Welcome to Durban-hagen, an African conference à la danoise

Saturday night, 7pm. Hundreds of delegates have reconvened in the plenary room for a very short stocktaking. During the last fifteen hours, very little information has transpired from the closed rooms in which the final negotiations have taken place. This situation has led a fertile ground for the most incredible rumors to spread in the corridors, from a possible extension of the COP until Wednesday in order not to conclude this African COP without a good agreement, to the fact that a miracle agreement matching the two degrees target would be reached.

The expectations were thus high as we entered into the plenary room for this plenary. The president of the COP opened this meeting with an attempt to inspire the delegates, calling those in the room to be the generation who came to an agreement on the form of the future regimes, while postponing discussions related to the question of the ambition of emission reductions. In the UNFCCC tradition, such opening is often followed by attempts by the facilitating officers to give an extra push to the negotiations.

The Working Group on future commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), the first of the four bodies expected to meet tonight, opened with the distribution of a new draft text. To the dismay of most of us in the room, parties began questioning the origin of the text, claiming that they were discovering its wording only now, and proposing text proposals.

It thus seems that the presidency of the COP has decided to put a new text on the table at a very late hour of the negotiations without letting the time for delegates to read the text carefully. This approach to climate negotiations is not unprecedented, as the COP15 final hours were shaped around a similar process, with the dramatic consequences that we all know. What should be said about the selective listening of the AWG-KP chair, interesting in EU’s position but talking over other delegates, or of the AWG-LCA chair refusing the right of civil society to make statement due to time constraints and then engaging in an auto-biography?

While the night goes on, the world can only be wary that the individuals presiding the conference and its main negotiating tracks might not realize fully the consequences of the way in which they facilitate the process. With all my heart, I hope to being able tomorrow to praise the South African presidency for having chaired the meeting as well as they managed the logistical arrangements (outstanding so far). Will the COP presidency get their hands back on the process when they still have the opportunity?