In the lead up to the COP21 climate negotiations this December in Paris, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is currently hosting its annual Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) session in Geneva, Switzerland. This session, ADP 2.8, comes just two months after the conclusion of COP20 in Lima, Peru, and presents the Parties -- the negotiating bodies for each country -- with a need to further develop and clarify the text that came out of Lima. This text will be used during the final 2015 climate negotiations in Paris.
Janice Meier was blogging from Geneva.
The story for this ADP session is shaping up to be one of excellent cooperation and stepped-up Party effort as the new Co-chairs’ strategic planning seems to be engendering effective cooperation. While this session must produce a draft negotiating text by May in preparation for an agreement in Paris, the co-chairs approach of focusing first on Parties’ text additions seems to have reassured Parties that they are being heard and inspired their focused effort.
This is not to say that differences have disappeared. There has been reference made to the disagreement on differentiation (how countries at different levels of development should be treated differently) being papered-over in Lima, that make clear that “slick language” won’t save the agreement. Then there is the question of handling “Loss and Damage,” that is, what happens in the most vulnerable countries when the impacts of climate change are beyond adaptation. And there are a host of others as well.
But, overall, the mood in the rooms has been upbeat in Geneva, and already we’ve seen dramatic shifts from the process in Lima. Where you couldn’t pay a delegation to moderate the length of their interventions in Lima, in the opening plenary in Geneva, we had Parties agreeing to hand in text for file rather than read out their interventions. And in the ADP sessions since, Parties have engaged constructively to follow the new Co-chairs' lead, including focusing first on new text submissions as a definitive way to put to rest Parties’ fears that text was being ignored.
And there have been real wins for environmental nongovernmental organizations ,as a number of Parties took up ECO’s Human Rights challenge and almost competed to introduce the text that was suggested in an ECO article, and likewise, offered long sought after text on the assessment of potentially risky climate technologies
But mid-week, the process seemed to hit a snag when the Co-chairs suggested reverting to the Lima text and announced that the results of the “streamlining process” that was about to be embarked on would not be reflected in the new draft text. What was not made immediately clear was that their reason for doing so was to protect the draft text that they had. Had they reopened that text, and if any disagreement had ensued, they risked not having enough time left to get to agreement again this week and missing the mandate for text before May.
In essence, the process was a victim of its own success. Because Parties agreed to the draft text so quickly, there was unplanned time. But because the draft text needed to be protected, no further change could be made to it. The meeting adjourned a bit early, and the next morning began with a discussion on guiding questions that gave the parties time to better understand each other’s positions. In the afternoon, the streamlining work began, again with Parties cooperating to find solutions.
Yes, this process has challenges and is likely to have many more between now and Paris -- including how to deal with a voluminous text. But the good news is that if this new-found effectiveness carries through 2015, we may be on the high road to a successful Paris agreement. Let’s give the negotiators kudos and all the support we can muster.