Leaders
‘will not negotiate’ at Paris climate talks
Summit
organizers want them to show up at the start, not the end, to avoid a
repeat of the Copenhagen disaster.
By SARA STEFANINI
10/5/15, 3:33 PM CET Updated 10/6/15, 8:29 AM CET
The Paris global
climate summit wants to reverse the way such talks have been held in
past years by summoning world leaders at the start — and then
leaving the messy business of hammering out a deal to their
representatives.
The reason is the
bruising experience of the Copenhagen climate summit five years ago,
widely remembered as a failure after fraught last-minute, closed-door
negotiations between a handful of world leaders did little but anger
the many more left out in the hall.
Paris therefore
plans to switch up the agenda for the COP21, bringing the leaders and
heads of state in for the first day-and-a-half “in order to get the
negotiations going,” according to a French official. It will then
be up to their representatives to work out the grittier details of
what many hope will be a legally binding agreement that puts the
world on course to limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees
Celsius.
“The French idea
is to have heads of state come at the beginning to make statements —
they will not negotiate, you won’t have them in closed doors,” an
EU source familiar with the preparations said.
While Paris has yet
to send out invitations to the summit, which runs from November 30 to
December 11, key leaders from both the developed and developing
worlds are expected to show. That includes U.S. President Barack
Obama, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, European Commission
President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and
of course the host, French President François Hollande.
The point is to keep
leaders’ hands clear of the actual text of the agreement, in case
it fails to satisfy. But their presence in Paris is required if the
196 countries want to succeed this time, environmental advocates say.
“Both Obama and
Merkel were in Copenhagen, and I suspect the thought of going in on
the last day doesn’t fill them glee,” said Liz Gallagher, a
program leader at the environmental analysis group E3G. “If it’s
going to have any credibility, the likes of Modi and Merkel and Dilma
Rousseff have to be there.”
BusinessEurope, the
lobby group for many of the biggest companies in Europe, likes
France’s attempt to change the previous format, said Nick Campbell,
chairman of its climate change working group. “We hope that the
early presence of heads of state will give the negotiators more
flexibility to reach the ambitious global agreement that we are
looking for.”
On the other hand,
showing up but not negotiating may leave heads of state with little
to do besides stoking ministers who should already be fired up, an
industry source familiar with international climate talks said.
The outcome of the
Danish COP15 in 2009 was derailed at the beginning by a leaked draft
of the agreement, and then exacerbated by the final talks among a
couple of dozen heads of state.
The document, leaked
to the Guardian two days into the summit, infuriated developing
countries by laying out a plan to give developed countries more power
than in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, weakening the United Nations’ role
in handling climate finance and setting tighter limits on per capita
emissions allowed from poorer countries, the paper reported at the
time.
There is cautious
confidence that the COP21 will result in a more successful outcome
than the Copenhagen summit. The expectation from NGO, business and
European leaders isn’t that countries will commit to reducing their
emissions enough to stop climate change from passing the 2-degree
mark this time around, but that they’ll agree on a legally binding
framework for countries to evaluate their progress and gradually
raise their targets.
The difference
between the two summits was visible in the first two of three
week-long meetings in Bonn earlier this year, where country
negotiators were split into working groups and subgroups to debate
the 80-plus page text that will serve as the basis of a Paris deal.
“They’re
actually starting to talk about issues, they’re putting text on the
screen and, while they’re not negotiating, they’re saying things
like ‘Why is this word here and not here?’ etc.,” the industry
source said, calling it a step forward.
The U.N. published a
first “comprehensive” draft agreement package on Monday, cut down
to 20 pages from more than 80. Negotiators meet one last time in Bonn
from October 19 to 23 discuss the brackets scattered throughout the
text and finalize a more comprehensive version to take to Paris. That
said, the industry source warned not to make plans for the weekend
following the formal conclusion of the summit on December 11.
“My advice, if
you’re going to Paris, is book your hotel through the Monday.”
Nicholas Vinocur
contributed to this article.
This article was
first published on POLITICO Pro.
Authors:
Sara Stefanini
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário