so here are just four of the processes that we covered, we covered three more I think in the report but each of them offers their own lessons so when we talk about the review of national communications which are submitted regularly by NX1 and non-NX1 parties you can see that already in these national communications in their review emissions trends and emissions policies are already being reviewed but also one of the lessons from this process the high frequency of review can be quite resource intensive and this is something to keep in mind especially if we try to include more countries similarly with technical review of several reports under the period protocol and there's a few lessons that can be learned there and here one of the main lessons is that extra review process as such basically having a group of experts reviewing the report from a country can actually help that country in realising well this is how we can really come into compliance at a later stage but also here one of the lessons is that reviews actually require quite a large pool of experts and quite a significant resources then from more recent review processes and again I have two new acronyms and this is IAR which is international assessment and review and ICA which stands for international consultations and analysis with IAR being applicable to developed country parties and ICA applicable to developing country also here there's a few lessons one is that these processes actually show that there's some level of streamlining that is possible between all these different review processes what they also show that it's actually possible to combine expert reviews and more multilateral part to part in reviews and finally they show that it's actually possible to treat some countries differently because in this case the least developed countries and the small island states need to treat it differently under these processes and finally another example from the current processes is that already there's experience with aggregate level reviews at the moment there's an ongoing review which is trying to see whether the two degrees target is actually adequate for parties and whether it's maybe necessary to move towards a one and a half degree target so as you can see there are a number of lessons to be learned but also a number of systems that can be built on in the future then the other thing which was already mentioned by Bayakop is that we also looked at the number of processes outside of the UNIFCC not because you can take these as analogies and say whatever happened in the World Trade Organization can also happen in the UNIFCC but just to get some lessons and get some ideas from these processes and here one of the things that we figured out with the trade policy review mechanism under the WTO is that actually it's interestingly possible to link the frequency of the review to a share of World Trade so to specific criteria so that might bring the idea is it possible to link the future review to a share of global emissions for example but it also shows that group reviews are possible so a number of countries being reviewed at the same time another interesting process that we think is the universal periodic review which is the human rights review system and I think here one of the most interesting aspects is that even for a sensitive let's say a topic that really touches upon national sovereignty as much as one can imagine it's possible to actually involve non-government stakeholders in these processes and then again might might form a hopeful lesson for the climate review another aspect that they do is that today the subsequent reviews future reviews actually built on how well the outcomes of a previous review have been implemented what this process shows is that funding is possible to help countries participate and implement recommendations and what this process shows is that actually it can be quite difficult if countries really do not want to cooperate so if a country is being reviewed and recommendations coming out of a review then the country says well nice that you give us these recommendations but we're going to ignore them what do you do then what you do then is look at the Montreal Protocol where there is actually a stick so if there is non-corporation under the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances it should be possible to take trade measures for example against the country so what you see here is that there is a possible stick to really make sure that countries live up and really cooperate with the review but another lesson that the Montreal Protocol offers us is that there is a link between the outcome of a review and the receiving financial and other support so as I said there is quite a number of ideas that come out of these processes and that could be helpful also in the coming year in thinking about designing and organizing a process under the UNFCCC so we structured the reports along a number of questions with the first of these questions being what exactly should be reviewed and I already mentioned that the INDCs themselves their substance can be quite different for different parties so maybe until now it's maybe about mitigation so how many emission reductions are countries going to commit to but it might be that some countries also will include adaptation related information and maybe other countries will include financial or technological information so basically to say well our financial needs are this much and we want to receive that or a country may say well our financial contribution is going to be X dollars and maybe this will happen in the coming year at the moment it's still unclear there's no specific mandates in the most recent decision but at the same time some countries have indicated that they want this type of information in their contributions the question here is that what information should be reviewed and it's here it's important to know that already these existing review processes that are mentioned they already focus almost all of them focus exclusively on mitigation but it's also interesting to see that some of them also focus on means of implementation so finance technology transfer and capacity building so for example the