Where in the World is the UNFCCC?

Saturday, April 3 is the opening day of the first UNFCCC intersessional, in Bangkok, Thailand. Until Friday, April 8^th, negotiators will be gathered for meetings of the Kyoto Protocol negotiating track, the parallel Long-Term Cooperative Action track, and several workshops to move forward on the Cancun Agreements, which negotiators agreed to last December in Cancun, Mexico at the 16^th Conference of the Parties. You can watch the talks lives on the UNFCC website (check out the schedule of the talks here). But for far more exciting and accessible coverage of what’s really happening on the ground in Bangkok, follow our trackers from India, China, and Indonesia who will be blogging live from Bangkok. Some of us will also be tracking the talks from back home (including me!), so check the Adopt a Negotiator website for the latest updates.

Two weeks before the talks opened, at a ministerial meeting in Mexico City, head of the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres called on negotiators to maintain the positive momentum that emerged from the Cancun talks in December: “the world was at a crossroads in Cancun and took a step forward towards a climate-safe world. Now governments must move purposefully down the path they have set, and that means maintaining momentum at Bangkok in order to take the next big climate step in Durban at the end of the year,” she said.

Figueres also pointed towards several specific steps that negotiators can take to build upon the Cancun Agreements. There, negotiators agreed to establish a Green Climate Fund and institutions to coordinate international technology transfer and adaptation. Some progress has been made since Cancun: a Transitional Committee to set up the Green Climate Fund has been set up (after a good deal of wrangling over the board’s composition) and will meet for the first time at the end of April, countries have put forth proposals for the institutional functioning of the Adaptation Committee, and discussions on how to set up the Technology Mechanism will take place in Bangkok.

Yet according to the World Resources Institute’s Jennifer Morgan, “several key issues in the Cancun Agreements require further negotiations in order for implementation to occur.” Aside from the questions that remain about how the Green Climate Fund, a centerpiece of the Cancun Agreements, will be set up, negotiators still need to flesh out the rules for the implementation and assessment of developed countries’ emissions reduction commitments, address the gap between overall reduction goals and individual country commitments, and determine the legal form of a future agreement and what the Kyoto Protocol will look like when the first commitment period ends in 2012, just to name a few.

This is certainly a tall order, and several more intersessional meetings will take place before the next big Conference of the Parties, in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. Yet what happens at this first meeting will be essential for setting the tone for the rest of the year, and getting negotiators moving on the commitments they made in Cancun. Unfortunately, with all that is going on around the world right now, the Bangkok talks will not get much coverage in the media, and a lack of pressure on negotiators to continue the positive work that they accomplished last December may allow the talks to founder.

As these negotiations open, it is essential that we continue to keep track of what our negotiators do, and let them know what we think. As Negotiator Trackers, this is what we will try our best to do- follow our blogs over the next week, and leave some comments to let us know how we’re doing!