One week gone, one to go!!!

The end of week 1 is nigh!

Things are moving slowly in the ADP negotiations. Thursday focused on the content of Parties’ Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – basically, commitments – for the Paris agreement. At the time of writing, the ADP negotiations were ongoing, sadly on a line-by-line review as opposed to looking at the overall text approach. This is taking a lot of time and we are seeing many "old" positions re-emerging.

Friday evening saw a well-attended event sponsored by the BDI alongside IETA and the local business organization, SNI. This event provided an excellent opportunity to discuss the Green Climate Facility (GCF) with their Secretariat and an alternate GCF Board member. The GCF has now received $9.95 billion in contributions. It is setting up structures and processes to disburse this funding in loans, grants etc. They are also setting up a Private Sector Facility and are encouraging businesses to get involved.

As well as a large number of other meetings, Saturday has seen the Structured Expert Dialogue under which the European Union and then some Member states formally presented the progress that they are making towards their 2020 targets. The EU noted that they have calculated that they expect to be at -21% by 2020.

None of the market approaches, hopefully to be available in the Paris agreement to provide flexibility to meet commitments in the most cost-effective manner, have progressed at all. The overdue review of the CDM’s modalities and procedures failed to go forward and a similar fate beheld the talks on the Framework for Various Approaches (FVA), New Market Mechanism (NMM) and Non-Market Approaches (NMA). These discussions will re-start at the meeting next June. As a result of this failure, the EU and a number of other countries put text to allow the use of markets into the draft elements of the Paris Negotiating text.

This is a quick update on the status of ongoing negotiations in Lima (December 1 – 12) toward the Paris 2015 Climate outcomes that are to be agreed in December 2015. Just to re-state, the two main objectives of these meetings in Lima are:
 

• Agree a Decision here in Lima on: 1) how country pledges in the areas of GHG mitigation, adaptation, financing and technology are to be framed, 2) how to advance near term climate change action prior to 2020, 3) how to take forward the Paris 2015 negotiations
• Advance “Elements” of a Paris 2015 Negotiating Text

Government Environment ministers begin to arrive in Lima over the weekend, and they expect to see nearly completed texts that they can simply approve rather than have to negotiate the texts themselves. At the present stage of the discussions, this seems unlikely.