Progress made in the remaining negotiations related to the Paris climate change agreement in Bonn this week is underwhelming, particularly in light of the fact that formal negotiations will not resume again until November, members of the Climate Action Network said Monday. “It’s very important also to come out of this week here with mandating further work between now and Marrakesh. You may know that there’s not any other session scheduled for the negotiations. Of course, parties have the possibility to advance the agenda,” Sven Harmeling, climate change advocacy coordinator at CARE International, said at a press conference kicking off the second week of the Bonn Climate Change Conference.
The Bonn conference is the first meeting of the United Nations Framework Conversion on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since the body adopted the Paris Agreement in December. Within the agreement are several action items to be resolved by the parties to the agreement following its entry into force.
Until the deal enters into force, the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA) is buckling down to develop draft decisions which will, in turn, be delivered to the parties of the agreement at the first Conference of Parties (COP) after than time.
The agreement was initially drafted to come into force in 2020. However, during negotiations at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21), that language was dropped, and instead it was agreed that the deal would come into force once 55 parties, representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, signed and ratified the agreement. That time seems to be coming sooner rather than later.
Some officials, including UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, have suggested that the agreement might come into force by the end of the year. More conservative estimates put it in force next year.
Of the items not being addressed in Bonn include the stated ambition of the Paris Agreement, which is to keep global temperature rise “well below” 2-degree Celsius with an aim to keep it below 1.5-degrees. However, the list of actions that nations will take under the agreement do not equate to a 1.5-degree pathway and instead lead to a 2.7-3 degree rise in global average temperature.
“In order to be able to reach this goal we need urgent action now. We need faster action now. This is on the agenda in the UNFCCC, but it’s actually not on the agenda here at this session, unfortunately. It will be in Marrakesh though,” Inga Fritzen Buan, senior climate adviser at the World Wildlife Fund, said during the press conference.
While there are no more formal sessions of the UNFCCC planned between now and November’s COP22 in Marrakesh, Morocco, there are still things that nations can be doing on their own to keep the momentum of the Paris Agreement going, Harmeling said. “For example, preparing submissions on specific issues or looking into more technically focused meetings. As Marrakesh must be another big step in this journey, it’s very important to use the time in between.”