After two weeks of climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, delegates are packed up and en route to their home countries. In a meeting that had low expectations given the drama leading up to it, the parties delivered a mixed bag of success. They did not come closer to agreeing on mitigation goals, but they did make headway on the architecture and continuation of the Cancun Agreements.
The future of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) is still undecided. United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres stressed that the resolution of the KP and steps forward on the global mitigation framework was an expected outcome in the next Conference of Parties (COP) in Durban later this year.
With Japan, Russia, and Canada opposing the extension of the KP, however, its continuation, as it stands, is doubtful. The European Union also said that it will not sign up to a second round of commitments if major economies, including China, India and the United States, do not sign on, but it is also assessing negotiating options to help all parties collaborate on a second commitment period.
However, in the final press conference in Bonn, Figueres suggested that a link between mitigation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and under the KP needs to be sorted, suggesting a global solution that will require high levels of political attention this year. Since both tracks – the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) – are exploring avenues together, this suggests that the KP may be scrapped for a global solution that includes all actors working together. Whether this will improve progress is debatable. On the one hand, it opens up the framework to include all parties working on the same level, so no more debate about not signing up to a treaty if China is not included. But on the other hand, trying to get the entire convention to agree on the same text is unlikely, given the current political setbacks in the climate talks.
That also raises the question of the future of market-based mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that was established under KP. While Figueres insisted that there are no discussions to eliminate the CDM, if the KP is not extended in Durban, there will be a temporary regulatory gap between the end of COP17 and 2012, when the KP is set to expire. This could potentially create more uncertainty in the market, causing it to lose value. The market has already faced decline over the past five years due to uncertainty about the future of KP. Last year, the market only traded $1.5 billion in carbon credits, down from $25 billion when the market was established in 2005, according to the World Bank.
The architecture under the Cancun Agreements made more progress in Bonn, with steps to ensure that it is implemented on time.
Parties worked to define center networks in the Technology Mechanism, which is expected to be fully operational by 2012.
The Adaptation Committee worked on institutional governance, committee composition and interpretation of its role as advisory body to COP. Parties hope that it will be operationalized in Durban.
The Green Climate Fund – with the goal of raising $100 billion in finance by 2020 – held transitional committee meetings, with an additional meeting scheduled in July in Tokyo. The Committee hopes that the Fund’s design and sources of long-term funding will be approved in Durban.
However, fast-start finance is not making as much progress. Developing county delegates were frustrated in Bonn, claiming that only $5 billion of the $30 billion in promised funding is considered new and additional.
“It’s damaging the fragile confidence that we have,” Collin Beck, the Solomon Islands’ ambassador to the UN, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “These are things that have been promised but not delivered.”
In order to garner more of that needed trust in preparation for COP17, South Africa held presidential consultations, which were popular among the parties, and it will continue to hold several other meetings between now and Durban. It will also hold meetings during the UN General Assembly in September, using forums other than the UNFCCC to expedite progress. A UNFCCC intercessional meeting could take place between the last week of September and the first week of October, but details are still unclear.
Negotiators tackled a few smaller issues that will be revisited in Durban. There was talk about including blue carbon and water in the negotiating text. Blue carbon conserves mangroves, sea grasses and salt marsh grasses that can sequester up to five times more carbon and up to 100 times faster than tropical forests, creating the potential for a scheme similar to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+). The next COP may also include talks about common metrics, a subject delegates have been trying to solve for several years.
