In this issue:

The Brazilian Agreement on Cooperation and Facilitation of Investments (ACFI): A New Formula for International Investment Agreements?; Farmland Investments and Water Rights in Africa: The Legal Regimes Converging over Land and Water; Working by Design: New Ideas to Empower U.S. and European Workers in TTIP; News in Brief; Awards and Decisions; Resources and Events.

With 28 participants from 14 countries, the NAP Global Network’s inaugural Targeted Topics Forum (TTF) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil addressed the related topics of securing political support and sectoral integration in the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process.

These topics reflect objectives and principles of the NAP process, which is intended to facilitate the integration of climate change adaptation into new and existing policies spanning sectors and levels of government, and to align with overall sustainable development priorities.

This first TTF Report summarizes some of the key lessons that emerged.

This guidebook provides an overview and application of scenario approaches as a method of conducting complex regional and place-based assessments and providing information to support planners developing longer-term adaptation plans.

An important aspect of the approach, however, is that it considers future change in the context of whole regional systems. This guidebook describes how to characterize changes while measuring, evaluating, and mapping climate change impacts in the context of quantitative data on the agricultural sector in light of developed qualitative scenarios.

This briefing document summarizes approaches used and lessons learned with a focus on identifying socioeconomic pathways for a region that formally considers the role and future of regional agriculture (including management plans and actions) by 2035.

It also considers regional adaptation and management options, including strategies to mainstream climate change planning into regional decision-making processes. The scenarios and the identified adaptation needs indicated that adapting to climate change is a multiscale and multisectoral challenge requiring coordination between agricultural policy and other sectoral approaches. These sectors include municipal, provincial and federal agencies that should be considering measures ranging from support to ecological goods and services, different types of insurance mechanisms, addressing infrastructure challenges and ensuring that agriculture also provides societal and natural benefits. This approach has implications for monitoring to ensure that mainstreaming efforts (as well as the actual change in agriculture at the landscape level) are tracked and recorded.

Jointly prepared by IISD, OCI and ODI, this country study and accompanying data sheet compiles publicly available information on fossil fuel production subsidies in Mexico in 2013 and 2014.

It is a background paper to the report Empty promises: G20 subsidies to oil, gas and coal production and provides a baseline to track progress on the phase-out of such subsidies as part of a wider global energy transition.

To download the related Mexico Excel information click here.

Trade is reflected throughout the draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of June 2015 and the May 2015 draft outcome of the third international Financing for Development (FfD) conference.

The first aim of this paper is to map where trade-related elements are found in the SDGs and FfD. The second aim is to describe the trade-related architecture for review and follow-up that could support these outcomes and to map where it exists or could be built. Trade’s contribution to the post-2015 agenda is diffuse, which means follow-up and review will be a challenge, but it need not be overly burdensome, and it will be useful. The paper identifies six clusters of trade-related elements in the draft SDGs and in the draft FfD outcome, which range from improving access to markets for small-scale producers to strengthening the multilateral trading system. For each cluster, the paper identifies current thinking on indicators, where the necessary data are already collected (if they are) and where progress against these political commitments could be reviewed. The paper then presents the information from another perspective, focusing on the potential roles of a variety of review mechanisms. Given the profusion of options for review mechanisms, an inter-agency task force on trade could provide an analytical synthesis of reporting and reviews useful for discussions at national, regional and global levels of the interrelated effects and trade-offs between goals.

Ontario has successfully implemented its policy to put an end to coal use in 2014. This energy transition has become “the single largest GHG reduction measure in North America”: since 2007, when coal accounted for about 25 per cent of its electricity generation, Ontario has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 34 Mt or 17 per cent.

What lessons can be learned from Ontario’s coal phase-out experience? How can its success be replicated in other parts of the globe? This paper explores this question for all those around the world who may draw inspiration and lessons learned from Ontario: policy-makers, campaigners, entrepreneurs and others interested in transitioning to a low-carbon future.

We rely on the concept of the “window of opportunity” and suggest that all elements critical to a sustainable energy transition can be clustered within the four “panes” of this “window”: context, champions, concerns and complementary policies. These “panes” provide the basis for the structure of this paper. This analysis has been informed by a comprehensive review of existing literature and semi-structured interviews with high-level experts from Canadian political and academic circles, industry and civil society.

This joint IISD, World Bank and UNCTAD discussion paper marries two substantial bodies of research to show how investment contracts can be set up to promote sustainable development.

It presents the top five positive outcomes and the five downsides from private sector investments in large-scale agricultural projects. The paper also proposes legal options to maximizing the main positive outcomes and minimizing the main downsides through better drafting of contracts between investors and governments for the lease of farmland.

This paper has been posted with the permission of the World Bank.

Brazil has developed a new model investment agreement, the Cooperation and Investment Facilitation Agreement (CIFA).

Unlike traditional bilateral investment treaties (BITs), which are geared towards investor protection, CIFAs focus less on investor protection and more on institutional arrangements and agendas for investment facilitation and cooperation. They promote amicable ways to settle disputes and propose state–state dispute settlement as a last resort. Notably, CIFAs do not include provisions on investor–state arbitration.

CIFA negotiations were launched in 2013. Between March and May 2015, Brazil concluded the first three agreements, with Mozambique, Angola and Mexico. Negotiations with Malawi are reported to have been concluded, and Brazil is also negotiating with Algeria, Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Peru, South Africa and Tunisia.

Jointly prepared by IISD, OCI and ODI, this country study and accompanying data sheet compiles publicly available information on fossil fuel production subsidies in Italy in 2013 and 2014.

It is a background paper to the report Empty promises: G20 subsidies to oil, gas and coal production and provides a baseline to track progress on the phase-out of such subsidies as part of a wider global energy transition.

To download the related Italy Excel information click here.