In Bonn, Spirit Holds But Progress Is Slow

In the lead up to the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris later this year, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was recently hosting its annual Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) session in Bonn, Germany. This session, ADP 2.9, came six months prior to COP21 and presents the Parties -- the negotiating bodies for each country -- with a need to further develop and clarify the text that came out of the previous intersessional, ADP 2.8, in Geneva, Switzerland. This text will be used during the final 2015 climate negotiations in Paris, and will give us the 2015 Agreement.

Janice Meier was blogging from Bonn.

We all know the story out of Lima, Peru at the last Conference of the Parties (COP): The then Co-chairs of the work that should have led to the 2015 Agreement took the initiative to get the ball rolling by suggesting a text that was pulled together from many Party-generated sources and was slightly edited for better coherence.

While the process would seem to be rational if you are trying to get a quick start to an important document, the Co-chairs failed to understand just how fiercely Parties hold their national sovereignty. To make a long story short, the session ended with the Parties rejecting that text as not being “Party-driven” meaning that not all content and editing was done by the Parties themselves.

Fast forward to the recent “intersessional” meeting of the Parties in Geneva, and we find a new pair of Co-chairs who came into the position with the mindset that they can do no more than facilitate meetings and make suggestions in “scenario notes” on how they think the meetings will play out. We met in Geneva with the Co-chairs fully chastised, and we got a round of “any text you want Parties, throw it in.” The move was hugely popular with the Parties, and Geneva ended on a high note of cooperation that overachieved by getting the text safely banked early and allowed bonus time for Parties to chat on the issues.

Fast forward once more to the most recent intersessional in Bonn, Germany, when at the end of a long week of Parties “streamlining” the text, they had done little more than consolidate some paragraphs by introducing more choices in brackets. The hard discussions were still out of sight, and Parties were beginning to see the wisdom of allowing chairs to organize the text (without deleting ideas).

It was pointed out that in the current schedule, we have only 14 more negotiating days before Paris. The U.S. and others have called for the August/September intersessional to be extended. The Co-chairs responded by listing all that needs to be done in these few days, beginning with consideration of what happens to the negotiations after Paris: Do they continue as is? Do they come under one or more of the Subsidiary Bodies?

Most delegates I’ve spoken with were clear: Paris is not the end, it is the beginning of pre-2020 preparation for an ongoing process that could, and in my opinion, should go on for the foreseeable future. So, add this process question to the tough nuts: how to make the agreement fair, how to ensure that climate action is cranked up to put us on the pathway to the 2C or preferably 1.5 C goal, and how to ensure that that Parties are living up to the spirit of the agreement in practice as well as on paper.

Earlier last week, we finally heard the Parties say that they want the Co-chairs to take steps to better organize the text so that the negotiations can begin now.

Will the Co-chairs hear the call?

Here’s hoping they will accept the trust of Parties declared in last week's Stock-taking meeting and leverage that great spirit of cooperation into real progress on toward the Paris agreement. My take is that Parties have finally understood the message that there is not time to waste and they know that we all flourish only when we cooperate. Nothing stands in our way except ourselves.