The Climate Action Network appealed to negotiators to make offers and not demands at the next round of climate talks in Tianjin China in October, after what can be considered backward steps made at the just concluded Bonn climate meeting in Germany last week.
In a statement delivered at the meeting at the Maritim Hotel during last week, the body, which makes its voice of advocacy heard at every major climate change meeting , said that the opposition is not each other, “but the devastating cost of inaction, business as usual, and complacency.” The statement said: “The goal here is not to create fouls of own goals, but to use teamwork to create a safe climate. You, dear negotiators, are the only team we have that can save the planet.”
The Group said that while there was some movement in the negotiations last week in Bonn, it wondered how much willingness Parties have to really move the negotiations forward. “Sadly, the spirit of compromise has been lacking here in Bonn. After months of reduction to a manageable size, essential elements of the text have inflated again. For example, developing country mitigation exploded from three to nine pages,” the statement said.
According to the statement, as more and more brackets go into the text, recalcitrant parties were demanding things that they know will never go forward. “This has the usual effect of creating the equal but opposite reaction, igniting conflict, slowing the negotiations down and diminishing the [chance] [opportunity] [likelihood] of a [positive] [required] [any] outcome at Cancun,” the Climate Action Network said.
The Group said that quality rather than quantity is what is needed. “The text needs to bridge substantive issues rather than simply polarize positions. While offering clear options on unresolved issues in the text is a good thing, allowing political positions to be made in the run up to Cancun, retreating to the pre-Copenhagen text with a grab-bag of claims is not. This is a recipe for recreating the Copenhagen [collapse] [circus] [ill-will] [rancor] [mess] [catastrophe] [debacle],” the statement pointed out, mocking the brackets in the climate document text.
The statement noted that the Bonn meeting has not been entirely misspent since, in some areas, Parties have made progress. The Group observed that on fast start financing, there were positive and simple approaches to improving transparency, the lack of which was a concern. Further, the statement said that there has been a pleasing level of agreement that a new finance fund is required and discussions on how the Conference of Parties will exert its authority. “The workshop on targets in the Kyoto Protocol clarified the size of the gap between what has been offered and what is needed. Parties are finally coming to grips with a potential gap between commitment periods and are considering ways to overcome it,” said the Climate action Network.
Officials and observer groups left Bonn with the feeling that the talks pushed the climate campaign backwards. The text of the negotiated agreement increased in pages because of the many bracketed items added and the insertion of old positions into the text. But the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Christina Figueres, is remaining hopeful that the process will go forward to Mexico by the end of the year.
She is appealing to the negotiators to narrow down the choices before them by the time the talks move on to Tianjin in October.