For the first time since 2019 and following a flurry of net-zero pledges from the world’s largest emitters, UN climate negotiations yesterday resumed in a virtual format just six months before the crunch Climate Change Conference (COP26) summit.
The talks, nominally hosted by the UN climate change program in the German city of Bonn, will all be informal, meaning that no decisions will be taken during the three-week dialogue.
However, with increasingly dire warnings from scientists that the pace of global warming is already outstripping humanity’s best plan to cut emissions, the pressure for progress to be made on a number of thorny issues is high.
Photo: AFP
In 2018, countries agreed to many elements of the Paris agreement “rulebook,” governing how each nation implements its goals.
However, several issues remain unresolved, including rules about transparency, carbon markets and a unified timeframe for all countries to ratchet up their emissions cuts.
At the last UN climate summit in December 2019, countries also failed to agree upon a universal system of reporting climate finance.
A deal on greater transparency was “a central component of the effective implementation of the Paris agreement,” World Resources Institute research associate Nathan Cogswell said.
“The upcoming session will hopefully help parties get closer to that,” he added.
One of the thorniest debates during recent UN climate talks has been Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which deals with the trade of emissions cuts.
A major sticking point remains over rules to avoid double counting emissions reductions within both bilateral and international carbon markets.
Some wealthy nations without the natural resources — forests, for instance — to mitigate their contribution to climate change have spent huge amounts on projects to preserve those habitats in other countries. Currently, both the buying and selling nations may count the project toward their domestic climate action, opening the door for the same cut to be counted twice.
Cogswell said that a failure to agree on a protection against double counting emissions reductions by the end of the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in November would “weaken the ambition of global efforts” to fight climate change.
COVID-19 forced Britain and the UN to shelve talks originally scheduled for last year until the end of this year.
As the pandemic continues to rage, particularly among developing nations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, negotiators will need to achieve tangible progress during the three-week Bonn talks.
“The absence of a COP left a tremendous amount of work to be done ... if we want to deliver at Glasgow,” said Marianne Karlsen, chair of a major technical forum at the UN-led negotiations.
The two-week sessions — expanded this year to three — normally involve thousands of representatives from more than 180 countries, and often rely on behind-closed-doors bargaining between delegates to get deals done.
Karlsen said the virtual configuration of talks was “not ideal at all.”
“We really wanted to be able to have all the interactions of when we meet in person, but there was no other option,” she said.
Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, chair of the UN’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice technical working group, said delegates needed to use the virtual negotiations to “prioritize a way to capture progress, so we can capture that progress when we meet in person, and make decisions” in Glasgow.
“It’s important that we send a clear message to the world: We are very much engaged in resolving the Paris rulebook and to tackling this climate change conundrum,” he said.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS