Brussels, 28/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - Around 30 decisions, confidence restored in talks, and light shed on the work to be done in the next two years to conclude a global agreement in Paris in 2015 - that was the very positive summing-up of the Warsaw climate conference delivered by Marcin Korolec, the Polish minister who chaired COP 19, speaking in Brussels on Thursday 28 November. Addressing a small group of journalists in Brussels, he said the agreement should be viewed as the result of a COP marked by the “spirit of convergence”.
“We have a clear agenda of what will be done between now and the conference in Paris (COP 21). A draft text will be presented in Lima (COP 20) to discuss how the different contributions of the different countries should be presented. We know that those contributions must be presented by the first quarter 2015 in order to present the text in six languages end May 2015, to prepare for the Paris conference”, he said (our translation throughout). In Warsaw, the future presidencies - Peruvian and French - worked with the Polish presidency in all meetings of the Convention bodies and geographic areas “to ensure continuity of the process as the Paris agreement is the greatest challenge for all members of the Convention”.
The Durban agenda and timetable for knowing how to prepare the 2015 agreement, and the breakthroughs in climate funding (implementing the Green Fund for the climate, prospect of climate funding until 2020, and the agreement on setting in place an international mechanism on losses and damages) are, in his view, major breakthroughs. “The decision on damages and losses is extremely important because the developing countries have been waiting for it for 20 years, and because the COP 19 was marked by the tragedy in the Philippines”, the minister said. He also mentioned the package of decisions on the preservation of tropical forests and the decision on the surveillance and obligation of reporting on objectives (MRV), which is decisive for creating common understanding of verification arrangements and data presentation at global level. “Apart from that, my ambition as president of the COP 19 was to restore confidence in the process”, he said. And that has been achieved, Korolec believes, including between developing countries and developed countries. “Confidence has been restored in the sense that it has been decided very clearly what will happen between Warsaw and Paris. It is a major success”, he said.
Of course, the developing countries have not obtained an interim figure from the industrialised countries as a step towards the $100 billion annually in 2020. The COP president agrees but “we have made great progress in terms of understanding what had been decided in Copenhagen, what those $100 billion annually mean and how to mobilise that amount of private and public resources. We are much further forward than one year ago”, he assured.
When quizzed on the criticism made by environmental NGOs who reproached the Polish presidency for having organised a world summit on coal during the COP, Korolec declared he was “personally astonished by the publicity poured onto a two-day event that was just one conference among 600 others”. He who has now been officially appointed secretary of state plenipotentiary for the climate within the Polish Ministry of the Environment will negotiate, for his own country, the new EU integrated climate/energy framework to 2030 for which a European Commission proposal is expected in January 2014 and which must be discussed in the European Council in March. (AN/transl.jl)