We are the youth that is awake, with the mind and the heart alert. The counterweight that balances the balance. We are the strength that does not get tired.
Hi everyone, welcome to the session. We're really excited to have you here. I'm really delighted that you're all joining us today for the session. My name is Alexis McGivern, I'm one of your hosts today. I'm just going to pass off to my co-facilitator Yoko who will open the session.
Thank you for introducing me, Alexis. Welcome to the first session four of the Global Youth Coalition on Medication. Thank you for joining our climate training continuously and being part of our movement. Today we will talk about medication and its role in the Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change. In terms of medication, we will most likely focus on energy and the shield process emissions.
Is this slide sharing? Yes. So we couldn't do this without the generous support of our founders and contributors, Oxford Net Zero, Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and Development, and Equine Temperatures. So just to introduce myself, my name is Yokoro.
I am currently the contact point. of the Medication Contact Group working group of YoungGo, the Youth Consistency to the UNFCCC and also formerly the contact point for the Health and Nature Working Groups. I'm also part of the Global Coordination Team where I co-ordinated the Global Youth Amendment which was presented to the Executive Secretary Samir Steele and others at COP27 as well as COI17 last year in Egypt.
Other than the UMCCC, I'm also involved in the processes of the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, UNESCO, and the Food, Agriculture, and Organization. I will pass to Alexis. Thanks so much Yoko, and we're really excited to have you all here for our fourth session.
So my name is Alexis McGivern and I work for Oxford Net Zero, which is an interdisciplinary research group based here at the University of Oxford. We basically do research across several disciplines in the university to make sure that people who are attempting to get to net zero, which is the global goal we must meet by 2050, are doing so with integrity. Just please note that you can check out our work at netzeroclimate.org and also through the Smith School website. This session is being interpreted in different languages so we have interpreters who are currently getting a live interpretation done for us which is very exciting. If you are in the Zoom call right now, you can select the appropriate language by going to the bottom.
There's a little globe and then you can select French, Spanish or Portuguese. And if you're watching in English on the YouTube live and you feel you need the interpretation, please do send us an email at youthclimate training at gmail.com so that we can ensure that you're on the Zoom link for future sessions. And so you've seen this by now a few times. but we just wanted to remind everyone of the rules of engagement for our sessions.
The number one priority of which is, of course, always treating each other with respect and especially respect for our expert speakers and our youth, our youth testimony that is going to be happening today, making sure that we respect their time. And we've based on feedback from different participants. We have extended the period in which you can watch the recording from one week to two weeks. So now basically, as long as you watch the recording before the next. session your attendance will be counted.
So thank you so much to those of you who expressed that this would make this a better learning experience for you. We really appreciate it. So our timing today is that we're going to start with an amazing youth testimony just shortly, then we'll have our first expert speaker speaking about mitigation. We'll have a brief discussion about our community space on Slack and a little quiz on Mentimeter, a little discussion there. We'll have a five minute break at 5pm in UK time.
Then we're having a real treat, we're having an amazing performance by Maafetula and then Yoko will be speaking through some of the work that Youngo is doing on mitigation initiatives. we'll finish with our second expert speaker Dr Alex Lenferna who's going to be speaking to us about just energy transition partnerships and then we'll close out. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and move to the mentimeter right now so we will have a mentimeter which is the same code as if Jamie can share the the mentimeter and we'll have the same code for the whole session for the for the mentimeter and and I'll actually I can share my screen and we'll be having the same code for the whole session and apologies folks and and you can weigh in now so I'll just share my screen so that you can get the session there great um so we'd love to hear what topics come to mind when you think of mitigation so we'll allow you a little a few moments there now to um to weigh in on what you think of when you hear the word mitigation I'll just make sure. Great, so we have some things coming in. Justice, carbon budget, making sure that we're reducing the impacts on the front end.
Reduce is really coming up. Reduction of emissions. Unequal, I guess that means the sort of unequal focus maybe on...
mitigation versus adaptation, perhaps. I like to see degrowth in there. That's a nice thing to see people talking about. Great.
Thank you so much for your insights on that. It's really great to see you all. But yeah, I think a big thing that's coming through is just reducing and preventing.
So the Mentimeter will remain open for a little bit. So feel free to continue to feed into that. So thank you for participating in that.
Great. Fantastic. We'll just hand over to Yoko for the learning objectives of the session. So we are excited for this session and for all we will learn together and here are a few of the topics areas we will cover and please share the site as well. So basically for about the medication the main topic within the UFCCC will be presenting a medication work program.
This is one of the main objectives negotiating at the SB58, which is happening right now in COP28, on how to reduce greenhouse gases and to achieve the global goal of 1.5 degrees over time. It's also about Paris Agreement, including responsive measures, and just transition work program, which is all about green jobs, increase of green jobs for everyone, not just youth. and it's also part of the Global Stock Tech which is again has medication as one of the topics within Global Stock Tech and for COP28 it will be the first Global Stock Tech happening and it will also be the first time for the Medication Work Program dialogue which is hopefully the case and as a young girl this also like as from youth perspective the Yangu has already submitted the UMCCC and energy transition and a photo which is about the agriculture and food and land usage, which I will talk more about it later towards the end of the session.
So yeah, and so, and then, yes, as yeah, they are all past. to the Alexis to introduce the U speaker. Great, thanks so much Yoko.
And just a reminder on the attendance form, we'll be sharing it through the session, but you also have, as we mentioned, two weeks in order to fill it out. So if you can just click to the next slide, please. I'll just, I think maybe easier if I just share my screen.
Sorry. It's fantastic. Can everyone see my screen? Yes? Okay, great.
So we're really, really delighted to have Benjamin Caravajal-Ponce, who's an advocate for the just energy transition and for climate action. He has a background in mechanical civil engineering and a master in management for sustainable impact and consulting from the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria. Benjamin has gained lots of experience in promoting sustainable practices. So we're really lucky he's with us today because he's actually the founder of Uno.C. Cinco, which is a social enterprise focused on environmental education.
And he actively drives collective action against climate change and towards sustainable development. He's committed to fostering a more united Latin American region, empowering citizens and youth and influencing public policy. He's participated in global climate events such as pre-COP25, COP25, pre-COP26, COP26, the 2022 UN Ocean Conference as a Youth for Climate delegate.
it. Additionally, he has contributed to important initiatives in the energy sector, including the Chilean long-term climate strategy and the adaptation strategy against the climate crisis. So we're really delighted to have him here today and I'll hand off to you Benjamín.
Thank you. Thank you a lot for such a big presentation and also for the honor to be here and try to share my experience also like on a small from a point of view of this topic that is the energy transition. So, well, it's not necessary to present myself, so I'm going to go directly to the topic that is matter for today.
And it is always said that you never, never, never start a talk with a graph, but that is exactly what I'm going to do, because we are going to talk about this, the temperature and how we try to decrease this, like, increase. at the end of the global temperature. So to address the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, we need to talk about energy. We need to talk about energy transition. And the first thing that comes to my mind when we talk about energy transition, people believe in energy and they're clinging to electricity.
But honestly, energy is totally more than that. even more complex than that. Our society is so related to the energy, how we move, how we eat, how we live basically every day. So we could say, or at least I would like to say, that it's almost all about energy. If we talk about, for example, about the climate action or the climate change, we have to keep in mind that almost three quarters of the greenhouse gas emissions today come from the energy sector.
