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Forging a new climate agreement

SALEEMUL HUQ
F HE nineteenth conference of parties (GOPI 9) of the 1 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will run for the next two weeks in Warsaw, Poland. The main outcome expected from this meeting is to put in place a road map with clear milestones for reaching a major new climate change agreement in two years time at the twenty first COP (COP21) which will be held in December 2015 in Paris, France. There will be one more COP in
Lima, Peru in December 2014 a year from now before we get to Paris in December 2015. Some of the major issues that will need to be discussed and resolved are described below.
Lessons from Copenhagen:
At COP 15 in 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a similar attempt to come up with a future regime failed miserably. So the lessons from that failure need to be learnt so that they are not repeated. One of the lessons of Copenhagen was that the attempt to do everything in one big package at the end was asking too much. The paradigm of Copenhagen was "nothing is agreed unless everything is agreed". And since everything was not agreed, nothing was agreed! Hence, going forward to Paris, the parties need to try to achieve partial agreements on the way and use COP20 in Lima next year as an important stepping stone and milestone to agree some of the elements of the future regime.
Another important lesson is to involve the political leaders in the process from early on and not at the last minute as happened in Copenhagen. It was said about the failure of the talks in Copenhagen was because it was "too technical for the politicians and too political for the technical negotiators". So the negotiators must do what they can and then bring in the political leaders to do the final deal making. The high level meeting called by the Secretary General of the United Nations Mr Ban Ki Moon in September 2014 will therefore be an important point in time for political leaders to engage.
The two major issues that will need both technical negotiations and then political support and agreement will be on raising the ambitions of mitigation efforts and delivering on the financing of 100 Billion Dollars a year from 2020. I will discuss each of these in turn.
Raising ambition on mitigation:
One major, positive, difference between Copenhagen and now is the attitude towards mitigation from all countries. In Copenhagen some of the major emitters were reluctant to take actions unless others too actions first. Hence when the talks ended in failure each party was able to blame others for the failure. The situation in the last few years has changed for the better. Now all countries, including all the developing countries are willing to take actions on mitigation and many have come forward with Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) and many have stared implementing them. The developing countries have also said that they are willing to raise their mitigation ambitions if they receive technology and finance to do so. The problem is that if all these voluntary mitigation actions are added together
it still takes the world towards a temperature rise of well over 3 degrees Centigrade while we all agree that we want to stay well below 2 degrees. Hence, all countries are going to have to agree to raise their mitigation ambition in terms of reducing their emission of greenhouse gases.
Financing actions to tackle climate change:
This is the second major open question where the developed countries have already promised to provide up to 100 Billion US Dollars a year to the developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation as well as adaptation. The good news is that the Green Climate Fund (GCF) has been successfully set up with its headquarters in South Korea slowly taking shape. Unfortunately, there is still no real money in the fund. The developed countries had promised 30 Billion Dollars over a three year period from 2010 to 2012 which has been largely delivered (although it is still difficult to trace exactly where the money has gone), but there are no real pledges for funds between 2013 and 2020. Developing countries will expect some pledges to be made in Warsaw.
Loss and Damage:
One relatively new topic that will be discussed and negotiated in Warsaw will be the possibility of setting up a new International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. This was a demand that the alliance of small island states (AOSIS) and
least developed countries (LDC) group had made at COP 18 in December 2012 in Doha, Qatar and was only resolved after tense negotiations that went into overtime in the last hours ofCOP 18 in Doha.
That Doha decision on Loss and Damage has opened up the way to consider the setting up of a new international mechanism in Warsaw. However, it will require some tough and well prepared negotiations from the AOSIS and LDC negotiators to get what they want.
Bangladesh's role:
The Bangladesh delegation is again expected to play an important role as part of the LDC Group supporting Nepal who currently chairs the group. Bangladesh's senior negotiators are well versed in their respective negotiating issues and the country also brings a great deal of experience from actual research and action on the ground in Bangladesh especially on adaptation as well as loss and damage. Bangladeshi NGOs are also important players in civil society groups who will be in Warsaw and will be able to play an important role there as well.
I will be providing feedback from Warsaw over the next two weeks and a round up after it is over.
The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: Saleemul.huq@iied.org