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The Paris climate talks enter the home stretch showing signs of progress
来源:http://www.economist.com/news/international/21679868-reach-deal-negotiators-must-now-solve-toughest-issues-paris-climate-talks
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作者:Econmist
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发布时间: 2015-12-10
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1950 次浏览
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To reach a deal, negotiators must now solve the toughest issues
“GIVEN the schedule we face, we need to continue to work,” declared Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, as he dismissed a plenary session of the UN climate talks in Paris late on December 9th. That afternoon he and his colleagues had introduced a new “draft final” text to the talks. During the evening plenary speakers from country after country pointed to its flaws and voiced their reservations. But none said it should be thrown out—and praise for the French presidency’s handling of the negotiations came thick and fast. At this stage in the last big climate confab, in Copenhagen six years ago, talks had almost entirely collapsed. The process in Paris is in far better shape.
The new text, based on a document that has been developing for months, contains just under 20,000 words, down from about 25,000 in the version circulated at the start of the week. According to an analysis by parisagreement.org, a pop-up NGO funded by the Tropical Forest Group, an American advocacy outfit, it includes 361 bracketed sections where precise wording has not yet been agreed—an improvement on the 916 there were before. Some sections, such as that on technology transfer, are already virtually bracket-free, or “clean”. This progress bears out the feeling that these negotiations are far less dysfunctional than those at Copenhagen and some other previous conferences. But the toughest questions remain. Who should do what, including financially? What should the long-term goal be? What mechanism should be used to ratchet up action in the future?
Of all these, the hardest to resolve is the one that goes by the name of “differentiation”. In 1992, when the countries now gathered in Paris committed themselves to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” by signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), they agreed that not all of them should be expected to contribute to that objective in the same way. Thus the convention states that they should act “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities”. This differentiation of responsibilities was built into the UNFCCC’s first offspring, the ill-fated Kyoto protocol, which required developed countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions but required more or less nothing of developing countries.
“GIVEN the schedule we face, we need to continue to work,” declared Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, as he dismissed a plenary session of the UN climate talks in Paris late on December 9th. That afternoon he and his colleagues had introduced a new “draft final” text to the talks. During the evening plenary speakers from country after country pointed to its flaws and voiced their reservations. But none said it should be thrown out—and praise for the French presidency’s handling of the negotiations came thick and fast. At this stage in the last big climate confab, in Copenhagen six years ago, talks had almost entirely collapsed. The process in Paris is in far better shape.
The new text, based on a document that has been developing for months, contains just under 20,000 words, down from about 25,000 in the version circulated at the start of the week. According to an analysis by parisagreement.org, a pop-up NGO funded by the Tropical Forest Group, an American advocacy outfit, it includes 361 bracketed sections where precise wording has not yet been agreed—an improvement on the 916 there were before. Some sections, such as that on technology transfer, are already virtually bracket-free, or “clean”. This progress bears out the feeling that these negotiations are far less dysfunctional than those at Copenhagen and some other previous conferences. But the toughest questions remain. Who should do what, including financially? What should the long-term goal be? What mechanism should be used to ratchet up action in the future?
Of all these, the hardest to resolve is the one that goes by the name of “differentiation”. In 1992, when the countries now gathered in Paris committed themselves to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” by signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), they agreed that not all of them should be expected to contribute to that objective in the same way. Thus the convention states that they should act “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities”. This differentiation of responsibilities was built into the UNFCCC’s first offspring, the ill-fated Kyoto protocol, which required developed countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions but required more or less nothing of developing countries.