And energy sector is the transport, is the energy used in building, it is of course the electricity generation, but it's even more than that. So we have to keep in mind also that the energy is going to play a key role in how we're going to address, how we're going to drive on this climate action. And if we see actually our history... It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be easy at all. Because if we make an overview of our last 200 years, we could see that how oil and gas, starting with the first industrial revolution in the 1750s, and until today, we can see how they discover the use, let's say. of different fossil fuels and also machines too that give us the opportunity to reach our development, to reach the tools that we have today. So when we say that climate action is about energy, it's because we are facing actually right now a massive partnership, both in terms of source of our energy and how we obtain the energy and the waste. that we consume as well also the value that we give to the energy and how we use it.
And this transformation, of course, it will not be mine. It's going to change not just our electricity, it's going to change all our society in terms of social, political and economic mutation that we're going to live. So we are going to say that we will live and change and probably change.
But how it's going to be, we don't know. But something that we know is, for example, that electric vehicles, their cost is falling and their sales are rising. For example, in 2022, more than 10 million electric cars were sold worldwide in the last year.
Or, for example, in the last decade, the two main renewables, that means wind and solar, have reached the fuel maturity. cheaper than fossil fuels. So we can see that this change between fossil fuels and clean technology in terms of cost and also in terms of benefit, so it's something that we cannot stop, something that we are going to see every day and we're going to live. So we could say that it's clear the what and the why. Why we need the energy transition, what is energy transition, it's so important and that is going to depend on us how and when.
So how and when it's going to be depend of or are gonna define our future because any transition at the end represent this how they how we said this pandemic shift in terms of economic social and environmental and also geopolitical thing so when we say how we need to see our scenarios if we keep our current policies we are not gonna reach the paris agreement vote we are gonna probably like see an increase of the global mean temperature of 2.5 degrees Celsius at least. And the Paris Agreement says that we cannot exist between 1.5 and 2 degrees for the whole century. I'm so sorry to interrupt, but we're having trouble hearing you. Would you maybe mind speaking without your slides, as it might be taking up too much bandwidth? And then maybe we can share them afterwards, if you wouldn't mind just speaking.
Sure, sure, sure. So what I don't know if you can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Without the video, I think I am. Yeah, perfect. So again, what we're to say is the global and energy transition or to reach at the end, the natural mission is possible.
The same has said it has said that it is possible, but possible doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. It's going to be really difficult and we are going to live many many of the challenges that we don't know how it's going to happen, how it's going to be in the future and something that we have to keep in mind is the energy transition. It is not a simple change up from fossil to renewable technology.
It is more than that. It is a historic process of collective transformation that will be driven by a technological transformation, but will affect how our society relates to each other, right down to the geopolitical structure of the world. So we have also to think that there will be sectors that will be benefited and sectors that will be suffered.
There will be jobs and economic sectors that will disappear and others that will be born or grow stronger. they will be national, for example, that will lose power, those first different fossil fuel economic and base countries, and also they're going to lose influence and others they will gain. So we will see change in our economics and also how we pay taxes, how we relate our economy with our energy.
So it will be up to us. how we make this energy transition. Is it going to be just energy transition?
or if it's going to be just a transition. So how we could get this energy transition to make it a just energy transition? Well, the youth and the civil society department has a key role in terms of how we push, how we implement this energy transition, for example, raise awareness on the advocates for sustainable energy policy. bringing fresh perspective, for example, in terms of innovation and technological expertise to the development of clean energy technologies, and also education, as this instance, the education and empowerment, for example, of young people, or the engagement with policy advocacy, or the promotion of community engagement, are just a few actions we measure that we can do to push. to make this transition, the energy transition and just energy transition.
We have many many examples in all the words that have put or have like broke the different scenarios how make this ambition like a real action, a real our reality. So my call today is that we have a key role also. as young people, as civil society, to turn this energy transition into the energy transition, because it's something that we cannot like, that we cannot, it is not an inevitable asset, as we saw. So everything is gonna depend on the action that we talk, that we take, sorry, today, and we, what we push for in this next. seven years.
Thank you so much. Thank you for that talk. It was very inspirational and we are really glad to really hear about the youth discipline and we have learned a lot from you.
I will introduce for the next expert speaker, the first speaker is called Jose Maria Ferranjuela. the postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford, Oxford, New York. He is a dedicated researcher passionate about shaping the dialogue to accelerate energy transition and promote economic justice. With a wealth of experience in policy practice across public agencies, nonprofits and consultancy, Jose brings valuable insights to the field. He holds a PhD from the prestigious Wilhelminthic School of Government at the University of Oxford, along with degrees in Politics and International Relations from the University of Chicago, Tsinghua University, and Korea Hyo Dae Mikhae Go.
Jose's mid-disability background equips him with a deep understanding of the complex intersection between politics, energy, international relations, change and contribute to a more sustainable and equitable future. And I will pass to Jose. Thank you. Thank you to the organizers.
Thank you for everyone that's joining us today or looking at the recording later on. So hopefully you can see the correct view on the slide. You're gonna have to...
someone's gonna have to speak because I'm not able to see you. All right, Jose Maria, we can't see your slides if you wouldn't mind sharing them. You can? Cannot.
You cannot? Can you see the slides now? No. No, you just need to share them from the bottom of your screen.
Yeah. I can share them on your behalf if that's easier. Yeah, maybe can you see them now? Yeah, sorry they're in presenter mode. I can share them for you.
No, that's good. Now can you see them? Yes.
Fantastic, so we make it happen. So I'm very happy to be here. I'm very happy that the audience is very international.
I work for the University of Oxford. I'm Mexican by birth. I studied Mexico, I studied in the US, in China too, so I was very glad to see such a diverse community participating in this course. So I'm going to talk about political economy of energy transitions. I'm going to give you a very personal perspective on how I think about this.
Hopefully, it's going to be interesting to you. I'm also part of Oxford Net Zero as a researcher. So naturally, I was very happy to accept the invitation to contribute in this series.
So let's talk about effective technological development and deployment. Benjamín, who we just presented, made a fantastic presentation. He spoke about...
all of these changes that we are going to experience in an accelerated pace in the next coming years. So I'll make emphasis on a few things that I think are very important when we think about the transformation of the energy system and other industrial systems, like, for example, the production of cement or the production of steel that are very pollutant and they produce a lot of greenhouse gases as well. So the first element that I think we all have to keep in mind, despite all the technological optimism, is natural resources. What natural resources does a country, does a region have and can use in a manner that's equitable and a certain level of justice for communities involved?
The second point is... on technology is not only about whether we have the resources, but we have the technology and the kind of the soft technologies or the skills, the techniques to transform natural resources, to use the technologies that we find useful. And the third element, and I think this is the one that's most forgotten about, is the systems for operation.
And this is that many times when we think about a technological change, we can think about a wind turbine or a solar panel. We can think about an electrical vehicle. But actually, all of these things are only one piece into a larger functioning system.
And some of these systems are very complex. So what you can see there in the third image is the picture of a controlled room of an electricity system. This one in particular is in the UK.
But essentially, every country has at least one. Maybe some have more than one. Comfort rooms where they are monitoring in real time.
what's going on with the electricity grid. If there's not enough electricity, these are the people that get to choose what cities have to cut their energy off. If there's too little demand, these are the guys that have to decide which power plants we're going to have to turn on.
So I just want to bring into the discussion the fact that underneath what we see as visible technology, there's always some systems, some institutions, some people. that make things run smoothly for us. We only know of them probably when things fail, and then they come up in the news.
