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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS