by Agence France-Presse
BONN, Germany—Three days of talks aimed at putting a new gloss on U.N. climate talks ended here late Sunday after new textual trench warfare, less than four months after a stormy summit in Copenhagen.
Countries wrangled for hours beyond the scheduled close over the work schedule under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and what blueprint to adopt for further negotiations.
“The negotiations were very tense. There is a lot of mistrust,” said French chief negotiator Paul Watkinson. “Some delegates don’t seem to have taken onboard what happened in Copenhagen and the need to gain quick, concrete results.”
As the 194-nation forum struggled with a sour mood, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer warned that the process would be dealt a crippling blow if it failed to deliver a breakthrough at a Nov. 29-Dec. 10 meeting in Cancun, Mexico. Cancun had to yield a “functioning architecture” on big questions, including curbs on carbon emissions and aid for poor countries, de Boer said in an interview with AFP.
“We reached an agreement in Bali [in 2007] that we would conclude negotiations two years later in Copenhagen, and we didn’t,” he said. “The finishing line has now been moved to Cancun, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the final finishing line in terms of a legally binding treaty ends up being moved to South Africa,” at the end of 2011.
“Copenhagen was the last get-out-of-jail-free card and we cannot afford another failure in Cancun,” de Boer said. “If we see another failure in Cancun, that will cause a serious loss of confidence in the ability of this process to deliver.”
The Bonn talks exposed a rift between developed and developing countries over whether to pursue or quietly bury Copenhagen’s main outcome. This is the so-called Copenhagen Accord, brokered by a couple of dozen countries in frenzied late-night haggling as the summit faced collapse. It sets a general goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), earmarks some $30 billion in fast-track aid from 2010 to 2012, and sketches a target of mustering $100 billion annually by 2020.
But the agreement came under fire from countries excluded from the small drafting group and failed to gain the endorsement of a 194-nation plenary. Around two-thirds of UNFCCC members have now signed up to it, though.
Some of the faultlines opened up again in Bonn.
The United States and the European Union said the Copenhagen Accord, despite its flaws, should be included in draft text for negotiations. “We need a different paradigm and that’s what emerges from Copenhagen,” said top U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing to journalists.
Other countries were not keen about incorporating the Copenhagen Accord in the negotiating blueprint, reflecting concern about the document’s purely voluntary emissions pledges and the way the deal was brokered. Left-led nations in the Caribbean and Latin America attacked the Accord as undemocratic and a betrayal of U.N. principles. They called for negotiations to resume on the basis of a draft that was put on hold halfway through the Copenhagen meeting, delegates said.
After hours of debate, delegates agreed to give the chairwoman of the main working group, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, latitude to draw up a negotiating text. The Copenhagen Accord was not specifically mentioned in this mandate, but Mukahanana-Sangarwe said orally it would be taken into account, along with other documents.
Two extra rounds of talks will take place before Cancun, the conference agreed.
Wounds of Copenhagen still fester
The three days of talks in Bonn at times resembled the movie “Groundhog Day,” where a grumpy skeptic is doomed to live the same events over and over again.
Almost as if the shock of Copenhagen had never happened, delegates squabbled afresh over the minutiae of the UNFCCC’s work schedule, over which bits of draft text to use as a blueprint for negotiation, and over the fate of a document widely dismissed as a threadbare compromise.
“Old habits die hard,” Greenpeace observed acidly. “Too many of the negotiators present chose to focus on divergence and problems.”
“There’s still strong disagreements about how to move this process forward … to demonstrate that the UNFCCC can deliver in the end, because there is a lot of debate in the public about that right now,” admitted E.U. negotiator Artur Runge-Metzer.
Developing nations barely masked their mistrust of rich countries, which many suspected of seeking to ditch the carbon-curbing Kyoto Protocol after 2012 and replace the benchmark treaty with a wishy-washy voluntary deal.
The United States and other rich countries, for their part, at times struggled to hold back exasperation at a consensus-driven negotiation format that, in their view, had dangerously slowed progress. They lobbied for Copenhagen’s one semi-success, the Copenhagen Accord, to be given life rather than cast into limbo.
“Some delegates don’t seem to have taken onboard what happened in Copenhagen and the need to swiftly gain concrete results,” said French chief negotiator Paul Watkinson.
The latest talks at least showed unity in one area: the realization that dealing with climate change is going to be a grinding and very long-winded business indeed. No one is holding out any guarantee that the post-2012 pact will be wrapped up in Cancun.
A better chance lies with the 2011 get-together in South Africa, but only after patient and cautious progress, said de Boer, who himself will soon be leaving the UNFCCC to pursue a career in the private sector. “It is important to bear in mind that this quest to address climate change is a long journey, that generally achieving perfection takes practice, that the scientific community is telling us we need to achieve huge emissions reductions by the end of the century,” he said.
Overladen, fiendishly complex, and apparently unreformable, the UNFCCC roadshow will crawl on, but there is now a growing interest in smaller, nimbler fora, gathering major emitters, donors, or key countries fighting carbon emissions from deforestation.
“We will continue to take advantage of venues that promote candid and constructive dialogue,” said Pershing, carefully stressing that the work would only be “complementing” the UNFCCC process.
“There is still momentum in the U.N. process, but it is fragmenting,” commented Annie Petsonk of the U.S. green group Environmental Defense Fund.
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