Some bedtime reading

The LCA text - like Harry Potter for policy wonks...

Saturday night, the middle weekend of COP, for the tracker team this can only mean one thing…it’s time for the NGO party. As well as being a lot of fun this can sometimes be a really good chance to have a really informal chat with a few of the negotiators, as everyone takes a moment to grab a drink, hit the dance floor and relax. But it doesn’t look like we will be seeing too many of our negotiators there this time. Because a few hours ago they were all given a bit of Saturday night bedtime reading.Unfortunately for them it was the sort of bedtime reading that would send most people to sleep by the end of the first page. Though I guess for policy wonks it was like receiving a first edition of the new Harry Potter book.

At about 2pm this afternoon, we finally got the news we had waiting for all day and if you swung by the document centre in the un you could pick up a copy of the new LCA (long term cooperative action) text. When we went it was literally hot off the press, the pages were warm in our hands as we flicked through for the first time to see what it contained.

This new text will form the basis of the negotiations for the coming week. It was needed because the text the negotiators had been working on is simply not ready. There had been rumours flying everywhere and much speculation as to what it would contain, and so everyone held their breath as it was released.

Now as much as I do enjoy policy, I’m no wonk so I certainly won’t be staying in tonight and missing the party to analyse the text in full. But as I start the evening on the balcony with a beer and flip through it, I can start to form a rough picture of how it looks.

And for once the news is good, well maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the news isn’t terrible at least.

The text seems to form a good basis for the negotiations next week and there are many options in there that we would support. The aim is now to get the parties to support them too, because of course the text also includes lots of weak options that would not lead to a good outcome here or moving forward. The text very much lays out the extremes of the options we have on the table, so now what we need to see is countries compromising, being constructive and looking for a way forward that they can all accept that falls between these extremes, though of course also falls within what science demands.

The progress we are most looking for is countries reducing their emissions. This new text does not go anywhere near addressing that, and there is no way we will see countries increase their pledges here. But over the next week, with the help of this new text, and the KP text when we get it, we really need to see countries finding a way forward with this. We need countries to work out how they will over the next year increase their ambition, how they will increase their current emission reduction targets.

If we see this then we really will have taken a step forward.

So as I sit here I raise my glass to next weeks negotiations going well. And now, on Saturday night it’s time for me to take a step back from the un, to relax, recharge and heal a little bit of my soul with some dancing.

But for the negotiators it’s time to take the text to bed, and as they drift off to sleep with the sound of the Caribbean waves lulling them to sleep, decide how they can work with this text constructively over the next week.

If they do this then they can go home from Cancun knowing that they achieved something here.

Because what they are working on is a million times bigger than Harry Potter…