Its time to bare it all….

In sunny Cancun, there is nothing more you could wear than a flimsy swimsuit and a skirt. Browsing through the street you find women and men in small nickers, bikinis and floral shirts all ready to soak up all the sun. In India if you had to roam the streets wearing close to nothing, you’d either have to be drunk or well a foreigner. The point is Cancun gives you a message, it wakes you up and says, darling, it is time now to bare it all…… Let go of your inhibitions, put yourself out there and enjoy. Life IS actually too short (since major countries are as it is not doing much about climate change anyway…) and you would never be living the movie stars life with a ocean side view and a beach to explore ever again. This is it. Get out there and be more flexible with your schedule. Do your work and be within your budget….

So, for becoming more a part of the solution, India recently came out with the following proposal (by the way, i think this is a leaked document I have gotten hold off): to give room/space for negotiating on the MRV - measuring, reporting, and verifying over the nationally appropriate mitigation actions.

This is roughly the structure of the document—its not a WIKILEAK …. but something along those lines

1. ICA will proceed on the strict understanding that it is a facilitative process for transparency and accountability and that it will not have any punitive implications of any sort.

2. ICA will have a multilateral anchor. This anchor will be the SBI.

3. ICA will take place once every two/three years for countries with share of world GHG emissions in excess of 2%. All other countries will have the ICA process once every four/five years.

4. Each country will submit a “ICA Report” to the SBI once every two/three years where its share of GHG emissions is more than 2% once every two/three/four/five years and every four/five years otherwise.

5. The ICA Report will have (i) emissions inventory; (ii) description of all mitigation actions; (iii) analysis of impact of the mitigation actions; (iv) progress on achieving the pledges made in the Copenhagen Accord; and (v) further mitigation actions under consideration, wherever appropriate.

6. The ICA report of each country will submitted to the SBI. It will be circulated by the SBI to all members. Each member will have 30/45/60 days to send written comments to the SBI on the ICA Report(s) circulated.

7. The SBI will have a panel of experts drawn from all over the world who will provide their own assessment of the country’s “ICA Report”.

8. SBI will send the written comments on the ICA Report received to the country concerned. 30/45/60 days after receipt of these comments, the country concerned will send its written response to the SBI.

9. A 2/3-day ICA meeting will be convened by the SBI to discuss the ICA Report of the country concerned, the written comments received and the written responses sent.

10. At the end of this meeting, the ICA Report, the written comments, the written responses and an agreed summary of the ICA discussions will be made public.

ICA : International Consultations Analysis

SBI - Subsidiary body of implementation under the UNFCCC

So, for those of you who are not policy wonks or jargon addicts, here’s what it means in simple language. India will be proposing in the plenary the above set of points to make international consultational analysis (ICA, or scrutiny over the funds that are given to developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change). The interesting shift is that there is NO DISTINCTION with regard to the countries that need to come under scrutiny, but there is a difference in the amount of years for countries with GHG emissions in excess of 2% of global emissions. Don’t ask me why 2% in particular, but on the outset, the proposal looks pleasing to the negotiators eye since this is a contentious issue on which the 1 b 2 group in the negotiations has been blocked on for a long time.

This could be that one document that could change the face of this negotiation and the negotiations to come. It could be the next danish draft text, or it could be the one key to this lock.

So what is the status of this document now?

At the moment, this document has not been introduced on the floor of the G77 and China. The Indians wouldn’t want to propose it there in the first place, since three countries in particular don’t like the idea of external scrutiny - China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia. Hence India might directly propose it in the LCA group.

So who all are here?

Jagdish Kishwan , Ajay Mathur, Mauscar, Rashmi , Vijai Sharma , Ashok K. and Ghanshyam ( from the external ministry)…. but more on who’s here and where tomorrow……

Stay tuned for more wikileaks!!!!!