So why don't we take this kind of political economy perspective on energy transition, and you'll start understanding more my way of thinking about these issues, is that we need to think about the distributional impacts globally and locally. Who wins? Who loses? How do we make sure that the benefits of whatever we're doing are equitably distributed.
I was very happy to see in the first exercise that there was a lot of mentions to equity and justice, even when we talk about mitigation, it's not only about reducing emissions, it's about doing it in an equitable way. The second reason why we do kind of a political economy that does a lot of comparison, that looks at across cases and countries, is to think about the current opportunities of action. which might be very local, very specific to a country, to a region, to an economic tradition, to a particular set of cultural and preferences. So, for example, there's places where people use a lot of cars.
That's a double challenge, both technologically and behavior. There's countries where we still have a lot of people walking or biking to their jobs for economic or behavioral practice reasons. So we need to think about how do we leverage these local positive conditions to accelerate action on climate change.
And the third one is to expand our imagination about how do we combine human resources, human capabilities and technological and technical resources. And I think we need to think a lot of comparisons and looking across cases. And obviously, courses like this are very useful for that because they open our imagination to what could have been done in the past in my country, in my region. And what could we do in the next, in the future to change our region, to look in a completely different way or look slightly different way based on some examples, not to copy them, but to kind of inspire the way that we want to go forward.
Why do we take this kind of comparative political economy perspective? Or how do we do it? We need to all the time think about the linkages between the local and international. A very good example of this, and we're going to talk about it in the rest of the presentation, is kind of finance, right?
So when we talk about renewable energy, EVs, large infrastructure, technological transformation, there's always the problem of who's going to pay for it. And even if we think about... the existence of climate finance and international sources of funding, well, not every country has the same access to international finance, and not every country has the same conditions.
So these unequal relations are important, and we need to constantly be thinking about them. Second, we need to understand what drives change in a local economy. Some economies are very agricultural-based, very productive in agriculture. Some are very productive in manufacturing. Some are very urbanized, some are very rural.
So we need to think what drives employment, what creates incomes for families, because some of the technologies that we think are ideal for a particular place might not be ideal for a different place where people's income, families'incomes are coming from different economic activities. So there might be some solutions that seem very reasonable in the UK. because we have a very good, let's say, electricity system, so we can put all the biomass into the electricity system.
But in other places, it might be more important to fight desertification, so we might want to make sure that all the waste or all the farm waste that we're producing, instead of going into energy, goes into soils to help fight deforestation and desertification and erosion of soils. The third reason is to revisit, or the third way that we do it is to revisit, to question, to think about the ideas and assumptions of what a society considers to be desirable or plausible. That is, we're used to seeing our society based on the past, and sometimes what we need is to nudge, you know, from another example to think, well, you know, things don't necessarily need to be this way.
In Latin America, it's a region that has very little trains, passenger trains, essentially no passenger train. But not long ago, a few decades ago, it was a region just like any most of the other regions in the world that had a lot of trains, passenger trains, but they disappeared in the last decades. And I think many people in America don't even remember that we have trains and that we could have trains again, right? So then it's always useful to look at other countries to say, well, you know what, what?
would it look like if we had something like that? Like we would like it? How would our life change if we had something different? And finally, and related to these ideas, to expand our imagination on how we can recombine human capabilities and technological resources, right? How do new generations or even older generations can work on new fields of industry of technology and society that didn't existed existed before right so let's say it goes all the way from you know how does someone that has driven to their work every day in their life or in their adult life suddenly decides to uh to buy to their work but also how does uh kind of a technical work in the old industry moves to starting working in the renewable energy in the renewable energy industry Now, this is kind of the framework.
So let me go through some evidence and show some important things for you to consider when you are discussing in your future career. I'm sure all of you are going to have a lot of impact. So I really want to share some of this insight because it seems like the most effective way I could have impact if I have impact on you at this moment.
So these are three types of countries in very broad terms. This is coming from a paper that was just published a few days ago, actually. And they don't use the three types framework.
I'm sharing my idea of three types to you. But there's countries like Canada on the left. Canada is just an example of a number of countries that are in this situation.
What we see in the black area, it's essentially the cumulative emissions. I'm going to be using a pointer now in purple, the emissions that the country has already produced, the contribution to climate change historically. And they're already in that red square because that means that they've already consumed their fair share for a carbon budget.
to not be beyond 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees. So even if these countries like Canada reach net zero by the time they say they want to do it by 2050, they would have still already blown out their carbon budget. So there's an inequity for sure dimension here. That's why we think that these kind of countries should be doing much more, more rapid, but also facilitating forms of compensation to other countries to accelerate decarbonization. but maybe also to pay for damages in their economies, right?
There's a second type of country, which includes Chile here, but might include, for example, Mexico, the country where I am from, to where the emissions of the country are already past kind of a fair share of these green 30, 50 parts per million on the atmosphere. But if these countries were to move to net zero by 2050, they would still be... within the 1.5 share. So if a country like Chile that has a net zero target already were to achieve its target, well, we can say, well, it's making its fair share. Whereas countries like Bolivia, which is type three, and many other low-income countries are in this situation, their contribution, their historical contribution is so small that if they achieve net zero, which they could, as well, very rapidly, they clearly would be much, much more within the framework and the global climate budget.
If they were to keep growing as they are now, they would still be within the 1.5 degrees, right? So, and I think this is very interesting and this is very important when we engage in the discussion about net zero is that in practice, some countries might or might not reach net zero by 2050, but actually, if they don't, because of their potential to develop, to increase, to leave people out of poverty, to improve other environmental conditions, like water quality, for example, or air quality in their cities, this is still something very valuable, even if they don't reach net zero, right? Definitely not within the next decades.
So this is just to have this in mind, because this is about... kind of both historical responsibility about urgency that has different connotations in different in different cases. So let me tell you about one report that I really like about technology. There's many of these reports, some for example published by the international energy agency or by private firms, sometimes by governments.
This is by the United Nations climate change convention, the framework convention on climate change. There's something called the Technology Executive Committee that is only now becoming more active. And they published this report only a few months ago. And let me tell you what it says, because I think this is very, I like this because it's not only about the technology, it's about the technology implementation, really. So they developed a few indicators for technological feasibility.
And, you know, when I started reading the report, I thought they were going to be very technical in this regard. They were going to look at whether you had the money to do this or you had the, you know, the engineers to do this. And then what we realized, what I realized, and I really like their work, and this is something nice about the Framework Convention and the whole climate negotiation process, is that it's very, sometimes it can take very long, but their outputs might be also very measured. and really right on point when we think about equity, is that technological feasibility, it's a deeply social, institutional, and political matter. It's not about the technology itself, here represented by this idea of maturity and technology readiness, like how much does the technology have advanced, but it's also about how simple it is to use the technology, right?
And this is not only kind of, you know, about having an app in your cell phone where you can control your car. It's about how are... solar panels simple to install and to utilize in a grid or off-grid.
And that's one of the reasons why solar panels have become so prevalent across the world is because they are a very simple technology. I mean, we got them to a point where they are very simple technology and we can deploy it very easily. So we have to think about the simplicity of the technology in the interface with the user. And finally, the scalability of the technology.
And this is not only about whether the technology can be produced many times, kind of massively produced, but whether this is a technology that can spread across societies and across regions within a country. easily whether we think this will happen. Some technologies are very unique to certain conditions and therefore they might not be really scalable.
Now let's get to the muddy parts. That's still very optimistic. We have to just think about the human component of the technologies.
