Want to keep track of the ongoing climate negotiations in Bonn?
Although you may not have heard about it on the news, there are actually UN climate change negotiations ongoing in Bonn, Germany. These negotiations are not as big as the annual ‘COP’ summits (such as ‘COP17’ in Durban that I went to last year), but without the media attention often more achieved at these small meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - the UN process seeking to tackled climate change.
As always there is a team from the UK Youth Climate Coalition (the organisation I went to Durban with) at the negotiations. Follow their progress on their blog or on their twitter. You can also follow Camilla, Louisa or Danny from the delegation on Twitter.
Also worth following is the ‘Adopt a Negotiator’ project, who have a fantastic website giving updates of goings on in Bonn. You might want to follow some of Adopt a Negotiator’s writers on twitter, such as Seb, Priti or Mostafa.
There two big debates taking place in Bonn are:
Equity
There has been renewed focus on who takes more responsibility greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Nations such as India and China argue that as they have less historical responsibility for emissions, they should not have to reduce emissions as much (or even at all) and should be allowed to develop more. This is an established principle in the UN climate convention, but these developing countries want more emphasis placed on it in future negotiations.
In Durban, India’s proposed ‘equitable’ approach was not having any new legally binding treaty on climate change - clearly not a viable option. Young people in Bonn are trying to reframe the equity debate, emphasising how the only equitable solution to climate change is an ambitious and binding one, that actually solves the problem.
For more information check out these three blogs, explaining the perspective of India, of China and of the EU (the EU negotiates as a bloc in the UNFCCC).
The Durban Platform
The Durban Platform is the new track of climate negotiations created at COP17, the climate summit in Durban, South Africa last year. It seeks to create a treaty ‘with legal force’ by 2015, that enters into force in 2020. The first negotiations sessions of this take place in Durban. Not much has happened yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally-binding climate treaty to date, but it doesn’t come near to solving climate change. The outcome of the Durban Platform needs to be a fully-fledged international solution to climate change.
The Durban Platform is nowhere near urgent enough, right from the beginning. The International Energy Agency - usually a conservative source - estimates we have less than 5 years to take action on climate change before the effects become irreversible. Clearly 2020, when the Durban Platform treaty would come into force, is after this 5 year window. This means that the treaty needs to be incredibly ambitious, so nations take pre-emptive action.
So far in Bonn, negotiations on the Durban Platform have achieved…. nothing. Debates over the agenda have prevented progress, as has the aforementioned debate on ‘equity’. This is not inherently a bad thing - we want to make sure this treaty is equitable - but that progress has been stalled so much is pretty worrying.
