ADP for dummies

COP can give you a hard time. Yes, you can understand what happens in the steep hillsides in Costa Rica or how our hydropower plants lack more water every year, but UNFCCC dynamics are impossible to decipher. Where do you even start?

There are too many acronyms, subsidiary bodies, contact groups –ranging from formal to ultra informal informal–, too many meeting rooms and definitely way too many colors in the coding of badges. Are you a UNFCCC delegate? I have a question for you.

This year, the Adopt a Negotiator team decided to elaborate a guide to follow one of the biggest topics in Lima: the notorious ADP.

This can help us understand why these people are so crazy (spoiler alert: they aren’t) and the absurde complexity of UNFCCC.

Along with SBSTA and SBI, ADP is the grand-dady of the negotiations – understanding this is the key to penetrate in the heart of the negotiations. So let’s start right from the beginning.

ADP is the acronym for the Durban Platform (legally known as the Ad hoc Durban Platform) a body created in 2011 during the COP17 in Durban, South Africa. It’s one of the most relevant working groups within the convention and its mission is simple: to develop a new global protocol to reduce our emissions.

Well not so simple.

It also has a timeline: the global agreement needs to be ready by 2015 (to be implemented in 2020) and countries are still trying to figure out how should it be.

In order to do this, every delegation must put forward their vision, and then try to figure things out together.

Sometimes they make progress, most time they don’t, but their baby-step footprints are being drawn in Lima’s pebbled-sand.

For now, we have two papers on the table (one is the so-called Non-Paper and the other is the Draft Text, but we’ll get into that), both of which share the goal of getting us to a new agreement.

What we currently have is the Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect on 2008, but lacks real power: only certain developed countries ratified it and all developing countries (including GHG powerhouses China, Brazil and India) are exempt from its obligations. The protocol resulting from ADP would be mandatory for all parties in the UNFCCC.

There are currently two papers being negotiated within the ADP (those aforementioned) and both share the same dynamics: the Co-Chairs (sort of the facilitators of the process) draft a base text and then parties suggest changes to it. This is the usual reaction of this proposals:

This is pretty much why we’re still here, burning the midnight oil throughout these Lima Plenary pavilions.

There are two texts, each of them with different components and every country proposes how to improve them according to their own view. When a country proposes an idea, it doesn’t say ‘I would like that these adaptation ideas were included in the contributions’. That would be awesome, and we could all understand.

Instead of that, they say something like ‘I would like to modify paragraph 13 in the Draft Text, with the proposal that AILAC included in the paragraphs 15 to 26 of the “submission paper” that AILAC and Mexico presented in October”

The most appropriate reaction is wanting to die a little bit.

So, to understand what they are saying we need to unpack the texts. Open the links if you want to see each of them and follow me along the paragraphs.

• Draft Text: it has two big components:
  • The so called “INDC” (from paragraph 7 to 11): this is the legal tool that countries will use to report the actions that they will take and their compromises to reduce their greenhouse gases. If you can, see paragraph 13. It is the key to understand what is being negotiated
  • The pre-2020 agenda (from paragraph 12 to 14): when it is signed, the protocol will come into action in 2020. However, if we mainatin the current path of emissions until then, what we do later will not be enough. That’s why a very important part of the agreement is what we do before 2020.
  • Furthermore, there are the general concept of the 2015 deal (paragraphs 1 to 6), the proposal for the high level discussion (15 to 17) and three options of how INDCs should be (in the annexes).

• Non-Paper: first, what the hell is a non-paper? This is part of the convention’s jargon, where there are informal meetings, informal informal meetings and contact groups with too many countries to have contact. Many things that we have got used to, but that we could put aside. The non-paper tries to define the structure of a new agreement in different parts:
  • Preamble (lines 1 to 28): contextual elements
  • Definitions (lines 29 to 32): as any other legal document, the definitions of concepts included there
  • General (32 to 89): basic stuff they agree upon
  • Mitigation (90 to 282): how to reduce our GHG emissions.
  • Adaptation (283 to 446): how to reduce vulnerabilities in a warming world.
  • Loss and Damage (447 to 492): there are stuff you can’t adapt to, like the typhoons in the Philippines, and climate change makes them worse. This is how to deal with that.
  • Finance (493 to 803) : who pays the bills? [There is an alternate proposal by the African Group supported by many delegations]
  • Technology Development and Transfer (804 to 908): There is science and technology behind mechanisms like more efficient energies or new adaptation strategies. How will we share that?
  • Capacity-Building (909 to 1004): There is some important work to do in terms of capacity building. Especially necessary for developing countries.
  • Transparency (1005 to 1260): makes sure everything is seen by everyone
  • Time frames (1261 to 1523): Everything that has to do with time periods in the agreement.
  • Facilitating implementation and compliance (1524 to 1552): who will carry the guidelines of the compromise
  • Annexes of other compromises (1553 to 1647): other general compromises.

Every time a country suggest removing a line or paragraph, a heart breaks somewhere. Most of the lines are there for a reason: a country wanted it there. If it’s removed, there will be a very angry delegate somewhere, trying to get his paragraph back into the text.

And this is another reason why it takes to long for negotiations to find a happy ending.

Actually, we won’t.

Waiting until Paris to break a deal is not a real option. We need a draft now! Five years ago, Copenhagen hosted the COP15, with a similar general feeling: delegates expected to sign an agreement, but lacking previous preparations. Finally, it was a debacle and no deal was reached. This time, the draft MUST come out of Lima.

In order to move towards Paris, we need to be prepared, or we risk another Copehagen.

If we are going to find a way in which countries can reach a just global deal, we need to get back to the basics and look at a few key elements: phasing out fossil fuel, phasing in renewable energy and reforesting the planet.

We’ve been here for way too long: the first COP was back in 1994. That was 20 years ago.

That’s way longer that we can afford.