Now let's talk a little bit more about the international relations of this mitigation agenda. I've already talked about how there's a historical responsibility to support technological transitions across developing countries as well. So these graphs from the same report talk about development finance for climate technology. And what we see in the left is about debt. It's about countries or companies taking on loans that will be paid later on.
And in the right it's grants or subsidies. So this is money that will not have to be paid off. And I think this is very interesting because what you see in this graph in green it's mitigation, in blue adaptation, and in gray is kind of whether they are both mitigation and adaptation. And one very interesting factor is that, well, there's a lot of funding from loans for energy, which is the first column.
There's also a lot of grants for energy. There's a lot of subsidies from kind of develop countries to developing countries on energy. What's really striking, what's the big difference is in the transportation sector.
Transport and storage, there's a lot of credit, there's a lot of debt here, but there's almost no grants. And this is kind of shocking when I saw this graph, because, you know, coming from Mexico City and someone from Chile that's been in Santiago, someone from Santiago, someone from these very large cities in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America. even in some capital cities or large cities in developing countries will know is that we have a problem of air quality right and a lot of the solutions for mitigation of emissions in transportation are actually very valuable for contributing to air quality improvement in the cities. So it's not only about the climate fight but it's also about human health and and you know when you really go deep into these numbers you find these shocking results, like why is there no grants? Why is there no more direct support for transportation solutions that might benefit developing countries?
So I don't have an answer to this, but this is just kind of a call for you to keep looking at these aspects of our work and be able, so that you are able to highlight the inequities or the opportunities that we have to improve in certain areas like transportation, for example. Another dimension is kind of the geographical diversity, right? This graph shows how much funding from loans, from debts, go into different regions from what we still call climate-related development finance. This might be from international banks like the World Bank, but also the most rich countries to other middle-income or low-income countries.
And what you would see here is that there's a particular set of countries that are very good, are very capable of taking a lot of debt, mostly in Asia. In America, there's a few, let's say, for example, Mexico or Chile, that have really good conditions to take on loans to do this kind of work. But if we look into other specific areas, like South America or...
both north of Sahara and sub-Saharan Africa, there's very little happening here. And this is because not all countries get access to the same debt opportunities and conditions. For some countries, it is very expensive to take on debt.
And some countries are mostly taking debt to do, for example, activities on mitigation, which is on green, like South America, for example, or Central America, whereas other regions have been more successful in starting to work on the same debt opportunities. adaptation, which is also critical, like in Asia, right? So this is also another source of difference that we have to keep in mind. So let's talk about institutions and kind of the relation between institutions and the technological perspective.
So I'm not sure how many of you have read widely about the Washington Consensus. right like this this set of policies created in the 1990s that started since the 1980s really mostly by international organizations and the rich countries in the West, to impose reforms in developing countries, and especially countries that were in financial distress, were going through financial crisis or debt crisis. These were very important in the 1980s in Latin America, in the late 1990s again in Latin America, but also in Asia. And they have been recurring in different moments in Africa, too.
So there's this discussion about how the U.S. is transforming, right? We hear all of this news about how the U.S. government, through the Inflation Reduction Act proposed by President Joe Biden, is transforming the technology ecosystem in the U.S. It's giving a lot of subsidies for EVs, for renewable energy projects. And there's discussion about how Europe is starting to do the same, how UK, the European Union are also kind of getting into this boat of transforming technological systems.
And they are calling this kind of this new Washington Consensus and not only see the new Washington Consensus, but seems like now it's transatlantic. And this is very good news because, you know, still the US, Canada, European countries are very high income and their mission footprint is still very high. they've long time ago they they've blown out their carbon budget a fair carbon budget so they have to decarbonize very fast but the question is where is this really you know is is a consensus that it's transatlantic really a new washington consensus like is there is it different enough if the parties to these new consensus are still the same transatlantic groups So, you know, it's an interesting, I think it's an interesting debate for people working in middle and low income countries, because, you know, the original Washington consensus was not intended for the US or for European countries. It was intended for developing countries to privatize their industries, to cut taxes, to liberalize certain markets that they thought would be working better without government intervention.
And one of the final points from this climate technology progress report that I've been discussing in the last few minutes, it's related to this idea, right? And what they say, it's very much related to the Washington consensus as it existed in its original form, say, well, regulatory reform should not be aimed exclusively at economic and financial aspects. So it's not only about creating the better environment for the private sector to invest.
They are also about how they contribute to scientific and technical knowledge locally, and the provision of intellectual property rights and ownership locally. And this is really, really important because in the future we really need to question how climate finance has worked, maybe with some potential, with very good benefits to climate in terms of, for example, expanding renewable energy in different countries, but how little they have. contributed besides that to jobs and employment and other forms of kind of high higher forms of revenue generation like property rights intellectual property rights or some forms of technical knowledge that can then be dispersed locally um so having said that um well i think i yeah having said that let me give you a good example of Another problem that we face when we discuss climate change and climate solutions for mitigation globally, and this is I think a good example, I don't want to criticize these authors, I think people are doing great work in academia trying to imagine all the different futures that we could pursue to reduce our carbon footprint, but sometimes we have to question them. And this is an example. of a paper that tries to establish how much bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration could be done in different regions.
So this kind of technological system, essentially it's about burning biomass, let's say wood, into a power station instead of coal, and then capturing the CO2 from that biomass and storing it underground. So this whole process becomes net negative. So at some point you'd end up capturing more CO2 than the one that was released to the atmosphere.
So this is, in general, we would say this is good. But then they said, oh, well, you know, you can do that in Europe, you can do that in the US. you know, these are rich countries, they also have, they might also have the biomass available, but then they start, you know, considering that this could happen everywhere else in the world, including in countries with very low incomes and very low energy demand. So, for example, and I take this quote from the report, these technology peaks could account for over 20% of total energy consumption in Central America, Mexico, and the European countries. So maybe for European countries, this is right, because European countries have been reducing its electricity consumption for the last 10 years.
So they might have the space. Maybe for Mexico, it's all right. It's really for debate. It's a country that's going to stabilize its energy consumption at some point in the next years. But Central America, it's a region that has a lot of low-income communities that consume so little energy that the expectation that we would dedicate 20% of the total energy production in that country to do these kind of activities, you know, it's kind of, to me, it's a living mind blow.
So just to finish with these ideas, I want to give you a very good example of the last message, which is that when we think about policy innovations, some of these policy innovations are not only coming from the US or from Europe or from UK and so on and so forth, there are some really cool policy innovations coming from developing countries. And this is, again, just to say that this progress can come from anywhere, right? So in the UK right now, it's very, very common to talk about energy options. And these are very common in Europe, essentially everywhere.
But it was in Brazil where they started 10 years even before the UK thought about them. So it's really mind blowing to think that, you know, you have really good examples elsewhere in the world of things that can go very well. So the Brazilians did it well and then other countries copied them. Or another good example, Chile has been really good in planning its energy system.
And what's interesting is that Chile didn't start its energy planning system based on the example of, let's say, Canada or the UK or Norway. They started... by copying or learning from an experience in South Africa that had been done before.
So I think I eat up most of my time, but we can definitely keep talking by other means. My takeaway message is truly consider national circumstances, consider historical and equity dimensions, and really pay attention to imagining new possibilities to ramp up action through local institutions. and make sure that international corporations serve local institutional needs rather than just international goals.
