EITI-Woche in Berlin
Diese Woche findet in Berlin das internationale Board-Meeting von EITI statt.
EITI steht für Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative und bemüht sich um die Offenlegung der Zahlungsströme im Rohstoffsektor.
Mehr Infos gibt es hier. D-EITI publizierte 2017 seinen ersten Bericht.
Im Rahmen des Board-Meetings gibt es folgende Veranstaltung von der bzw. für die Zivilgesellschaft:
Dienstag 26. Juni “Workshop on resource governance, transparency and climate change”
mit Publish What You Pay, Global Witness, Heinrich Böll Foundation, openoil.net und FSB Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Hier geht es um Rohstoffe, Offenlegungen der Zahlungen bis zum persönlichen CO2-Budget.
Mittwoch 27. Juni, 9-11 Uhr, CS Meetings mit folgender Agenda:
International gab es die Unterzeichnung eines Memorandum of Understanding zwischen OGP und EITI. Deutschland ist eines der wenigen Länder, in denen beides aktiv implementiert wird.
orange OGP-Länder, hellblau EITI-Länder, violet EITI-OGP-Länder
Aspects of Resource Extraction and EITI Wednesday, 9 – 11 am
09.00 Welcome Prof. Dr. Edda Müller, Transparency International Germany
09.10 Social Aspects and D-EITI - IGBCE (Industrial Union in the Mining, Chemical and Energy Industry)
09.20 Ecological Aspects and D-EITI - FÖS – Green Budget Germany German Forum on Environment & Development
09.30 EITI and the Ecological and Social Impact of Mining in Peru Cesar Gamboa, Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales
09.45 EITI and the Ecological and Social Impact of Mining in the Philippines Dr. Cielo Magno, Bantay Kita
10.00 Discussion Under the moderation of: Jürgen Maier, German Forum on Environment & Development
10.50 Announcing EITI & OGP Partnership - effects for CS - OKFDE & friends
10.55 Prof. Dr. Edda Müller, Transparency International Germany
16:00 Side event from BMZ on civil society and shrinking spaces (Room Eichensaal)
Thursday Board-Meeting
15:00 Side event from EITI International Secretariat on contract transparency
What’s the Deal? Evolving Practices in Contract Transparency mit EITI Secretariat, NRGI, OXFAM, OpenOil und Open Contracting Partnership.
18:30 - 19:00 Side event from NRGI and EITI International Secretariat on blockchain technologies in
the extractives industries
18:30 - 20:30 Schmutziges Geld aus dem Süden: Welche Rolle spielt Deutschland? / „The Shadowed economy – Illicit Financial Flows and Germany“
19:30 - 22:00 Liquidity & Networking
Freitag Board-Meeting
Mexikanische Delegation
WB und Extractives Global Programmatic Support (EGPS)
Deutschland fällt hier eine wichtige Rolle zu. Einerseits gilt es, EITI-Standards, die man erfolgreich vertritt, auch international hochzuhalten (Arbeitsrechte, Verteidigung des Civic Spaces) und innovative Ansätze voranzutreiben (Tiefseebohrung, Erneuerbare Energie). In Sachen Transparenzregister und Informationsfreiheit hat Deutschland noch einiges nachzuholen.
Mehr Information und Zutritt, wo möglich, gibt es per Mail unter eiti@okfn.de.
02.-05. Juli Booksprint on EITI in Potsdam mit PWYP.
3. Juli in Berlin #Rohstoffkongress “Digitalisierung und Rohstoffversorgung sind zwei Seiten einer Medaille.”
Tuesday - Bericht vom Dienstag:
Paris Agreement - Article 2
framing: Emphasising with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap
between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual
emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with
holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial
levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C
Difference between 1.5C and 2.0C warming - Was ist der Unterschied zwischen 1.5 und 2 Grad?
Project Climate Action Tracker
Project Oilchange
Documentary Smoke & Fumes The oil industry used the tobacco playbook in its fight against climate science. But where did tobacco get that playbook?
and the report A Crack in the Shell: New Documents Expose a Hidden Climate History
CO2-Offsetting ~10 USD per ton.
Presentations by
Johnny West of Openoil
Paul Nash - forthcoming
Lili Fuhr - forthcoming
Wednesday - Bericht vom Mittwoch:
Side Meeting from German Civil Society on Social and Ecological Aspects of Resource Extraction and EITI
OGP and EITI joining forces
Germany published the first EITI report in August 2017. Questions around ecological impacts of resource extraction have been of major interest to the German civil society. Which environmental payments have to be made by companies? Does the state levy taxes related to environmental impacts/ and how high are the revenues? In the second report, we, the German CS, also want to include a stronger focus on the social impact, such as workers’ rights and the role of the trade unions, social security or the process of relocation of population.
Presentations by Alexander Berch of IGBCE (IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie, mining trade union in Germany) on the importance of social aspects and workers rights, and ecological aspects presented by FOES and FUE were followed with great interest by the audience, like the Civil Society Members Cielo Magno (.PH), Cesar Gamboa (.PE) and Faith Nwadishi (.NG), Gubad Ibadoghhlu (.AZ) and Oleg Orlovsky (.UA) and the Mexcian delegation.
The importance of this questions was also shown by the presentation on social impact of mining in Peru by Cesar Gamboa CSO board member of Ambiente y Recursos naturales.
Dr. Cielo Magno, Assistant Professor and CSO board member of Bantay Kita was presenting her current work on valuing the use of water and proctecting social expenditures.
In the discussion round the Mexican delegation pointed out that during the #EITIBerlin18 board beeting, Mexico will present the status of its first report where issues on environmental and social impact will be included.
Also representives from the Netherlands are working towards enviromental goals and have shown their aim to make environmental transparency a part of their report, stating “trailblazer by including environmental performance data as a core component in EITI reporting”.
Although the EITI Standard does not require any disclosures regarding to environmental impact and very little regarding social impact, this side event clearly showed the importance of several EITI implementing countries have already included some information in their EITI reports and the need to increase this innovative coverage in the reports.
So not only the EITI and OGP is joinging forces, but also the various groups regarding social and enviromental issues.
Given the interest and demand, we would like to foster this exchange on these topics and discuss different approaches in the future.
At the Side event from BMZ on civil society and shrinking spaces Peter Eigen pointed out, how EITI started, as an civil society initiative and what it means to stick to the basic rules of disclosure.
Thursday - Bericht vom Donnerstag
Great presentation by Bady Balde on DRC - Democratic Republic of Congo and Mining Cadastre.
The elephant in the room today is be the non-disclosure of taxes by ExxonMobil and Chevron.
PWYP USA sent on that matter a letter to the board on the 27.06.18 after raising awareness for that issue for quite some time, and calling for the removal of ExxonMobil and Chevron from the EITI Board if nothing will change.
minilog
CSO board members Jana Morgan, Faith Nwadishi, Cesar Gamboa, Cielo Magno and Oleksiy Orlovsky made clear statements towards the urgent issue of the non-disclosing of ExxonMobil and Chevron.
More than “diplomatic” response by the EITI secretary trying to slow things down.
Stuart Brooks points out his 40th board meeting.
“USA redrew because it risks failure of validation, because this companies didn’t report the taxes." - Jana Morgan
“Letter written by non-board-member” - Reinfeldt
“Every step you take you have to understand what is the next step … I believe in making clear when I made the statement in the US … in that sense they are following the standard … - Reinfeldt
“I understand that US no longer a implementing country … but it helps to strengthing the EITI process itself if you can held the companies accountable … welcome the Netherlands as the 50th country … when the UK joined, we were looking forward toward the BO of the companies operating abroads, that’s why this debate is important. We need to move beyong implementing country or not." - Faith Nwadishi
“the board should be concerned if there is a disregard regarding the rules … reinforces the relevance of the discussion tomorrow on the companies expectations … there need to be room to discuss this …” - Rosemarie Schulp
In this context a side event on grievance mechanism on the next board meeting is welcomed, for further information take a look at the report on a workshop on grievance mechanisms at EITI convened by MSI Integrity in 2016 from 2016.
tax disclosures and grievances mechanism
Side event - What’s the Deal? Evolving Practices in Contract Transparency
Contract transparency landscape:
More than half of Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) member countries have disclosed extractive industry contracts and 16 EITI supporting companies have now made statements supporting publication in some form. In the last year alone, new contracts were disclosed for the first time in Ghana, Guyana, and Malawi; the Kyrgyz Republic passed a law requiring publication of licenses; and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Mexico have produced state-of-the-art contract portals.
OXFAM - Contract Disclosure Survey 2018 PDF
Open Contracting for Oil, Gas and Mineral Rights: Shining a Light on Good Practice PDF
Side event - Blockchain technologies in the extractives industries"
With Stefaan Verhulst of @TheGovLab, Anders Pedersen of NRGI and Sam Bartlett of EITI Secretary hosted by Kaiser-Tedesco of @GIZ_gmbh.
Slides are here also recommended for this topic the reading list combined by NRGI and TheGovLab.
attributes of the blockchain:
- immutability
- guarenteed integrity
- distribute resilience
optional attributes:
- disintermediation
- transparency
- accessibility
blockchain cases
According to the panel major cases of usage are “when there is information asymmetry, that’s the promise” and “lowering transaction cost due data security” providing “reliabilty and authenticity” and “the real thing is blockchain plus - blockchain plus IoT & AI …”, blockchain as technology or “digitization” accelerator since the current hype can and shoud be used and “civil society to becoming a partner in the role of establishing the standards, since the industry is moving now fast in this area - current trading platforms 1 and 2 and the danger of upcoming monopolies.” Gruezi Zug & Cryptovalley!
There is a certain irony, to have a “mining” product, which used to be originally established to create anonymous digital transactions (decentralized, without ~institutions), using certain resources (~energy, quite a bit) to bring transparency in this “raw” sector (~MedienBruch). You have to hash that out. MimbleWimble
There is a nice flowchart “Do You Need a Blockchain?” by IEEE.
tl;dr answer probably has 2 letters.
To sum it up, great panel with great people, thanks Stefaan and Anders! - also great audience. See #EITIBerlin2018.
The fun continued in the evening, at the Biergarten.
Friday - Bericht vom Freitag
¡Buenos días a todos!
Working breakfast organised by Christin Fröhlich from @BMWi_Bund for new implementing countries from Latin America 
grievances mechanism discussion (update will follow)
Last but not least:
Ein weiterer wichtiger Punkt, der Antrag von D-EITI (Deutschland) bzgl. der Wesentlichkeitsschwelle von 2 Mio. € bei der Gewerbesteuer wurde angenommen. Damit sollte es mit der kommenden Validierung zügig voran gehen. (Board paper 40-4-D Inquiry from Germany regarding requirements 4.1 and 4.6 (€2m for accepted.
And Peter Altmaier, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, stopped by.
Big thanks to the EITI Secretary, D-EITI Secretary, BMWI and Mrs. Wysluch for the work over the last years!
And all the best for Jonas Moberg and his new endeavours!
Picture archives:
CSO meeting
BMWI
Board meeting including civil society constituency, BMZ shrinking civic space, blockchain side event)
dropbox - Thomas & Boris