A book to save the world: Where are we headed in the UN climate talks?

Imagine for a minute if you will that instead of a boring legal document what the negotiators here are trying to do here is write a book.

A book to save the world.

When completed the plot of the book will paint the narrative of what we did and how we did it. There’ll be an introduction, of what the world was like before we realised how our actions were impacting the planet, and an epilogue, a portrait of a beautiful world.

If you sat down to write this book where would you start?

If it was me I’d think about the book as a whole. Before I put pen to paper, I’d map out the overall picture, I’d think about the plot arc and the character development. I’d work out the beginning, the middle and the end of the story. I’d take a step back and think of the book as a single piece of work. Thinking of how all the subplots could weave together.

That’s not how they write books here at the UNFCCC.

No here at the UNFCCC they write books chapter by chapter, section at a time, without much idea of how they all fit together, what the whole book looks like, or how we get from intro to epilogue. They have different people working on all the sub plots and very rarely step back to work out how they are going to weave them all together into a coherent piece.

If I come down from my metaphorical ramble for a second what i’m alluding to is the fact that we are here in Bonn with negotiations happening in informal break out groups where they are discussing quite technical issues, and at the minute we really don’t know what we are working towards. If we take a step back from a convention that now has 6 sets of negotiations happening under it, we have no idea what our goal (our novel) looks like anymore.

This is something that many of the countries and NGOs alike have been mulling over for a long time. We call it the legal issue: as yet we still have no clear picture of what form this takes.

What we do have is some form of collective writing process. And unfortunately all the editors have very different ideas of what the final piece will look like.

Over the last few months we have been working to get some clarity on the options on the table, the different ideas as they stand, and it seems to have boiled down to 4 main ones, with a variety of combinations of them available and being championed by different countries (or should I say editors…)

So what form could our book to save the world take?

Well option 1 is a book where we scrap all the sub plots and just go for one main killer plot line. In UNFCCC land this means we have one single treaty under which everything we do falls. No more KP and something else, no instead we combine them all and all the contributors feature in the same narrative. This isn’t a very popular option as many of the editors feel it will take away from the ideas they have already, ie. that the KP will not exist.

Option 2 for our book on how to save the world is a novel with 2 subplots, one of which we have published before as a short story and are now extending and weaving into a longer novel. Both plots are equally as important, they each feature different characters as the main protagonists and the story they weave is similar yet different. Together they balance each other to make a novel slightly more repetitive than a single plot line option, but with a more nuanced style with room for plot diversions that bring a much wider audience on board. In UNFCCC speak this is the 2 protocol option: where we keep the KP (the original short story) and have a second commitment period, while also getting another legally binding treaty from the LCA. This is an option championed by a lot of countries who like the original story and would like to create a book with balance.

Option 3 sees us once again keeping the KP, and this time it features as the main plot line. Along side it we have a series of sub plots developing slowly as the story unfolds. Here at the UNFCCC this translates into a series of decisions being made as we go along, so each time there is a COP different decisions can be taken on different issues. A lot of the countries here, though they would prefer a more coherent novel, could perhaps be persuaded to compromise and take this approach.

The final option keeps our short story as the only story we have. Then we have a wide amount of ongoing text with no clear form, it’s like we haven’t finished the book. In fact it is that we haven’t finished the book, instead we have asked our publishers to publish the original short story again then applied for and been granted an extension to finish the novel. Here at the UNFCCC that means we get a second commitment period for the KP and a mandate to continue discussing in the LCA. At the minute this isn’t too popular, however again those countries who definitely are against the single story approach have some wiggle room in agreeing to this format.

So one novel with 4 ideas of the overall story line. Each of the editors here has a different idea for which of those they would like what we have to develop into. Some of the editors are flexible, some are not.

What we need now is for the editors to sit down and really decide what this novel looks like. It’s great to be working on sections of the book, in the long run we can slot them in, but it would be a lot easier for everyone to write their sections if we knew how this plot plans out.

If we could do that we could get on to much more exciting things, like working on the launch party of our BOOK TO SAVE THE WORLD!

And if you’re looking for the slightly less waffly, more straight forward explanation of what I am trying to explain check out our latest video from an expert on the issue here.