So thank you all. Thank you so much José María, it was a really great presentation and always great to hear your insights um it's really really appreciated so thank you so much for taking the time to share with us um and so uh we are running a little bit behind time so i might ask if it's all right if we can do the questions written afterwards um just because we're running a little bit behind our schedule if that's okay um so we had some some interesting questions about d growth but uh if it's okay we'll do those afterwards and send them out to folks um thank you so much jose maria um so just a reminder everyone um I hope that everyone is receiving our emails because some people had a problem with emails going into the spam. But some of the questions that I see we're getting in the YouTube and in the questions here, we have addressed a few times in the emails, for example, where you can find the slides. We send them out at the end of every session every week. So just making sure that people are checking their spam folders.
And if not, then also joining the Slack where the link was sent last week, two weeks ago and also yesterday. So just. just uh that's where we have our community space where you can connect with people you can introduce yourself and we also have little prompts where we discuss some of the the content and we also share the slides and things like that there um so this is the qr code for the attendance form i also saw this in the youtube chat just a reminder you have two full weeks to fill this out so you can enjoy the session now you do not need to worry about this as mentioned this will be sent in email afterwards um and it will be shared on the slack So you can copy this now and fill it out, but there's no difference between doing it now and doing it in a week's time.
So just make sure you're really present for the session and enjoying the time. We're also just going to put it in the Zoom and YouTube chat in just a second. I know that a few people had some trouble with the attendance that they missed, you know, missed it closing and didn't watch it in time. And we've received a lot of requests to have exceptional cases to count your attendance. We're really happy to.
accommodate these but please do not send personal slack messages or personal emails to us because it's so much easier if we can handle everything through our one email youthclimate training at gmail.com and which is the email that you get from us uh you can just reply to that directly please try to send your request there because when we have all the different team members receiving requests it's a little bit hard for us to follow so thanks so much for your your cooperation there and we also mentioned two weeks ago our collaboration with tara which is a climate training platform um excited to get a bunch of free resources from there and we've just had a little bit of delay in getting that up and running and so you will receive an email directly from Tara with a with a login and you can get access to loads more lectures there and also that will be another place where you can find the links to the recordings as well as our emails and on Slack so you should be covered across those different platforms. We're just going to flip to the mentee and talk about some mitigation questions so I'm just going to flip the Menti and you can kind of fill in what would what you would like to have the UNFCCC negotiations discuss in terms of mitigation and so again it's the same Menti meter code as always and as same as the session and you can check it out there and I've had my camera off this whole time and great so I'll let people just weigh in there on what they would like the UNFCCC to discuss And maybe you can draw some inspiration from what Jose Maria just taught us. I'm also going to go and write something in.
Yeah, there was a question as well that came through to you Josep Maria about nuclear energy and the relationship between nuclear and renewables. So maybe as this is coming through, if you want to make any commentaries on that. Sure.
I think so. I think some countries have really good reasons to not have nuclear. Others, others. have embraced it. So I think it's a solution that every society has to decide by themselves, probably with their neighbors, because the risks are kind of regional.
But it is a real technological solution out there. Especially, I think, there's countries where demand is growing very rapidly. and that have the right financial conditions because nuclear energy requires a lot of investment. So it's not really feasible for a country that doesn't have a really solid financial system that can borrow at kind of local currency rates.
It can be very risky for a country that is having financial problems to try to invest in something something like nuclear because the history of the projects has shown that they could potentially be much more expensive than what they are planned for. And that's a problem for many countries. Great. Thanks so much. That's really helpful to understand sort of the different national circumstances and how they affect the potential energy pathways.
Great. Thank you so much. So we're just going to take a quick comfort break now. So just a few minutes.
I'll ask you to come back it's 5.03 UK time. I'll just ask you to come back at 5.07, 5.08 and make sure to be back on time because we have a very very exciting musical performance. So just take some time to look at the sun if you can. I'm personally just going to go stand in the sun for for just a second, get away from my screens and just remember how lucky we are to be alive right now. So we're just going to take a second and we'll come back in five minutes.
Thanks everybody. Thank you Great, so we've been seeing some great answers coming in on what we'd like the UNFCCC negotiations to discuss. So thank you so much for contributing to that.
We're really, really excited now to have an incredible musical performance from Mafe Tula. So I'll just... Come, fear takes the reins Get in the path that the mysteries reveal The past forgiven The future has not arrived The horizon is asleep and abrams But you can overcome fears and pain Hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, Rima, rima con coraje por el charco de la vida Al ritmo que dicta el viento Siempre pa'lante, nunca hacia atrás Marca el paso, el tiempo fugaz Sástenete bien el sombrerito de mi That life in a breath goes away It goes flying Rims with courage through the puddle of life To the rhythm that dictates the good Hey-oh, hey-oh, la-la-la-bing-bee, la-la-la-bing-bee Hey-oh, hey-oh, la-la-la-bing-bee, la-la-la-bing-bee Hey-oh, hey-oh, la-la-la-bing-bee, la-la-la-bing-bee Hey-oh, hey-oh I have my chest open, my heart is going to come out I know it will run away, I don't care where it wants to go It's like a horse out of the mouth, galloping in a hurry I've tried to tame it, but it's a good scavenger It goes galloping under the rain, under the sun It runs through the sand until it melts I'm so sorry to interrupt but we've just lost your sound it's on mute sorry if you could just unmute yourself Bajo la lluvia, bajo el sol Corre por la arena hasta fundirse en el horizonte Se va galopando bajo la lluvia, bajo el sol Hasta donde acaban las praderas En esa loma alza el vuelo Y se va, se va, ¿dónde quiere ir?
En esa loma alza el vuelo Maffetura and yes and we if we we just provide instagram to the people I believe and we will share with that with everyone so that everyone can connect with you on instagram and yeah let's hope that they'll connect you and we will be more future in the future as well more yeah thank you for that yeah oh there you go there you go basically after that music thank you very much again for your performance thank you You're welcome. Then I will jump to the next session and sorry for the really, really, really huge difference between the medication and the medication topic by jumping to topic. So I would just jump right into the Young Girl Medication Workgroup because I'm the contact point. As contact point, I would like to introduce you to the topic for medication really specifically in the UMCCC.
And this is a very technical term. and a document that have been really in a discussion during the negotiations since 1937 and towards 1928. So this is only one sample that Yangguo Multi-Casual Working Group has submitted to the UMCC portal and it's basically called the first global dialogue and investment focused event. I mean it's just like a one document that really talks about discussions.
and under the SHARM-AX shake, which was where COP27 occurred last year, and under the Medication Work Program. So these are just the five main points that are discussed within our submission. And so, as I mentioned before, the mitigation is a very important topic.
Without medication, it would be really difficult to achieve the goal of 1.5 degrees or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So that is very critical for us. the young people in the world to dive in and engage with the world to emphasize the key points and possible demands especially on negotiations but we don't have to be in person to discuss this but we can also be more engaged online and as like for example communicating with people working with education and we really talk about it so that they can are more aware of our education and forward collaboration especially online And so in terms of energy transition, the five really the main points are the role of young people in energy transition, fossil fuel phase out, energy transition finance, carbon city technology, and just energy transition. Energy is not just one component for medication, but also nature, just like the Afarud agriculture for extreme land use, which was mentioned earlier, when we talk about the non-carbon dioxide. greenhouse gases because greenhouse gases is not just carbon dioxide but there's also other gases like methane and therefore in order to approach this it's really important to approach this at different sites and also how young people play a full system of transformation like planting trees to make sure that soil is healthy enough to ensure that the plants are grown and that land is not degraded and like less pollution, for example.
