Brussels, 07/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - A clear mandate to conclude a global climate agreement in Paris in December is the result of a week of climate negotiations which closed in Bonn on Friday 4 September and this, in everybody's opinion, was not enough (see EUROPE 11382).
With just five days of negotiations left until COP 21, all parties agree that the negotiators are taking their time and that unless they pick up the pace considerably, the heads of state and government cannot be expected to pull miracles out of the bag when COP 21 opens in Paris on 30 November.
The discussions identified areas of agreement and allowed progress to be made on a number of issues, such as transparency and differentiation between the countries, the revision mechanism and the notion of a joint direction for adaptation efforts. The 195 parties to the talks gave the two co-presidents a mandate to present a working document by the start of October, aiming to provide a basis for the negotiations on the future global agreement. The final negotiating session before Paris will be held in Bonn from 19 to 23 October, and on 1 November, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will present its summary report on the cumulative effects of all of the submitted national contributions (INDC) to the global, legally binding and dynamic agreement to be concluded in Paris.
A risk of fiasco. At his sixth twice-yearly press conference in Paris, on Monday 7 September, François Hollande, president of the COP, made no bones about the risk of the Paris conference turning into a fiasco. In answer to a journalist who asked him whether COP 21 would be a failure if the intended offers were insufficient to observe 2°C for global warming, Hollande said: “The risks are there. Anybody who thought that the road to Paris was already marked out in laurel wreaths, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint them. There is a risk of failure. So far, we have barely 60 contributions (57 INDCs from countries representing 60% of global emissions have been submitted to the UN: Ed)”. He stressed once again that if there can be no agreement on the financing, then there will be no agreement in Paris.
French offensive for pre-agreement on financing in October. “Momentous declarations do not always translate into hard cash. The underlying financing is not there. That is what it will all turn on. That is what we are working on, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There will not be an agreement - some of the emerging countries, some of the countries of the South will not allow there to be - if there is not a firm commitment on financing”, Hollande warned. He went on to stress that such a commitment had to be “measurable, predictable, verifiable and transparent” and be accompanied by a revision mechanism allowing it to be increased consistently over time. “Already at Copenhagen, the figure was 100 billion dollars in 2020. We have made no progress since Copenhagen (COP 15 in 2009: Ed). It is on this that France will be carrying out its offensive at the UN”, at the General Assembly (September) and in Lima and at the meeting of the World Bank and the IMF (9-11 October), he announced, stressing the need to “reach a pre-agreement” on the financing in October.
Preventing the risk of millions of climate migrants. Warming to his theme, the French President stressed the importance of this summit in the light of the current migrant crisis. “If we do not conclude, there won't be hundreds of thousands of refugees, but millions of climate refugees” for the international community to deal with, he warned.
“The direction is the right one, but the speed is still not enough”, the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said on Saturday. The financing and the adaptation measures were central to the informal consultations he held in Paris last weekend to speed up the negotiations. They were attended by the ministers of 57 countries, including the major economies.
Step change needed. The European Commissioner for Climate Action, Miguel Arias Cañete, argues that the time has come for a change in the UN negotiations. “This week's talks have been useful in bringing partners closer together and clarifying some of the key issues on the table. In particular, I am glad that more and more Parties seem to be converging around the EU's idea of a global stock-take to take place every five years. But now it's time for a step change. The real deal needs to start taking shape. We need a concise, consistent and coherent text to allow us to start the negotiations in earnest”, he said on Friday, after the preparatory session in Bonn.
According to the WWF, which was present in Bonn, the progress to be made must focus on: - pre-2020 actions; - review and scaling up actions; - climate finance; - cutting emissions from deforestation and degradation of the forests in the developing countries (known as REDD + in UN jargon); - loss and damage; - differentiation.
“There is no time to delay. We need a text for negotiations in October. Anything less could jeopardise an agreement in Paris. We want to see science and equity at the heart of the Paris Agreement. We need emissions to peak before 2020, with all countries doing their fair share. We need certainty on finance, loss and damage reflected in the agreement. Most importantly, we need to see that the agreement will ensure the escalation of ambition so countries' climate actions match what climate science tells us we need to do”, says Tasneem Essop, the head of the WWF delegation in Bonn. (Aminata Niang)