The first meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA1) could end without taking any action on implementing the climate change accord, according to a document made public Wednesday.
The meeting is scheduled for Nov. 15 to 18 in Marrakesh, Morocco, alongside the 22nd session of the Conference of Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. CMA1 was intended to act on several decisions on implementing the agreement, but the panel preparing those items has not yet completed its work. That is because the less-than-year-old Paris Agreement entered into force in October, a milestone that initially had not been anticipated until 2017.
It has been expected for weeks that the Paris Agreement parties — currently, the roughly 80 nations that ratified the deal at least a month before CMA1 begins — would extend the working group and close up shop until next year. At that point it will be significantly larger; there were 103 parties to the accord as of Thursday.
In documents distributed Wednesday, COP22 and CMA1 President Salaheddine Mezouar, Morocco’s foreign minister, offered “Possible initial elements of a CMA 1 outcome” for its session next week. The proposal calls on CMA1 to invite the UNFCCC Conference of Parties to continue to oversee the Paris Agreement work program, providing a progress report in 2017 and completing its work by 2018, at which point the resumed CMA1 can “take appropriate action on the outcome of the work programme.”
The second part of the proposal focuses on the Conference of Parties, laying out the same timeline to conclude the work program no later than COP24 in 2018.
This will give the ad hoc working group on the Paris Agreement (APA) additional time to finish draft decisions in four areas of Paris Agreement implementation:
- Guidance relating to parties’ nationally determined contributions.
- “Modalities, procedures and guidelines for the transparency framework for action and support”;
- Modalities for the global emissions stock take; and
- “Modalities and procedures for the effective operation of the mechanism to facilitate implementation and promote compliance.”