While many points are parallel to each other in terms of energy and effort along with ocean, nationally determined contributions, laws and regulations for policy implementing also really important to be effective in order to ensure that everything's in order. In case of NDC or nationally determined contributions, Medication is one of the topics discussed in the Global Stock Tech during SPS and COPs, where parties and non-party stakeholders come together to make interventions, ensuring that everyone is included into the decision-making process, as the GST will be the first process during COP28. Thus, with the flexible range of topics being considered, the Medication Working Program holds significance. to close the information gap. If you want to get involved, please email medication at yanggoklimelight.org and to get in touch, ensure that your voice is also included and be really proactive towards COVID-19 AIDS, but also during COVID-19 AIDS, like I did in these climate training systems or programs, to ensure that everyone learns about medication.
Yes. And that's really a broad overview. Thank you. And I will pass to Alexis to introduce our second expert speaker. I think you, by the way Alexis, I think you made it.
Thank you Yoko. Thanks so much Yoko. It's really great to see the interlinkages between the Global Youth Coalition and YoungGo and to see all the great work that so many young people are doing.
So we'll send all that information as well by email and post it on the Slack. But now I have the great pleasure to introduce Dr. Alex Linferna, who is going to be our speaker today talking about just energy transition partnerships. He's a highly accomplished postdoctoral research fellow at the Nelson Mandela University specializing in energy transition. in development studies.
He holds a very prestigious National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Fellowship, and he is the elected General Secretary as well as the co-founder of the Climate Justice Coalition in South Africa. He actively drives a transformative climate justice agenda through his work by bringing together civil society, grassroots organizations, trade unions, and communities. And he co-hosts this podcast called Just Us and the Climate, which is a fantastic fantastic bit of wordplay and they explore climate change as an opportunity to build a more just world. He has over a decade of experience in environmental and social justice and particularly in climate and energy justice. And he has been recognized through his work through scholarships like the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship, the Fulbright Scholarship and Endeavor.
He holds a PhD focused on climate and energy justice from the University of Washington and has published numerous academic and opinion pieces in outlets worldwide. So thank you so much, Alex. I'll hand over to you to share your screen and all of your insights with us. Thank you.
Thank you, Alexis, and thank you to everyone who invited me here. It's a real pleasure to be with you. I appreciate that very generous introduction too.
So let me see if I can successfully share my screen to start off with. Hopefully folks can see it. Is that a yes? Okay, great.
Fantastic. So today I'm going to be talking about Just Energy Transition Partnerships. And it's sort of a critique coming from South Africa, because South Africa is the place where they've piloted Just Energy Transition Partnerships. And so we're going to be talking about that. But basically, a Just Energy Transition Partnership is a form of climate finance.
So what this talk is really more broadly about is thinking critically about climate finance and thinking a lot about the questions of justice that we should be asking around how climate finance is delivered. So I'm actually quite very happy to be following the earlier talk because I think there were some important questions that were asked around that already. And so part of sort of the opening framing question that I wanted to ask. is to think about, you know, what is really the aim of climate finance? And I kind of wish I had a Mentimeter here.
It's such a great tool. I'm glad you folks are using it. But I ask this question because I think there are competing ideas around what climate finance is supposed to achieve. Is it supposed to be a vehicle through which the global north pays down its climate debt to the global south? Is it a vehicle for advancing the interests of private sector players who want to take advantage of the energy transition?
Is it a vehicle simply to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that's the main focus or is it supposed to be something that enables just and equitable development? Is it something that's supposed to drive green industrialization in the global south or is it something that's supposed to drive a global north agenda where they can dominate the clean energy economy of the future? And I think these are some of the difficult questions about what... is the role of climate finance that we need to ask when we think about what it means to deliver finance that has the stated aim of being climate finance, right? And I ask this because I think when we're thinking about climate finance, we do see it typically as a good thing, right?
We want more climate finance so that we can take more action on climate change, on adaptation, on mitigation, and increasingly on loss and damage too. But I think what we need to be learning and asking is to figure out when climate finance is a sheep in wolf's clothing. I'm sorry, a wolf in sheep's clothing. So that's basically saying when it is disguising a problematic agenda under the guise.
of a good one, right? So is climate finance being used to maybe serve the interests of like multinational financiers and corporations and governments in the global north over the interests of let's say weaker, less powerful governments in the global south and communities that might otherwise benefit? Like these are some of the critical questions we should be asking, right?
And so I want to ask these questions looking at the Just Energy Transition Partnership model, right? So these JETPs, as they are being called, are a nation. So they're quite new. They're these financing cooperation mechanisms.
And the aim of them is to help a selection of very heavily coal-dependent emerging economies make a just energy transition to renewable energy. And the countries that are involved is South Africa was the first country to try this out. And I'm speaking to you from Johannesburg, South Africa, where I grew up.
And then some of the other countries that are following. are India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Senegal. And so South Africa's Just Energy Transition Partnership, we see here a picture of our president, Soro Ramakosa, as he thinks about how do we make the transition from South Africa, which is one of the most coal-dependent countries in the world, if in fact not the most coal-dependent, depending on how you measure it, to a renewable energy future.
And we are also blessed with some of the greatest solar and wind resources. So it really is a fantastic opportunity for South Africa to enter into the clean energy economy. Now, the Just Energy Transition Partnership we have is where France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union promised South Africa 8 billion U.S. dollars. And this is through various mechanisms that include grants, concessional loans and investments, as well as risk sharing instruments.
And. a big part of the aim is to mobilize the private sector through this. Now, in response to the Just Energy Transition Plan, the South African presidency developed a larger investment plan called the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan.
And this world, unfortunately, is filled with acronyms and acronym soup. So this became the JET-IP in relationship to the JET-P. Now, this is just a slide that gives you an overview of where the money is going.
And these is denominated in the South Africa in US billion dollars. And basically, the majority of the money is going to our electricity sector to remove move us away from coal, right, which is a good thing. Generally speaking, the smaller portion of it is going to what they call new energy vehicles, which is traditionally electric vehicles, but also some other possible. options like hydrogen and so on that they're exploring. And then another significant chunk is going to green hydrogen, right?
And so this is really supposed to be a major investment plan that the presidency has come up with to build on the JP that's promised by the global north countries to then leverage that to invest, to have this bigger local investment plan, right? So it's on the face of it, it seems like quite a positive. developments that we're getting this finance from the global north it's being leveraged locally in order to drive a transition to renewable energy to clean energy vehicles and to green hydrogen right i think this is where we need to start digging a little bit deeper to think about the way that some of this finance is being delivered right and so i have a little cartoon here um and it's the the sort of the british coming and saying i claim this land in the name of his majesty, which is sort of the first colonialism.
And then after that, we have, you know, often dependence for a lot of countries in the global south. The way that colonialism often played out was through big global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund coming in and offering loans, offering debt, but in exchange for that debt, putting in place very strict policies that basically limit the way that a government, a national government can dictate their own economic policies. That's often called structural adjustment, right? And so the second element of this cartoon is the IMF coming in and say, I structurally adjust this land in the name of economic growth.
And often that economic growth was very much to the benefit of the big global north countries, the former colonizers. And so the idea is that, you know, in some ways loans are kind of the... neo-colonial way of controlling government, sort of the post-colonial way when we abolished full colonialism, we now have sort of colonialism in its new form through loans and economic structures, right? Now, part of the question we need to be asking of climate finance is, does it now begin to try and green structural adjustment or is there green structural adjustment happening?
And we've got to ask questions like whether loans made for climate finance lock countries into unfavorable conditions in the way that previous loans have. Do they lock them into things like private and weakening localization of renewable energy? And I want to say that. When we look at the JETP model, it seems like that is happening. And so we need to be careful.
