Key week for the success of COP21 has started
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During five days in Bonn, Germany, the Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) will work to finalize the draft agreement, which will then be negotiated during COP21 in Paris in December this year. The text is expected to become a global agreement to address climate change and protect life on the planet.
From October 19-23, the countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have the last opportunity before COP21 to formally work on the draft agreement. The main goal of the meeting is to achieve a clear and concise basis for negotiations in Paris, without which it will be much more difficult to conclude the summit successfully. During this week, negotiators will meet in plenary each day and discuss the text paragraph by paragraph, following the order of the document (during the last session in September, negotiators worked in small groups, dividing up the issues in the draft). By Friday, countries are expected to have approved a new version of the draft, so that final decisions can be taken at COP21 on the basis of a clear text that is representative of countries' positions.
The road to Paris
As Anna Pérez Catalá of Adopt a Negotiator explains, the UNFCCC negotiations continue to make progress towards the Paris goal. After the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, all countries agreed in Durban (2011) to build a new process that will lead to a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. After four years of negotiations, COP21 will be held this December, culminating this long process.
In Copenhagen, the negotiations were hidden and ended in failure. To avoid this scenario, work is underway, on the road to COP21, on sessions focused on "transparency" and "based on trust".
During these 21 years, Pérez Catalá continues, the negotiations have become very complex and have been incorporating new issues. The agenda aimed at reducing emissions that generate climate change has now been joined by adaptation to its impact, aid to the most vulnerable countries, as well as taking into account gender and human rights issues, positions that are being encouraged, among others, by the countries of the Latin American region.
Transparent negotiations
At COP20, held in Peru in December 2014, the countries approved the first version of the draft agreements. In Geneva (February), all country proposals were incorporated into the text, and the document grew from 39 to 80 pages. In the following months, the countries focused on improving the draft agreements, making them more manageable, eliminating duplications, and merging the proposals.
In the following two sessions in Bonn (June and September), an attempt was made to "clean up" the text, but progress was made more in terms of defining concepts and positions and working on trust. At the end of the September session, Laurence Tubiana, the French government's special envoy on climate change, declared that: "We have all the pieces of the puzzle", and Christiana Figueres, secretary of the UNFCCC, stated that "everyone is moving in the same direction".
Another important milestone of the last session was that the countries agreed that the ADP co-chairs would produce a new negotiating text, based on the week's progress. This new draft was published on October 5, and will serve as the basis for the full week's session.
Source: ConexiónCOP
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