STERN: NEGOTIATORS MUST ACCEPT ‘DIFFERENT BALLGAME’ POST-DURBAN

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
04/20/12

The country’s top climate negotiator this week stressed that delegates negotiating a binding emissions reduction treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol will have to embrace a new “paradigm shift” as they begin developing a framework for the treaty this year. U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, looking ahead to a United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) planning conference next month in Bonn, Germany, said in a call with reporters that international negotiators appear to be on the same page in terms of what needs to be accomplished this year in the lead up to a higher-level ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar in November. “I think that there’s a fairly broad sense of agreement that this year should be devoted to a kind of conceptual phase,” Stern said. “I don’t think anyone is thinking that there’s going to be a big deliverable in Doha or that there’s going to be negotiating text or anything like that. People are quite mindful that we’re entering quite new terrain here.”

The Bonn meeting marks the first time that climate negotiators will reunite since they worked overtime in Durban, South Africa last December to craft what became known as the Durban Platform, an agreement to finalize a legally-binding emissions reduction scheme by 2015 for both rich and poor countries—the first ever to do so. That plan will eventually replace the Kyoto Protocol beginning in 2020, negotiators said at the time. The platform was notable in that it got the United States, China and India, none of which were signatories of Kyoto, to all agree—in a non-binding manner, for now—to reduce emissions. However, negotiators now face the delicate task of hammering out a treaty that makes all parties happy while also achieving real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Different Ballgame’

Stern said the fact that the Durban Platform now covers all countries—instead of the traditional model of just developed nations—constitutes a “paradigm shift” that negotiators must take into account beginning with the Bonn meeting. He called the new negotiations a “different ballgame” compared to previous debates. “Certain kinds of provisions and agreements that might have worked in a different paradigm are not going to work, so we’ve got to think about how can you fashion an agreement that’s going to be inclusive enough to apply to everybody,” he said. Meanwhile, in a separate speech in Washington this week, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres also acknowledged the paradigm shift leading up to Doha later in the year. “This is about completely changing the economic, the production, the consumption structure that we’ve been used to,” she said.

Overall, Stern said that so far most countries have been able to “really understand” the shift in thought he says will need to occur. “I would describe this as good progress because people are on the same page, I think, with regard to how the process ought to go with respect to the notion that there should be workshops, roundtables, papers and all the kinds of conceptual thinking that needs to be happening this year in a very concerted way so that the groundwork can to be laid to move on from that phase next year and beyond,” Stern said. He said he hopes that negotiations this year will not devolve into a fight over agenda for the ministerial meeting, like what occurred during much of last year in the lead-up to the Durban summit. “This is going to be a process. This is not going to be steady onward and upward progress. This is going to be steps forward, steps back, that’s the nature of this,” Stern said.