Final Reflections on June 2014 Bonn Climate Talks

There is nothing like leaving Canada to regain some hope that the world may still be able to avoid the worst impacts on climate change. I spent the past 10 days following the climate negotiations in Bonn, and have been discussing the state of play with negotiators and researchers from around the world, while attending a number of side events that have explored what is being done and what could be done to tackle climate change. My overall reaction to my time in Bonn is that we sometimes forget in Canada how much is being done about this issue elsewhere, and how seriously the issue is taken in many countries around the world. The following are a few more specific reflections on the past week.

Negotiation Update

First, a brief update on the outcome of the negotiations. As has become the norm in this negotiation process, the June session in Bonn covered a broad range of issues, including mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, finance, technology, capacity building, transparency, compliance and legal form. In my assessment, however, three issues dominated this round of the negotiations:

The inadequacy of developed country mitigation commitment between now and 2020,
The process for agreeing to adequate and fair mitigation efforts for all countries starting in 2020, and
The need to capitalize and operationalize the UN climate regimes main funding mechanism, the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Pre-2020 Ambition

I explored the first issue in my previous post, but here is the key point. The focus of the current negotiations is an agreement to be finalized in 2015 and to come into force in 2020. This timeline was adopted after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen, as it became clear that it would take time to pick up the pieces. At the same time, negotiators realized that the climate does not wait for negotiators, so efforts are ongoing to encourage all developed and developing countries to commit to additional efforts to reduce their emissions before 2020. Negotiations on how to achieve this are going 0n in parallel with the negotiations for the new post 2020 agreement, and are taking place under the name of “pre-2020 ambition”. Until recently, these negotiations had been marked largely by backtracking and inadequate domestic efforts from 4 key developed countries, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United States. As explored in my previous post, the recent announcement of the US is starting to change this and putting pressure on the remaining three countries.

Post-2020 Commitments

The second key issue in the negotiations has been the post 2020 commitments. Progress on pre-2020 ambition has always been seen as a pre-condition for an adequate agreement on post 2020 mitigation. This is so, because of the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR), enshrined in the UNFCCC. Developing countries are being asked, for the first time, to make significant mitigation commitments. Their willingness to do so is conditional on developed countries taking the lead and providing support. The failure of leadership by some developed countries has allowed a number of developing countries (negotiating under the name of Like Minded Developing Countries or LMDCs and led by China and India) to continue to resist efforts to agree to an effective process to set mitigation targets for all countries for the post 2020 period, but there were signs in Bonn that this will change now that the US is moving forward domestically, particularly if Japan, Canada and Australia follow the lead of the US and raised their pre-2020 ambition.

Key issues currently being negotiated for the post 2020 mitigation efforts include the following:

When will countries announce their “intended nationally determined commitments” (INDCs)?
Will INDCs be limited to mitigation or will they include other issues, such as adaptation and finance?
What information should countries include when they report on their INDCs?
Will the adequacy of the INDCs be reviewed before the 2015 conference in Paris?
What (if any) criteria will be applied to determine whether a countries INDCs are adequate?
What happens if a country’s INDC is considered by others to be inadequate?
What happens if all the individual commitments do not add up to an adequate overall efforts, i.e. one that keeps global average temperature increase to below 2 degrees?

A particularly encouraging announcement was that Germany and the UK are pushing for a 50% target below 1990 levels for the EU for 2030. It seems clear at this point that these countries are seeing and are already benefitting from the economic opportunities of leading the solution to climate change. China is similarly showing signs of seeing this potential by pushing domestic mitigation efforts. It is unfortunate, that we in Canada continue to give up on this huge opportunity just to protect industries for a few more years that are not part of the solution. What will the long term economic price be for Canada?

Capitalization of the Green Climate Fund

The third key issue in the Bonn negotiations was finance, and particularly the capitalization of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). This fund has been established to facilitate the financial support for developing countries in a range of areas, including mitigation, adaptation, technology and capacity building. It is ready to become operational, but remains an empty shell, in spite of previous commitments from developed countries to ramp up funding to $100 billion US by 2020. It is critical for the GCF to gain much needed experience in overseeing the funding process before it takes responsibility for the full scale of funding in 2020. The capitalization of the GCF is also an important step in building trust between developed and developing countries.

Innovative Ideas

Of course, the negotiations are also an opportunity to explore longer term issues and to think beyond the immediate issues that tend to pre-occupy negotiators. The following are some to the many fascinating ideas circulating at the negotiations and side events that caught my attention.

Carbon Majors Loss & Damage Liability

In a discussion paper released by Climate Justice and the Heinrich Boll Foundation, we have, for the first time in the climate context, a concrete proposal to link liability for loss and damage directly to the companies who are responsible for the largest share of emissions to date. The idea is based on similar mechanisms with respect to liability associated with major oil pollution damage from oil tankers. The approach, if designed well, can serve two purposes. It can ensure that the cost of climate related loss and damage is properly internalized into the price of products and services that contribute to the problem. In addition, it can start to address the problem that the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change tend to lack the capacity to respond to the impacts, and tend to have contributed little to the problem.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply