The United Nations climate change negotiations are taking place this week in Bonn to set the stage for the final, universal climate change agreement in Paris in December this year. In other words, the Bonn climate negotiations continue the intense diplomacy on climate change—and there is a great deal at stake.
Climate change effects are already visible. They are hitting the poor and vulnerable the hardest. There is an enormous evidence from scientists that the Earth’s temperature would be dangerous if it crosses a threshold of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.
Even World Meteorological Organization secretary-general Michel Jarraud said that our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as burning of fossil fuels. “We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases across the board as we are running out of time.”
But despite these warnings, governments are still struggling to come up on ways on how to best combat climate change. The Bonn climate summit is the key to what happens in Paris as talks between developing and developed countries will turn to scientific, political and economic issues.
Halfway to Paris meeting and since the failed Copenhagen talks in 2009, what are the chances of success at this year’s climate negotiations? Can the missed chances and challenges that have befallen previous climate talks be avoided and tackled properly in Paris?
Bonn climate talks matter
The negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 ended with only aspiration targets and promises, falling far short of an ambitious fair or legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 15th Conference of Parties takes note of the Copenhagen Accord. In Warsaw climate talks and last year’s meeting in Lima, Peru were supposed to create an ambitious agenda propelling the last phase of negotiations forward.
In the Warsaw gathering, it was decided that countries offer an Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) before the Paris climate talks. In Lima, it was decided on how countries’ proposed national climate actions would be assessed and presented in a transparent manner. As of press time, there are already 38 countries submitted their INDCs to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The deadline for submitting pledges to tackle climate change is on October 1 this year.
In Bonn this week, negotiators from 195 countries will work to reduce the 47-page negotiating draft text to address climate change into a more manageable number of pages. Considered as the next milestone on the road to Paris, the Bonn meeting will also continue progress on addressing the most effective ways to raise climate action before 2020.
The negotiating text covers the substantive content of the new agreement including mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, capacity building and transparency of action and support. The overall goal remains to hammer out a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, mandating industrialized nations to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Sessions in Bonn will also include the meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP), a body tasked with reaching an agreement in Paris and looking at how best to raise ambition to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt societies to climate change ahead of 2020. The two permanent bodies of the UNFCCC: the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI). These two bodies tackle detailed issues and decisions on the technical, scientific and implementation aspects of the Convention and provide many of the foundations on which ADP is constructing the agreement.
The Bonn meeting comes in the wake of a major business and climate summit held in Paris and just ahead of the meeting of the G7 in Germany.
The Paris business summit underlined the way non-state actors across the globe are already undertaking climate action, as well as rallying in support of a strong climate deal. Around 25 worldwide business networks representing over 6.5 million companies from more than 130 countries pledged to help to lead the global transition to a low-emission, climate resilient economy.
The incoming President of the Paris climate talks, France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Monday wants countries to forge a “pre-agreement” as early as October and decide on contentious issues in Paris.
Ambassador of France to the Philippines Gilles Garachon said in an interview that Paris as a host country this year is hopeful for the positive outcome of the summit.
“ We have to commit ourselves. Countries need to sign the agreement and make commitment as this needs a collective action. We have to find for solution and find new ways to act regarding climate disruption,” Garachon said.
High hopes for Paris talks
More than five years have passed, there are solid reasons to be more than hopeful. First, there is now more awareness and evidence from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that the planet is warming and is caused by human activities. Second, that countries need to adopt a low-carbon growth path.
“ In the lead up to Paris, I am astonished of the increasing sense of optimism from all countries. The global framework is very well on track and we are seeing good progress. This year’s outcome can be both significant and positive,” said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said.
According to World Resource Institute (WRI) Global Director Jennifer Morgan, there is a great hope that the 2015 climate agreement in Paris will be different from the failed Copenhagen talks.
“ I am hopeful that the 2015 moment will be different for a range of reasons,” Morgan said in an interview on WRI. “ First of all, countries are realizing that they do not have to choose between economic development and tackling climate change. These two goals are different sides of the coin. Second, major emitters like the United States and China are now closely cooperating in implementing climate change solutions at home and finding ways to cooperate internationally. Third, countries have already committed to putting their national climate action commitments on the table well before the Paris summit so that the world can assess their ambition and fairness. This kind of transparency and engagement is quite different than before Copenhagen, and lays the groundwork for a new form of international cooperation.”