And I want to give some examples. One is from a recent report that came out from the Local Institute for Economic Justice in Oxfam, South Africa, which showed that recent loans to South Africa from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came with implied or stated conditionalities. And a conditionality is when you take a loan, the condition for taking the loan is you have to do certain things, right?
And that's how structural adjustment happens is through conditionalities. And some of the conditionalities are positive ones that I might celebrate as a climate activist, which is meeting our climate targets. Others are not so positive necessarily. So reducing spending on state-owned entities and state-owned entities are public entities that often are the ones that deliver services to people and reducing spending on them and moving forward.
privatization instead, which would then benefit the private sector and maybe multinational corporations. And as part of that, there are some conditions around what's called austerity or reducing spending from the public purse to deliver on social goods and public services. And so we do see that recent loans from the IMF and World Bank that have been connected to climate targets have also come with these other interesting conditionalities.
interesting is maybe a polite way to put them, perhaps quite negative, right? And when we look at the JET-IP, the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan that the president put forward in relation to this JET-P, we see some of these conditionalities kind of coming to the fore in a certain extent. So one of them is that there is a weakening of localization. So what localization means is taking the sort of supply and manufacture chain of things like renewable energy. and trying to build local industry and manufacturing capacity so that you are importing less and building more locally.
And that's really important because a lot of the job creation and economic benefits from renewables come from the localization. But if you analyze the JET-IP funds, only 0.1% in South Africa are dedicated to localization. So very small percentage. And this is against the backdrop of the local government weakening localization.
policies, right? And meanwhile, we do have Western countries and China and others, some of the big players, are in a bit of a trade war to ensure that they are the ones producing and manufacturing renewable energy. So I have here a picture from Joe Biden.
He has, he implemented something called the Inflation Reduction Act. And a lot of that is about trying to position America as the dominant player in clean energy manufacturing. So it would arguably be in their interest. to use climate finance as a tool to help enable them to export their technologies rather than enabling global south countries to lead in green industrialization and localization.
So we need to think critically about is climate finance being used as a tool to help countries like the U.S. have a made in America kind of clean energy future, right? And I think this speaks to sort of some of the critiques that have historically been made against sort of neo-colonial policy. So I quote here Kwame Nkrumah, who was one of the first prime minister of Ghana on the overthrow of colonialism there.
And as he pointed out back then, the result of neocolonialism is that foreign capital, which is often what climate finance is, is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neocolonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. Now, not all climate finance is that.
I'm not saying that. But we need to think perhaps through these sort of colonial critiques of international finance to see when is climate finance perhaps pushing that forward. And one other element that we do see through the fact that a lot of climate finance is in the form of debt. And I think we saw from Jose Maria's presentation that actually the large portion of it is through debt, that that might increase. the indebtedness of global South countries, many of whom are already paying a really significant amount of money on debt in their national budgets, to the point where they might spend more on servicing debt than they do on healthcare or education, right?
And so if most of the jet-pea, which It comes in the form of loans, which is the case in South Africa, and only a small percent is grants. Does that increase the indebtedness of countries, meaning higher debt payments? And if higher debt payments are often used as a pretext to cut public spending, then can climate finance be a tool to drive deepening austerity? And I think these are real critical questions we should be asking of climate finance. And in South Africa, we have this very interesting sort of...
sort of it's like a contradiction that we face where South Africa recently took on a massive amount of debt to build two major coal power stations, some of the biggest in the world. It was about three billion in loans that were taken on for one particular coal power station. Now it's worth remembering that the jet P that the Global North is offering is only eight billion.
So it's quite a significant amount that we took on to build a massive coal plant recently. And we did that despite widespread resistance from civil society and despite the fact that there were pretty clear elements of corruption in the project, not just from the local South African government, but also from U.S. and Japanese investor interests who were implicated in corruption, who got fined through the U.S. Stock Exchange Commission.
And so there's clear corruption involved in this. But it has locked South Africa into very expensive and polluting energy. And so in response, there's been calls from civil societies to say, rather than saying we need to be locked into even more debt, perhaps the international community should be cancelling the debt that they've locked us in. Institutions like the World Bank should cancel debt on these sorts of projects to South Africa.
And so debt cancellation is an important tool that we should be looking at. And maybe let me just double check my time. So I'm not going too much over here. But Let me talk a little bit also about how climate finance can be used as a tool to drive forward privatization of particularly the energy sector, because that's what this JET, the Just Energy Transition Partnership, is about. So when we look at the, if you analyze the JET investment plan that the president of South Africa put forward in response to the JETP, only 0.1% of the funds are dedicated to socially owned renewable energy versus you know, specifically to socially owned renewable energy versus the broader funding that is often about facilitating the privatization of renewable energy.
And in South Africa, we are seeing that in a big, big way where there has been a widespread slate of policies that are about privatizing energy and moving away from what used to be the case where South Africa had most of its energy produced by a state-owned entity called ESCOM, who I'll speak to a bit about in a second. And so the question I guess we ask, because not everybody maybe is an anti-privatization activist at this point, but the question is about what's so bad about privatizing the energy sector. And one of the simple answers is that, you know, if we have a state-owned entity, its mandate is about delivering energy for the public good.
And so it would target those that are, let's say, can't afford energy. It would help provide energy access to rural areas that aren't connected, who maybe aren't so profitable to do that for. And so there is this question of energy as a public good versus a private good that's driven for profit. Another element of what might be so bad about privatization, particularly in the South African context, is that what's required to invest in renewable energy, two of the key ingredients are land and money. You need land to put up a solar panel or wind farm or storage facility.
And you need money to invest in that. Now, in South Africa, when you look at the land, of the history of apartheid, white people still own about 72% of the total farms and agricultural holdings by individual landowners. 72% are also male.
And so if you were looking at who owns the land, it's predominantly white men, right? And so white men would be the ones who would benefit the most because they have the most land. If you look at money in South Africa, South Africa is the world's most unequal country, where 10% of the population owns 80% of the wealth, right? And so if you just looked at those two factors, which are key to investing in renewables, you would see that the benefits, if we go for widespread privatization, would rest in the hands of a minority. And so this is really worrisome in terms of privatizing the energy space.
And what we do see in South Africa is that privatization is driving a form of energy apartheid in a way. So the National Energy Utility ESCOM has been very deeply underfunded. It's been poorly maintained. And a lot of the coal plants that it's running are in really crippling states right now because of a lack of proper maintenance.
And so there is this underfunding of the National Utility ESCOM. Some of you might have seen reports of South Africa facing rolling blackouts. on quite a regular basis. These are scheduled blackouts called load shedding.
And the poor majority of South Africans are stuck with Eskom, this national utility, because they can't afford to invest in alternatives. Even though renewables are now the cheapest form of energy, the upfront costs to invest in them are prohibitive for the poor majority in South Africa. Meanwhile, more wealthy, better off individuals and corporations are being are able to drive forward major investment in solar, wind and storage and are benefiting.
And so there is this inequality in terms of who is benefiting from this privatization. And there's this question of whether climate finance enables that, right? So the question is, what are we to do? So Africa, as along with many different developing countries, does need climate finance.
However, many people are saying that the climate finance shouldn't be delivered like this, right? In South Africa, we have two somewhat progressive camps. Some say we must reject the JetP deal until it's better. When some people say we must reject the deal, others respond saying we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Basic meaning of that saying is that there is a lot of good stuff in the JetP, and so we shouldn't reject it altogether. But we must instead look at how we can improve it, how we can get more grant financing and less loan financing, how we can ensure there's better green industrialization and localization, as well as more social ownership of energy rather than the privatization of energy. And so there is quite a large camp that says, no, let's not reject it, but we must call for the deal to be improved. And so that's kind of the response. One of my other hats is as Secretary of the Climate Justice Coalition.
