COP18 Negotiations Update: Day 2 of the Last Day

In continuation of its long tradition, COP18 has officially entered the second day of its last day. It has been over 10 hours of additional negotiations on issues that have remained pending from the start. Luckily, we now have draft texts on all the negotiation tracks that have been forwarded to the COP for ministers to decide and make final decisions. Unfortunately these should have been made available earlier this week when the ministerial session officially started and not left for until now. In fact, only few hours ago we managed to get a final draft text on ADP (ad-hoc working group on Durban Platform). Earlier, on Friday, we received three draft texts in the morning on LCA, ADP and Finance. Most of the meeting between parties happened behind closed doors where they tried to remove as many brackets and options they could.

The initial LCA text we got on Friday morning was really weak and missed the section on finance. There was no decision of the Technology mechanism (TEC), low mitigation decision, weak sectoral approaches section, and unclear shared vision elements with no specifics about numbers and global peak year for emission reduction. Most of these issues are still pending and are being deliberated upon by the ministers. In the early hours of Friday night, the LCA plenary took place where the parties expressed their reservations on the draft text forwarded by the chair. According to veterans, the final draft text did not include anything new but just deletion of brackets, options and everything else that parties did not seem to agree on. In the plenary, China compared the text with the bad food of QNCC (the conference venue) – “not great, but something to eat”. Most countries rejected the text and chances could be that they would reopen the text in ministerial consultations. After hearing the criticism, the chair of the LCA, Ayysar Tayyeb forwarded the draft text to the COP, where decisions would be taken under the COP presidency by the ministers. This marked the end to the LCA track which was established in 2007 as per the Bali Action Plan.

Progress on the KP track is not anything less than disappointing. The draft text that was forwarded to the COP for final consultations has existing loopholes such as the issue of AAU surplus carryovers and low ambition. Developed countries seemed interested in keeping the market mechanisms intact and strengthened, but developing countries expressed concerns over this. Also, the second commitment period length was also highly debated. Rumors are we will see some last minute bargains in the Kyoto Protocol, which may not be good news for the world.

After several postpones, the ADP plenary finally happened in the late hours of Friday night. The co-chairs managed to forward an agreed draft text to the COP after much arm twisting from parties, particularly China and the US. The fights were mainly over the wording of the text with the US not wanting to add ‘commitments’ or ‘actions’ in the draft conclusions. China and other countries remained adamant that they wanted ‘commitments’ in the text otherwise they would not accept it. Finally, with Egypt’s linguistic help, parties managed to agree with having “enhanced action” in its place.

Decisions relating loss and damage and MRV standards are also outstanding. Several groups are bilaterally working to resolve differences and come up with an agreed outcome. The COP president will also hold a ministerial consultation session or “Majlis” (a meeting in Arabic culture where political decisions are made) to provide space to ministers to come to convergence.

We are over 12 hours of additional negotiations and have been informed that the plenary that is scheduled for 3 am, will now take place at 7:30 am (if odds are with us). Rumor mill has it that the COP president is gone off to bed (he lives only 10 minutes away from QNCC). Guess we all should get some sleep too. It will be a long day ahead of us, yet again.