Morgan said countries must make progress on key elements on the 2015 outcome. She said WRI has been part of an international consortium of think tanks and universities called Agreement for Climate Transformation 2015 (ACT 2015) which has put forward what an effective agreement could look like.
She said the agreement should include two long-term goals: a goal to phase-out greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century and a goal to build communities’ resilience to the impacts.
In order to achieve these long-term goals, Morgan said, first, countries should commit to strengthening emissions-reduction commitments every five years. Second, countries should build their adaptation efforts over time, with all nations completing national adaptation plans. Third, developing countries will need strong and increasing financial, capacity-building and technological support from developed countries to implement their mitigation and adaptation plans.
“ Countries also must be held accountable for staying on track, so the agreement should come with a built-in transparency and accountability system. Finally, the agreement should ensure that countries’ commitments are fair and equitable,” Morgan explained.
Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, said it is imperative for the global community to urgently curb emissions drastically or we will be reaching the limits of adaptation in the future.
” In terms of adaptation, what is emerging very fast is that all countries have to adapt. It used to be the thinking that only poor countries adapt, but now even rich countries know the impact of climate change is real and that it will hit them,” Huq said.
He said long-term adaptation strategies are much needed as adapting to the changing climate becomes a global issue.
At last year’s Lima climate talks, the Philippines was appointed chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, leading 20 countries that are highly vulnerable to a warmer planet.
“ We are optimistic with the Paris summit. We are suffering from the impacts of climate change first and worst, so there is a need to urgently address the issue of helping the world’s poorest countries cope with the changing climate,” Philippine Climate Change Commission Secretary Mary Ann Lucille Sering said.
Through the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), most Asian countries are exploring ways to prepare for and adapt to the threats their operations face from these natural disasters.
Last month, the Asia meeting of the CVF produced a 10-point climate action that includes coordination among institutions, knowledge exchange, technology transfer, climate finance, climate-smart industrial development, infrastructure, research funding and robust policy-making.
“For us, climate change is no longer just a threat environmentally but also economically. Extreme weather events have caused losses in our economy in the past three years. Every money spent on rehabilitation and reconstruction of infrastructure and agriculture, is money taken away from our basic services such as education and health. It is now beginning to threaten our millennium development goals,” Sering said.
Climate finance, Sering said, is one of the linchpins of the international climate talks. Like other poorer countries, the Philippines continued to experience weather-related events such as floods, fiercer typhoons, rising seas, water shortages and droughts, and urgently needs resources to address the adverse impacts of these.
In the view of developing countries, the climate talks will succeed if rich nations make good on their promise to boost climate financing to US$30 billion in ‘fast-start finance’ from 2010-2012, and US$100 billion by 2020 under the Green Climate Fund. The developing countries asked the ones holding the purse strings to detail its disbursement mechanism.
Former Climate Change Commissioner and lead negotiator Naderev Sano, who now leads the People’s Pilgrimage, said “ the climate negotiations have been going on for more than 20 years, and in many instances nations engaged in an exercise in futility. Perhaps the political solutions are unattainable because sovereign nations think as if the world has real boundaries when in fact these political boundaries are arbitrarily set by man. Climate change compels us to search for a moral force that can turn things around.”
Paris must be seen as a stepping-stone towards a new future, Sano said. “It must be viewed as a milestone that heralds a new global economic order, a new era of global cooperation, and a period of great empowerment of communities around the world.”
Athena Ballesteros, Sustainable Finance Program Director World Resources Institute said: “Countries need to commit to an ambitious and robust Paris 2015 agreement with a long term mitigation goal, and significant commitment to scale up climate financing.”
Ballesteros said that as governments gear up for the international climate change negotiations in 2015 in Paris, there is a need to make sure that governments especially those historically responsible for the rise in greenhouse gas emission are able to commit to deeper emission reductions over time as well as agree to peaking emissions by 2025 if we were to stop dangerous climate change.
“This takes political will if we do not heed the call of science to reduce emissions earlier than later then the impacts will be catastrophic for countries especially those that are most vulnerable and least able to cope,” Ballesteros explained.
In Paris, almost 200 governments are due to meet from November 30 to December 11 to agree on a deal to address the worsening threat of climate change. Despite the long, rough path and dashed hopes of other climate talks, the urgency of the task of global climate action is highly essential in Paris talks.
text and photos by: Imelda Abano
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