international assessment and review that I just mentioned is one of these processes which not only looks at mitigation but also at the financial contributions of parties then it's important to keep in mind when thinking about well what kind of information should be reviewed it's important to note that and I think Hogan can probably mention this in more detail is that the review of means of implementation and a review specifically of financial contribution has been a key priority for at least some developing countries and I'm thinking particularly of countries like China and India have been really hammering that this is an important aspect for them but then reading more information is not necessarily easy to do it may require more resources it may require more expertise also it's really useful to have just loads and loads of information to be reviewed it might also just confuse the stakeholders so it's not an easy thing to say whether it's the review should be extended also to other types of information from a political point of view it might be necessary then another question again a very contested question should there be differentiation between different types of parties in these processes and here it's important to distinguish between on one hand the type of differentiation and on the other hand the way that can be differentiated so in terms of the type of differentiation you can differentiate maybe between different contributions so you will have a different review process for each target versus a process for maybe voluntary energy efficiency targets but it could also be done by parties or by groups of parties so there might be a different review processes for the least developed countries versus other developed countries for example but then in terms of the means there's actually a very long list also in the report and my view is that the way that can be differentiated there's a lot of creative team there's a lot of possibilities to do so here I just listed a few of these options it might be that you give some countries access to funding and I was not it might be that for some countries group reviews are possible for others it isn't it might be that the frequency for some countries is higher than others or it might be that the outcomes of the review processes might be requirements for one country and let's say soft recommendations for others so there's a lot of aspects and a lot of flexibility to play around with differentiation when we're looking at what was how to move forward I think it's important to know that differentiation can be done for both reasons of fairness and equity so it might be necessary to treat countries differently because their circumstances are different for example because they are poorer but also for reasons of pragmatism I already mentioned that the number of experts and the number of resources the amount of resources is quite limited so maybe we simply cannot have a review as much as that for each country but at the same time what you end up with is a trade-off between on the one hand the transparency so ideally you would show as much as possible for all these countries versus the administrative efficiency so the cost of these reviews so this is a difficult trade-off that needs to be made the third question we looked at is well which kind of criteria do we actually use in the review so against which benchmark are we judging countries on the other hand you have criteria which are more of substantive nature so ambition and added proceeds to basically are countries doing enough and on the other hand you have fairness and equity so is what countries are doing actually fair and you have more would we term more procedural criteria so is what countries doing transparent is it accurate if countries report it on time is it consistent with the reporting format which are more of a procedural nature interestingly these criteria are already used in quite a lot of the review processes that I mentioned so it's clearly feasible to re-enummer these criteria but it might be difficult to extend them in the future review process but what can definitely be said is that agreement on criteria as desirable as they are but agreement on criteria related to ambition and equity and fairness might be more difficult to achieve in Paris then the fourth question we looked at is the timing should assessment and review be carried out and here we made the distinction between the types of review processes that are shown in the beginning so when it comes to this Exantum review so basically a review in this case before Paris but also maybe in future contribution cycles it could possibly be done on a rolling basis so whenever new contributions come in they are being reviewed it can be done after a submission of a certain number of these contributions so maybe if 50 parties have completed their contributions then the review starts or it could be done periodically so every five years there will be a new review of these contributions that are available at that time when it comes to the review of implementations so basically how are countries doing in implementing the contributions here the question is rather what do we do with the current monitoring, reporting and verification systems do we stick with them, do we amend them do we adjust them these are not easy questions to answer but these are some of the options when it comes to the review of compliance the question here is primarily what happens with compliance in any case and that's a much bigger question that we can probably address in these two hours on one hand say that it could happen after every five years or it can again happen on a continuous basis and then finally the aggregate assessments so all parties together the suggestion that we have is that this can be done in line with existing processes so already there is a process in place that can allow for aggregate assessments on a regular basis then moving on to the fifth question which is about how do we actually organize these processes and again all ideas can be drawn from existing review processes both under and outside of the unit of the city I will not go through this slide in detail I will let you read the poster brief and order report