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 4, is one month 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 3, in Bonn, Germany. 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.
When the opening plenary of the last five negotiating days before the Paris climate negotiations -- commonly referred to as COP -- began with statements from Parties saying the Co-chairs had overstepped and this non-paper cannot be the basis of negotiations, I felt the small knot of anticipation in my stomach grow to something significantly more uncomfortable. As I watched the Co-chairs squirm to hold onto the Heads of State agreement of the previous evening that we would start negotiations on the basis of the non-paper with “surgical insertions", the discomfort level grew. As the clock ticked so did the discomfort. We had lost half a day of our precious five.
When the Co-chairs finally agreed to take “not necessarily surgical” insertions, I feared another Geneva text -- tick, tick. But as the afternoon began, I suddenly saw some light. This was all about Parties taking back the text as their own, and that was a good thing. Better, there were no kitchen sinks in sight!
And then the dawn. A 4 a.m. text -- no, two texts -- one, a compilation of Party comments, and the other a “light touch" edit by the secretariat. As our colleague, Fred Heutte said, “what a difference a day makes.” My comfort level was at least temporarily relieved.
This is not to say, at all, that the fight is over. Ambition, particularly the right kind of long-term goal, has a start in the U.S. text “decarbonization” but needs much more clarification. The Africa Group addition aids with the thinking on differentiation, but again, the devil is in the details.
There is still a dearth of text on environmental integrity and the identification of actual environmentally sound projects, the lack of which turned the Kyoto Protocol’s Joint Implementation into more of a credit give-away than actual emissions reductions must be rectified. And it should be done in a manner that brings these considerations into coherence across the thematic areas of the agreement.
So today is another day, and one on which observers are barred from the meaty discussions in the spin-off groups that address specific thematic topics. But negotiations are beginning on Party-owned text. It was worth the ride.