Protestors at Berlin's Silent Climate Parade, September 2015. ekvidi/Flickr.com. Some rights reserved.The last round of negotiations before the much-anticipated Paris Conference kicked off on Monday in Bonn. With only five official negotiating days left before Paris, those involved in the talks have plenty of work ahead of them before agreeing on what will hopefully be a legally-binding agreement next December.
Discussions in Bonn resumed under a tense atmosphere, with the majority of developing countries involved expressing their frustration on the non-paper note produced by the two co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP). The ADP is the body in charge of developing some form of protocol or instrument with legal force, under the Convention applicable to all Parties, and expected to be adopted by all United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Parties in Paris this December. This instrument that should become effective after 2020 is likely to become the most ambitious and comprehensive agreement to tackle climate change yet.
On 5 October, Ahmed Djoghlaf (Algeria) and Daniel Reifsnyder (USA) presented the aforementioned note as a potential basis for future discussions. By reducing the text from 76 to 20 pages compared to the last negotiation round, the co-chairs left a series of issues – dear to developing countries’ hearts, though not exclusively – out of the document.
