Lima climate talks come down to marathon session at end

Developing nations accomplish task of including core interests in final draft

At the recent United Nations climate summit in Peru, where delegates from 194 countries gathered in a tent city at the country's army headquarters in Lima, time was the scarcest resource.

Many sleep-deprived negotiators went to the conference venue on the morning of Dec 12 and continued working feverishly for about 45 hours until the summit ended in the wee hours of Dec 14, about 32 hours after the scheduled closure deadline.

Similar stories of climate negotiators burning the midnight oil have been repeated year after year. The underlying truth is that many negotiators don't want to use their bargaining chips until the last minute.

But as the chaos and the haggling came to an end, the negotiators agreed only on some modest steps toward a Paris pact despite considerable momentum in the runup to the two-week meeting. In October, the European Union agreed to cut its greenhouse gases by at least 40 percent by 2030. A month later, at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in Beijing, China and the United States made a joint announcement to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

The recent announcements by the EU, China and the US sparked hope for "ever-higher levels of ambition", said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the Lima negotiations.

"The China-US joint announcement may turn out to be among the most important moments in two decades of international climate negotiations," said Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

But extreme weather in the Philippines and a UN report that 2014 is on track to be the hottest year on record added urgency to negotiations toward a major global climate pact.

In the first week of talks in Lima, little progress was made, with much of the discussions dominated by requests for draft texts on proposed climate actions projected onto screens in the negotiating venues. Artur Runge-Metzger and Kishan Kumarsingh, co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, continued last year's approach by simply listening to proposals made by governments and asking a secretary to take notes.

Most developing countries, in asking to project the draft texts in order for nonnative English speakers to better understand the proposals, also expressed their concerns about the transparency of the process. The co-chairs finally agreed. With the arrival of the ministers, the summit shifted into gear for the second week.

One bright spot from the second week was progress on the Green Climate Fund, as more countries joined a growing list of donors to push the fund past the $10 billion goal for 2014. GCF helps developing countries counter climate change by redistributing money from developed countries, which have a long way to go to make good on their vow to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020.

Then a crisis erupted. A five-page draft decision text for a 2015 Paris accord proposed by the co-chairs was released at around 2:40 am on the second Saturday of the summit. At a plenary on Saturday morning, most developed countries, including the United States, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Russia, accepted the text.

But developing countries raised strong objections to the draft text, saying it was unbalanced. Many said their core concerns - such as the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which pins current levels of emissions on developed countries on the basis that they are historically responsible for current greenhouse gases in the air - were not reflected in the draft text. For developing countries, the principle is the basis for climate change talks, though financial and technological support are two other key factors.

At the time, Liu Zhenmin, China's vice-foreign minister, said the draft text was not balanced and that the climate summit was facing a "deadlock".

Malaysia's delegation said developed countries' commitment for post-2020 actions solely focused on committing to targets for cutting emissions and ignored key elements such as adaptation, financing and transfers of technology to developing countries.

Calling for a balanced approach, India's environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, said: "Let's not make the poor to pay."

Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation directly threatened by climate change, said a mechanism to pay compensation for loss and damage from storms, floods or rising sea levels, a crucial issue for the world's poorest nations, was missing from the draft text.

"There is an overwhelming message from less developed countries that we need to have that in the text," said a Tuvaluan representative.

No consensus could be reached so the text was transmitted to Conference of the Parties President and Peru's Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal to lead consultations. Talks then entered a hectic eight-hour period in which Pulgar-Vidal held meetings and negotiations with groups of countries.

A redraft was handed out at around 1:30 pm Saturday and all parties were given one hour to go through the text.

At 2 am on Dec 14, Pulgar-Vidal declared: "It's so decided."

No country objected, and more than 190 countries named the outcome of two weeks of talks the "Lima Call for Action".

The outcome elaborated the elements of the Paris agreement and laid out ground rules for countries on how to submit domestic plans for fighting climate change beyond 2020 during the first quarter of next year.

Xie Zhenhua, head of the Chinese delegation, said the outcome met the delegation's expectations.

"We're not very satisfied with the outcome, but we think it's a balanced and good document," Xie said on Dec 14.

He said the Lima summit has taken a critical step toward next year's Paris agreement and that he believes next year's negotiations will be more challenging. He called on all parties to show greater flexibility.

The major concern of developing countries, of addressing the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, was added in the final draft.

Su Wei, China's chief climate negotiator, said the Lima call for climate action lays a solid foundation for meetings next year.

While some climate experts have said that the China-US announcement in November set a model for solving differences between developed and developing countries, Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, said the Lima deal addressed differentiation in the same language as the China-US deal.

"Most importantly, countries agreed in Lima on a consolidated negotiating text that delegates will build upon next year," Morgan said: "It's pretty balanced actually."

But many problems were unsolved. There is still no clear roadmap for how to make progress on the climate fund.

Samantha Smith, leader of WWF's Global Climate and Energy Initiative, said developed countries still could not explain in Lima how they will deliver on their vow to pay $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020.

Countries also failed to agree on specific pre-2020 actions that would have laid the groundwork for accelerating a global move toward renewable energies and increased energy efficiency.

"The most inspiring development from Lima was an outpouring of support for a long-term effort to reduce emissions, sending a strong signal that the low-carbon economy is inevitable," said Morgan.

lanlan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 12/19/2014 page23)