And last year, we did organize a march for jobs, clean energy and climate justice. And there, Sort of the top line message we were putting forward is that rather than the prevailing agenda of privatization and austerity, we do demand real climate justice that transforms our deeply polluting, unjust and unequal country. We must pursue a homegrown climate justice agenda that delivers millions of decent, well-paying jobs, a rapid and just transition to a more socially owned renewable energy future and meaningful climate justice that delivers for all.
So yeah, I think that brings me to the end. If there's any questions, you're welcome to get in touch. The Climate Justice Coalition's website, which is in construction at the moment, but there's an outdated version on the web. If you want to look at it there, you're also welcome to check out.
I've written about some of this stuff if you want to check my personal website too. So thank you very much. I think I'll leave it there.
And hopefully I did that within time. Thank you again for having me. Thank you so much, Alex.
That was honestly amazing. I wish you could see the YouTube chat at the moment because people are just saying facts, facts, facts and snapping their fingers virtually. So thank you so much for delivering such a clear presentation on. I really like the way that you described. at the wolf in sheep's clothing and lamb's clothing um which is a really important insight onto climate finance and we have a couple of questions for you and we have some time for it so thank you for for um for making time for that um the first question is just about But you talked about this in the context of the South African JETP and head of COP28.
Is there any kind of rumblings that you're hearing of sort of coalition building between different countries that have JETPs on the horizon and how they can sort of collectively resist these bad deals? Yeah, so there has been some international coalitions forming in different spaces. So, for example, I know that the trade unions for energy democracy recently had a big conference here in Johannesburg, where they've been working with trade unions across the global south to push back against sort of green structural adjustment.
And I think there are like some initiatives and pockets of different civil society, but I do think there needs to be a deepening of international collaboration on this front, because what we are facing are multinational corporations and multinational interests that operate. And so we do need multinational collaboration and resistance so that we can avoid, you know, this sort of case where finance might move from one space to another. And so.
rather than this climate finance driving a race to the bottom, we need to work collaboratively to ensure that it's kind of a race to the top and we hold climate finance as accountable. And I know there are folks working within the UN climate space to push this. And there is a question of like how effective that space can be and how we can build power in that space to meaningfully challenge it, both within the UN halls, but also from the bottom up too. So I think there is some collaboration, but we definitely need to see more. And that's...
something that I would definitely be interested in chatting about to anybody if they're keen to build those sorts of collaborations. Thanks, Alex. That's a super insightful answer. And I'm hoping that, yeah, the collaboration will become more. And we had another question about sort of the relationship between countries that have a lot of natural resources and therefore sort of carbon credits and the relationship between that and paying back loans.
Is there a relationship between those two things? Yeah, that's a tricky one. I mean, I think there is a relationship.
But I mean, carbon credits are a way that folks can sort of sell their ability to reduce emissions, whether that's through reforestation initiatives, or then perhaps reducing emissions through their own mitigation, and they're sold off. So it is a way that people can be paid for doing climate action. But, you know, there are a lot of critical questions about how effective those carbon credits are and whether they're actually are reducing the emissions that they claim they are. So but there is something called a debt for climate finance swap or debt for climate action swap, where people do get their debts kind of removed in exchange for taking climate action. So for example, Seychelles just had a major deal, I think, on debt for climate.
And debt for nature is a broader way of looking at that. It's not just about climate, but more broadly about ecological conservation. So it's not quite a carbon credit, but it is a way of removing debt in exchange for action on climate. And there is some good things to be said about that, because it is kind of a way of exchanging climate action or ecological action in exchange for reducing debt.
But there's a question of under which conditions that's being done and how much power do global south countries have in determining that. Yeah. Great. Thanks so much. That's super useful to understand that context.
And the last question is just are there resources or groups in particular that are doing really good work in this area that it's worth people who are interested in this field to follow? apart from the Climate Justice Coalition? Yeah, so maybe I can name a few.
One that is doing some of the international collaboration that I forgot about is Debt for Climate, and they are focused on how do we deal with the debt of the global south and ensure we're not getting locked into more and that instead that we have international climate finance that is a proper down payment on the... climate debt that the global north owes. So debt for climate is one, and that has quite an international reach, which is nice.
Then there is the trade unions for energy democracy. I'm not sure how many of you are in a trade union. I have a little history in trade unions myself, and I think they have a really important role to play in this. So that might be worth checking out. Another grouping that's quite interesting, they're not a climate grouping per se, but they do a lot of work on this at the international level.
in terms of pushing back against problematic international finance institutes is the progressive international so they might be worth checking out as well so maybe those are three that I can can name for now and I can try remember others and share great yeah I would also recommend the work of the debt justice campaign they're a little bit maybe more focused in the UK but they were formerly the jubilee debt campaign and now the debt justice campaign so they're doing really interesting work more on that broadly and But thank you so much, Alex. It's really great to hear your insights and thank you for sharing it with such passion and clear experience across different sides of this issue. So thank you very much.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great. Thanks so much.
And we'll share Alex's website where he has some of his publications and research so you can go in and check out more there. Fantastic. So we're just about to finish our fourth session, but in two weeks time, we have our fifth session, which is going to be all about climate finance.
We're really lucky to have two amazing speakers who have a lot of experience across this area and who will cover the sort of climate finance 101. So where are we at, for example, with the global goal of $100 billion to be delivered in adaptation finance? This follows on really well from Alex's presentation that he just gave us. And so we'll cover sort of the main areas of negotiation on finance at the moment, including an overview of the newly quantified collective goal. And we'll examine some of the.
more particular articles of the Paris Agreement that really discuss climate finance, particularly article 2.1c, that is really about making financial flows consistent, which is a really important and kind of often ignored part of the Paris Agreement. So we have Dr Charlene Watson, who's going to be speaking with us, and Veronica Gundu-Jakarasi. So we're really lucky to have a wealth of experience between them to talk to us about this.
So we're really grateful for them. Just another reminder here about the attendance form. So you can scan it again on this QR code.
We've put the link pinned in the YouTube chat as well as in the Zoom chat. As mentioned, you have two weeks to fill it out. We saw on the YouTube that a few people were saying that they hadn't received the session notes after the session or the slides. These have been sent out each week. So if you're not receiving those or if you're not receiving the reminder emails each week, week we send a reminder email 24 hours before the session and one hour before the session if that is totally new information to you if you haven't received that information um please send us an email um at youthclimate training at gmail.com um so that we can make sure that we get that all sorted for you um and you can also join the slack as we'll be posting resources and things there too um great so um yeah just a reminder that that's youthclimate training at gmail.com where you can find us.
So thank you so much again to everyone for being with us here today. We really had a great time and we learned so much and it was really great to have our youth speaker, to have Jose Maria Mafetula doing the music which was so wonderful and finally Alex Linferna who's doing our final presentation there. So as usual we really like hearing what you guys think about the session. You can of course follow us on the Global Youth Coalition and the Twitter.
and also make sure to follow the Smith School Twitter. Of course, we'll put it in the chat and you can follow us as well on LinkedIn and you can, we'll share everything as well in the follow-up email. Great.
And you can also... join the Twibunites campaign to share the session highlights and scan the QR code there. But for now, just thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day and see you next session. Bye.