The first meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement on climate change (CMA) will kick off on Nov. 15 during the 22nd session of the Conference of Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Marrakesh, Morocco, the UNFCCC announced Tuesday.
The Paris Agreement’s entry into force was triggered this month, much earlier than initially expected. The text of the agreement requires that the first COP after entry into force host the initial meeting of the CMA. The agreement will enter into force on Nov. 4, just days before COP22, which is scheduled for Nov. 7-18. This left COP22 planners with just a month to prepare to host CMA1.
According to a press release Tuesday summarizing a pre-COP meeting this week in Marrakesh, “the UNFCC Secretariat will make arrangements to open CMA1 on the morning of Tuesday, November 15, with a brief opening plenary meeting. The joint high-level segment of the COP, [the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol,] and CMA would be convened immediately after the CMA1 opening, where all Parties will make their national statements.”
Heads of state and government, as well as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, will make speeches during the joint high-level segment.
It remains uncertain exactly what will happen at CMA1. The Paris Agreement calls for the CMA to adopt a handful of decisions for implementing the accord that have not yet been ironed out, such as how to design the transparency mechanism of the agreement. The Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA) is tasked with delivering the draft decisions to the first CMA meeting (CMA1), after which it would disband. However, the working group has not finished, and cannot feasibly complete its work by CMA1; that means the parties to the agreement must decide how to deal with that situation.
A UNFCCC information note published in April suggests that in the case of early entry into force, the parties to the agreement may vote to suspend the CMA temporarily. “Should CMA 1 be convened with a minimal number of Parties to the Paris Agreement, this would result in important decisions concerning the operationalization and implementation of the Agreement being taken by only a small number of Parties. In order to avoid this situation, an option would be to convene CMA 1 … and then suspend it, with a view to its resumption at the next ordinary session of the COP,” the note says.
At the time that CMA1 opens, the agreement will have 81 parties. Nations become official parties to the agreement 30 days after depositing with the U.N. their instruments of ratification. With CMA1 less than 30 days away, no new parties will be added before the beginning of the meeting. However, “to participate in decision-making on the presumed last day of CMA 1 in Marrakech, on Friday, 18 November 2016, an instrument of ratification would need to be deposited at the latest on Wednesday, 19 October 2016,” a U.N. fact sheet release last week says.