for that but I think the most important point of this slide is that there are a lot of options here that can be done but a few months ago when parties gathered in Lima they basically for the process before Paris they discarded pretty much all of these options except for maybe a compilation by the UNFCCC secretariat of the contributions that have been submitted by October 2015 so the reason why I'm saying that is that it actually highlights what is listed down here it highlights the importance of assessments outside of the UNFCCC process and when I say outside of the UNFCCC process I mean assessments that are carried out in an informal let's say party to party basis or assessments that are carried out by observers and this is happening so organizations like EcoFace World Resources Institute, UNEP they have ongoing assessments of the new contributions as soon as they come in but also parties are having these discussions and there might be discussions on a less formal basis in Bonn in June to basically discuss each other's contributions to enhance understanding that doesn't mean that these contributions will actually change but at least there will be some kind of discussion about what's happening some kind of consultations then finally and again I will go through this slightly quickly because I think this will also be more discussed in the panel we looked at the way how assessment and review plays a role in registering up ambition over time and we made a distinction here because there's been a lot of talk about registering mechanisms so basically making sure that the ambitions of parties are increased over time and we made a distinction on the one hand that registering mechanisms that are clearly related to the region such as such and other registering mechanisms which are not necessarily related to the assessment and the review process but are related to the broader architecture of the 2015 agreements so clearly agreeing on a long term goal let's say a slightly more specific goal than a two degrees target clearly that is going to be important for registering up ambition because it gives let's say parties a destination to go to but this is not necessarily a feature of the assessment and review process similarly a regular negotiating cycle making sure that countries let's say every few years get together and have a discussion about how they're increasing their ambition very important for registering up but not necessarily part of the assessment and review process again contribution force basically making sure that whatever parties are doing this is also sometimes referred to as not backsliding but it basically means that whatever parts are doing next time they're going to do more is another important aspect of the 2015 agreement but not necessarily part of the assessment and review process so what is part of the assessment and review process that could help with registering up is two suggestions that are more suggested in the report is a recommendation for upward adjustments so whatever comes out of the review process there's a recommendation or possibly even a requirement to go to move ambition upwards which could help with registering up ambition similarly to have a periodic review of the adequacy of what countries are doing together might help with registering up ambition over time speaking of time I'm probably going slightly over mine but I'll wrap up so some of the key messages from the report and again you can read the report in more detail and also for more justification for some of these messages that we've discussed with you now and in the panel discussion as well so the first one should perhaps be the most obvious and that is that assessment and review is essential for trust building, for international cooperation broadly and in the end we think that it can help enhance ambition and increase fairness as well then with respect to the type of contribution that it should cover we believe that it should definitely cover mitigation contributions but that review process also covering means of implementation so again finance technology capacity building might help with forging a consensus in Paris then we suggest that assessment and review should cover all parties but at the same time the differentiation can be both fair and practical and again there's a lot of suggestions that we're making a report that could be implemented in practice the question is of course what will work best then finally this is a more difficult suggestion to make because on the one hand we see the need for an increased role or at least a clarified role of non-state actors in the review processes in a similar way that it's happening with the human rights regime but at the same time there's still some resistance from some parties to have observers, to have non-state acts involved in these processes but we would suggest that especially if there is no formal process like what's happening now in the lead up to Paris especially in those cases I think the role of non-state actors is going to be crucial then finally we're obviously raising a lot of options we're discussing a lot of we're covering a lot of ground-turned reports but I think one of the key messages is not all of the things that we're suggesting in the report not all of the questions that we've raised in the report need addressing before Paris and this is going back to one of the first slides the arrow continues so basically yes it's going to be important to have some basic agreement on for example that we have a review process that we ideally clarify the scope of such a review that we decide on the basic criteria of the review if we are going to use any what types of differentiation give an indication of the timing maybe an indication of the role of non-state actors but all the details, modalities and procedures do not have to be agreed necessarily in Paris they can also be agreed let's say between 2016 and 2020 so this is an important reminder that we're dealing with a very complex topic and of course this is only one part of the Paris agreement and there will be other aspects that will be equally if not more important to deal with and I think I will leave it at that but thanks so much for coming thank you