UN Climate Talks Back on Track Again

Martin Khor

26/05/2010

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The climate talks that concluded in Bonn on 11 April night has succeeded in re-igniting the negotiating process towards a global climate deal, four months after the chaotic and traumatic ending of the Copenhagen climate conference.

The Bonn meeting was in a way a “healing process” during which many governments that were hurt by being left out of a secretive meeting of 25 political leaders in the sidelines of the Copenhagen conference could air their grievances.

Many delegations and groupings pledged in Bonn that they would not allow such an un-transparent and undemocratic procedure to happen again. There was broad agreement that the time-tested democratic practices of the UNFCCC would be followed in future.

The three days in Bonn were both tense and intense. The meeting concluded with a clear work plan for the rest of this year. It was agreed that there will be three more meetings to prepare for the next Climate Conference in Cancun in December, and that a new draft text of the outcome will be prepared by May by the Chair of the working group.

But the most important results were the intangibles – the restoration of enough trust among the countries that they can work together in the fight against climate change, and a reaffirmation that the UNFCCC is the central venue for global climate negotiations.

Behind the procedural issues are major issues of substance. Can there and will there be a global deal on climate change, when will that be achieved, what will be its contents, and will it be adequate to address the crisis?

The new deadline for completing the talks is supposed to be this December, at Cancun. The developing countries pressed for many meetings to be held before then so that work can proceed, but the developed countries have been reluctant, signalling that a deal cannot be done by then.

This is a reversal from last year when the developed countries, especially in Europe, were adamant that there must be a deal by the end of 2009, otherwise there will be grave consequences for the world's survival.

This change of attitude from frantic urgency to apparent complacency is most likely due to the “elephant in the room”, the gloomy fact (not openly expressed in Bonn's meeting rooms) that the United States Congress is unlikely to pass a climate bill this year as there just isn't the political capital at present to mount a successful campaign for it.

And without the US on board, other developed countries do not want to make final commitments at the UNFCCC on how much they themselves will cut their emissions. So the world is “waiting for America”, and it can be a long wait.

The meeting of the UNFCCC's group on long-term cooperative action (LCA) saw tensions between the developed countries led by the United States which wanted to give a prominent role to the Copenhagen Accord, and many developing countries that wanted future negotiations to be based on the text that the LCA group had worked on for the past two years.

The Accord, a three-page document, was the result of a side meeting in Copenhagen between about 25 political leaders that had not been announced to the Convention's membership, and was not adopted but only taken note of. The Convention however did adopt the text of the LCA group that contains points of agreement as well as options to choose from in areas where there is not yet agreement.

The US in particular wants the Accord to be given at least equal prominence to the LCA text when countries negotiate the global deal. However most developing countries, even some that had associated with the Accord (like China, India, Brazil), want the LCA text to be the basis for negotiations. They argued that this was the text formally adopted by all in Copenhagen. Those advocating the Accord are free to propose the injection of parts of that document into the relevant sections of the LCA text as options to be considered by the group.

This may seem to be wrangling over procedures, but in fact it is a fight over the contents of what will be in a final climate deal.

In the end it was agreed that in drafting a new text, the Chairperson would draw from the LCA but also refer to the Accord and other proposals that countries can put forward in the next few weeks.

Bonn also discussed how future meetings should be conducted. Many developing countries do not want a repeat of the Copenhagen fiasco. The Africa Group, represented by Democratic Republic of Congo, told the meeting: “We saw the sidelining of the multilateral process, the emergence of a secret text put together by a selected few that later became known as the Copenhagen Accord and the blatant attempt to discard the Kyoto Protocol. These mistakes fundamentally broke the trust that is very necessary for any partnership that aspires to be successful and enduring to work.”

For the developing countries, it was the deviation from the UN's democratic procedures that caused the failure of Copenhagen, and not the procedures themselves. Participants at the Bonn meeting agreed that the UN's transparent and inclusive procedures should be used in the future, although it was decided that this need not be explicitly put on in a concluding statement.

Another “elephant in the room” was the grossly inadequate emission-reduction pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord by developed countries. Bolivia's Ambassador Pablo Solon brought this into the open by pointing out that the crisis in the present talks is mainly caused by this low ambition level.

He said that under the Copenhagen Accord, the developed countries have pledged to reduce their emissions overall by only 13-17 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels, when what is required is a cut of 40% or more.

Solon, citing a European Commission report, said the pledges are even worse if loopholes are taken into account, as they would then be in line with a rise in emissions by 2.6% (in the worst scenario) or a cut by 2% (in the best scenario). Scientists tracking the pledges have concluded that they are pointing towards a global temperature rise of 3 to 4 degrees celsius, when the rise should be restricted to below 1.5 or 2 degrees to avoid catastrophic effects.

Several developing countries alluded to the need for developed countries to improve their pledges to be in line with what the science says is required and bind them under a second period of the Kyoto Protocol, otherwise there cannot be a global climate deal.

This issue and many others (including whether and how to get binding targets for the United States that is not a Kyoto Protocol member, how to provide finance and technology to developing countries, and how they should report their mitigation targets and actions) will be on the agenda until a final deal is made.

Many intense and stormy meetings lie ahead between now and Cancun and beyond. The Bonn meeting succeeded – just about – to re-establish the UNFCCC as the premier venue for global climate talks, but the relations among the countries are still extremely fragile and it will need a lot of will and skills to build up a genuine cooperative effort to tackle the climate crisis.

- Martin Khor is the Executive Director of the South Centre. He can be contacted at: director @ southcentre.org

Source: South Bulletin 47 (http://www.southcentre.org/)

https://www.alainet.org/de/node/141726