Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/4/2015
While heads of state made their presentations during the first plenary sessions of the 21st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris this week, the members of the Ad hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) were hard at work trying to clean up a draft global climate agreement. ADP is tasked with developing the agreement, which upon approval will be sent to the full conference for adoption next week. The conference is scheduled to end on Dec. 11.
ADP has been working on the draft since its inception at COP17, held in Durban, South Africa in 2011. COP President Laurent Fabius said he has asked ADP to present him with the text by Saturday. “I hope that the draft they give me this Saturday at 12 noon will be as finalized as possible because the aim, and I hope they meet this aim, the aim is for many issues to be settled by then, options to be settled, so that we can focus as of the fifth of December with the heads of delegations, ministers, on the final political points that need to be settled,” Fabius told reporters at a press briefing Wednesday.
ADP chose to work through the heads of state and government presentations, Fabius said, as the working group has little time remaining to approve a draft. “We must speed the process up because we have much work to do. Compromise solutions must be found as fast as possible. Heads of state and government have given us an unambiguous mandate: We must succeed and do whatever we can to succeed,” he said.
The draft going into the negotiations left much undecided, including key issues such as financing, the legal nature of national commitments, and the shared responsibilities of developed and developing countries. The text ADP is working through is riddled with bracketed language to be negotiated. For example, the purpose of the agreement remains undecided. “The purpose of this Agreement is [to [enhance the implementation of the Convention and] to achieve [its] objective [of the Convention] as stated in its Article 2,” the text says.
The negotiation process will not be easy, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said during the briefing. “[The agreement] will go through ups and downs,” she said. “There will be many commas inserted and commas removed because that is the nature of this. It is a legally binding text and needs to be reviewed very, very carefully, so the end product of that is not going to come out until the end of next week.”