There’s only 2 days to go to go until the UN Climate Negotiations hourglass gets officially flipped and flowing again, from the Sands of Qatari desert, to the Coal Soot of Poland.
Over the next 2 weeks I’ll be tracking countries and negotiators in the MENA region, as well as giving an oversight on the big picture. In returning to the Adopt a Negotiator project for the 3rd time, I’ll also be diving deeper into the human side of the talks, including matters such as health, neuroscience, spirituality and matters of the heart.
So where do the negotiations stand now?
In 2014 climate negotiators will touch down in Peru for COP20/CMP10, which should see the introduction of a draft global climate agreement, to be finalized in 2015 at COP21 in Paris-Le Bourget. In 14 months, key areas in a legally binding 2015 climate deal that require convergence includes; the review of the long-term global temperature rise limit; closing the emissions gap; climate finance; market mechanisms; a loss and damage mechanism; and technology transfer. In light of agenda delays in SB-38, this also puts greater pressure on the need for a productive COP19 in Warsaw, and for the UN Secretary General to succeed in his high-level climate meeting of world leaders in September 2014, and get countries to commit to ambitious targets that meet what is required by the science.
If Parties and Civil Society are to pour their efforts toward an ambitious, fair, equitable, and legally binding agreement that meets what is required by the science, much of the struggle will be won and lost by COP20. As Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres reiterated earlier this year, “If civil society plan for 2015, then they will be too late”. This is particularly true for the MENA region, where many Parties have failed to progressively align and commit themselves within the negotiations, and also with civil society finding difficulties in creating and implementing an appropriate strategy that is effective in moving MENA country positions forwards.
Since the previous UNFCCC intersessional last June, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirmed beyond all doubt that climate change is human-induced, and cites widespread and consequential impacts throughout the globe as a result of climate change.
The Arab World will be one of the most impacted regions, with water resources growing scarcer and the agricultural sector becoming the victim of more extreme weather, thus threatening our water and food security. Climate change projections point to an average temperature increase of 3°C throughout the region by 2050, with an additional 3 degrees increase in nighttime temperatures due to the urban heat island phenomenon. The Arab region is currently the region in the world that is most affected by temperature increases (Dababseh, 2012).
There’s no time to waste for the Arab world to get truly engaged as progressive actors in these talks - and to contribute towards forming a deal in 2015 that might just help to “stabilise ‘greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous human-induced interference with the climate system” (The reason we will all gathered here for the next 2 weeks in a football stadium.)
The hourglass is flowing.
photo credit: @tijszwinkels