Media Background
Note
Bonn Climate Change Talks, April/May 2018
(Bonn, April 27)
Recording an estimated $300 billion of climate change damages, 2017 went down as
the costliest year as well as the third hottest on record. Large tracts of the
world's oceans are being suffocated, and according to World Bank estimates,
hundreds of millions of people are at risk of being displaced in the coming
decades.
It is against this background that negotiators from the world's
governments gather in Bonn from April 30th to May 10th for three simultaneous
meetings under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Their
aim as ever is to figure out how to further implement the many agreements they
have made over the past 28 years, and crucially how to put the 2015 Paris
Agreement into practice. Their self-imposed deadline to finish this work is the
end of this year at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to be held in
Katowice, Poland. However some key questions have to be resolved before this can
happen, including:
Will countries step-up their contributions in this
critical window for climate action?
Will countries stick with the plan to
deliver comprehensive national contributions?
Will real progress be seen on
finance—the key enabling condition for climate action?
How can the process
itself advance given the role of the US and polluting corporations?
With
the window to avoid breaching the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C threshold closing
fast—by some estimates less than four years remain—and with the nationally
determined contributions (NDCs) projected to result in 3°C warming, countries
know they must radically step up their efforts in the immediate-term as well as
the long-term.
Will the Talanoa Dialogue increase ambition?
The
Paris Agreement set up a process by which Parties could review the adequacy of
their NDCs and increase their ambition accordingly. Though not a legal
obligation, there is building political pressure around this so-called ratchet
mechanism, and the Fijian Presidency has taken on the task of running what they
have dubbed the “Talanoa Dialogue.”
The Dialogue is organised around
three questions: 1) where are we; 2) where do we want to go; and 3) how do we
get there? The Presidency invited both Parties and civil society to submit their
inputs which the UNFCCC Secretariat will compile into materials used during the
April/May meeting.
Previous dialogues of this nature, such as the 2016
Facilitative Dialogue on pre-2020 action, have seen Parties largely ignore the
input from civil society experts and fail to revise up their commitments, so
expectations are tempered for the Talanoa Dialogue. However, there is a
determination among both developing countries and global civil society to use
the Talanoa Dialogue to have a meaningful conversation can take place around
what constitutes fair and adequate efforts, and to translate this into a badly
needed concrete increase in ambition.
Having fought so hard in at COP23
in Bonn for attention to be paid to pre-2020 climate actions, we can expect
developing countries to maintain their strong call for more ambition in this
period. Countries did agree in Bonn to submit progress reports on their pre-2020
actions for all to see but whether or not there is any kind of meaningful review
of the adequacy of these critical near-term efforts is not
guaranteed.
Will the scope of the NDCs be comprehensive?
A major
point of contention within the negotiations continues to be the “scope” of the
NDCs which Parties have made as part of their efforts to meet the objective of
the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to below 1.5°C.
This highly
political debate has seen developing countries fighting to maintain a holistic
approach to the NDCs—as enshrined in the Paris Agreement— and the
differentiation between developing and developed countries. On the other side,
many developed countries would like to see the focus limited to emissions
reductions only, with no clear differentiation, and without meaningful
conversation about the financial support they have put forward.
Will
there be progress on finance?
Finance, an eternal sticking point within
the talks, has recently become much stickier with the withdrawal of $2 billion
by the U.S. under Trump's administration. A high-level segment on finance is
slotted for COP24, but with the U.S. delegation adamant that they do not want to
discuss finance at all, it remains unclear how the item can advance unless other
developed countries such as the European Union find some more margin to revise
their approach to climate finance. Without a clear roadmap for delivering $100
billion per year by 2020, as pledged by developed countries since 2009,
developing countries are hindered in their ability to carry out their own
mitigation and adaptation actions.
How will the process
advance?
Parties are also expected to continue negotiations on how to
best address conflicts of interest in business groups, especially those that
represent the fossil fuel industry's interests. Developed countries, where most
fossil fuel corporations are based, have continually tried to block these
negotiations but their efforts have been largely overpowered by negotiators from
Latin America and Africa who have championed the issue.
The Co-Chairs of
the Paris Work Programme track of the negotiations (the “APA” for short) have
outlined a process to conclude negotiations which involves picking up the same
streams of work, with the same facilitators, as their previous sessions.
Notably, the US—which has indicated its intention to withdraw form the Paris
Agreement—is facilitating talks on the issue of transparency which may raise
some concerns among other countries and civil society.
Negotiators will
be working to narrow down the textual proposals in order to arrive at a
negotiating text well before COP24 in Katowice, Poland, this December. The
actual shape of the outcome on the Paris Work Programme remains undecided, with
developing countries in favour of a single decision to ensure coherence between
all the issues and avoid the severing of any links between issues being taken
forward in the APA and related issues being advanced in the other negotiating
bodies, the SBI and SBSTA, which also meet next week.
Background
information and spokespeople are available on request.
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