Extreme weather warning issued at unfccc
Posted on 06. Aug, 2010 by annac in Adopt a Negotiator, United Kingdom
Yesterday in the KP session I was following the chair made the comment,
“I don’t want it to start raining brackets.”
I hope he packed an umbrella…
Because in the last couple of days it hasn’t just started to rain brackets, it’s also started pouring text. It’s a veritable thunder storm.
Last year I bashed on endlessly about the need to reduce the huge text they had down to a manageable size, so they could negotiate it properly at Copenhagen.
Needless to say that didn’t really happen.
As we resumed negotiations this year new texts were brought to the table, and to begin with they seemed quite a manageable size. But over the last few days as countries have been locked away in so called ‘drafting’ groups, and in contact groups on specific sections, new text has been falling from the sky in biblical proportions, and the documents have inflated to huge sizes again.
Sections of the text that were a manageable 3 pages are now heading into double figures, and there are so many options for every paragraph it’s getting hard just to follow where they are in the document. And that’s not just for me, a mere civil society observer. In the session yesterday if a country asked for clarification of which part of the text they were discussing once they must have asked a thousand times.
And with all this new text comes…yep you’ve probably guessed it…new brackets….
Tens, hundreds, thousands of them. So many that even if the chair had packed an umbrella I don’t think it would have helped him. So many we all need to run for cover.
Brackets in the text mean lots of different things and there are many different types of brackets, normal, square, curly, shall I go on? So many in fact that yet again even the negotiators are confused. One negotiator yesterday asked for clarification of what the curly bracket meant in a certain section, and not a single person in the room could answer her!
But the one basic thing you need to know about brackets, is that they are not a good thing when it comes to solving climate change. Because the one thing they always mean, whatever they look like, is ‘undecided’.
As long as we have a text that contains huge numbers of brackets we have a text that will not lead to meaningful action on climate change.
At the minute all we can seem to do is take shelter and watch the rain from a safe spot.
But we have to remember to not loose hope.
Because someone once told me…
If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
I thought that when the EU [ ]d some *’s we’d finally lost it…. ;-)