*Insert back to Bonn/no progress/mind the gap related pun here*

Posted on 03. Aug, 2010 by annac in United Kingdom

I’m stumped, completely stumped, I can’t think of a single back to Bonn related pun that I haven’t already used. This is our 3^rd time here this year, 4^th in total and the 6^th week the tracker team have spent in the lovely (yet it has to be said slightly dull…) city of Bonn.

I have literally been at the negotiations for just a few hours yet it feels like we were never away. I can only imagine how delegates who have been doing this for years must feel.

But with the tracker team consisting of only me and Florent for this session there is a lot to get up to speed on from my first missed day. And with such a small team we’re both also going to have to master the art of hardcore multi tasking to keep up to speed with the blogs, twitter, youth stuff and of course actually following the negotiations this week.

If only the negotiators could get on with some hard core multi tasking too…

Because though there’s a lot for me to get up to speed on here, it has to be said, I didn’t exactly miss much progress in the negotiations in the last 36 hours. ‘What!’ I hear you cry ‘the UNFCCC didn’t make any progress in the last 36 hours of negotiations. We can’t believe it…!!!’ (sorry I shall try keep my sarcasm to a minimal but the UNFCCC does bring it out in me…). But yes, once again we are sat in Bonn discussing the same things we have been discussing for years. And I can’t think of a new pun about the lack of progress either.

Today however one thing has changed, there is a new murmur in the corridors. There’s a new paper on the block and it’s causing a bit of a stir. This paper is the so-called document /10 (sounds thrilling doesn’t it…).

But document /10 is rather important. Because it is in document /10 that the UNFCCC has finally said (with slight anna paraphrasing),

“Guys we need to discuss something. We seem to have a problem…

We seem to have run out of time!”

Yes the UNFCCC have finally admitted something that to the rest of us has been rather obvious for a while. We do not have time between now and the end of the Kyoto Protocol first commitment period (in 2012) to agree on what happens next.

‘What!’ I hear you cry again, ‘but that still gives us 2 years of negotiations how can we have run out of time????’

Well perhaps it becomes clearer when you realise that even after the first commitment period of the KP had been negotiated and agreed on, it still took 7 years to get enough countries to ratify it for it to come into force…

And we haven’t even negotiated, let alone agreed what happens post 2012! So we can’t even begin to try and ratify it.

Put simply, we have a problem. Another gap, here at the UNFCCC (they seem to be springing up all over the place…). And because we have so many of them I can’t think of a new pun for this either, please mind the gap had definitely been rather overdone.

But pun or no pun, document /10 deals with this new gap. In document /10 the secretariat have set out ideas for what we do from a legal point of view if we cannot agree a new commitment period and are faced with this gap between the first and second commitment periods (or the gap between the first period and whatever we get instead of another commitment period).

This gap begins on Jan 1^st 2013.

Pun or not, this is no laughing matter. We are currently looking at having no decision on action to tackle climate change from the 1^st of Jan 2013.

Some might say we need to start working this out, and we need to start getting somewhere in these negotiations fast!

If me and Florent can do it this week why not the negotiators too? Let the hardcore multi tasking begin.

And I guess one of my many tasks, in the spirit of this blog, is while they all discuss the options in document /10 I should find some way to make it a pun.

The UNFCCC don’t make this blogging business easy do they! Answers on a postcard please…

Tags: Bonn, Cancún, cop15, COP16, Copenhagen, document/10, KP, Kyoto Protocol, UNFCCC