Express at COP 20: Talks in gridlock, meet head says let’s not leave Lima empty handed

“This is the time to take decisions…we want to give a clear and strong message that we want to take this process forward…you have not come here to just enjoy Lima…we must not accept to leave Lima with empty hands,” Vidal said in an impassioned plea to the negotiators.

The day’s time was lost following two suspensions of the working group that was negotiating the draft decisions to come out of the Lima talks. The Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform, or ADP as it is called, is supposed to decide on the form in which all the countries will list their ‘contributions’ to the fight against climate change. These ‘contributions’, which are supposed to be ‘nationally-determined’ and hence called Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions (INDCs), will form the backbone of the global climate agreement that is expected to be finalized at Paris in 2015 at the next climate conference.

There are serious differences between the countries over what these ‘contributions’ should contain and whether these should be put to an international review. While many countries, especially the developed world, wants only mitigation actions to be put in the INDCs, others, including India, have been arguing that adaptation measures should be counted as ‘contributions’ as well. Important disagreements exist on several other issues related to INDCs and also on the actions that have to be taken by developed countries in reducing greenhouse gas emissions before 2020, the date when the climate agreement currently under negotiation is supposed to come into effect.

Progress on the negotiations has been extremely slow this week and none of the five main contentious issues have been resolved. A number of countries expressed their frustration at the painfully slow pace of negotiations which spent a lot of time earlier this week on streamlining the process.

A brief visit of the US Secretary of State John Kerry to the conference on Thursday was expected to force the pace of negotiations, but that hardly happened. Kerry made an urgent appeal to the negotiators to reach an agreement that would initiate timely action against climate change.

“I know discussions can be tense and decisions can be difficult. But the fact is we simply don’t have time to sit around going back and forth about whose responsibility it is to act,” he said.

He said future generations would “want to know how we together could possibly have been so blind, so ideological, so dysfunctional and frankly so stubborn that we failed to act on knowledge that was confirmed by so many scientists, in so many studies over such a long period of time”.

However, when there was still no progress by six in the evening on Thursday, COP President Vidal decided to take matters in his own hands. He instructed the co-chairs of the ADP to prepare a draft decision text later that night that can be discussed on Friday morning. Draft texts are generally an outcome of discussions of all the countries and not presented by the co-chairs, but Vidal said he was making an exception and he would take full responsibility for it.

He also asked countries not to spar over “dots and commas” and only make “substantial” suggestions to improve the text. “We are not here to practice our linguistic skills,” he said.

After scolding the delegates for about ten minutes, Vidal pleaded with them to get their act together. “Please help me (in getting the negotiations on track)…Please don’t leave me alone,” he said and received a thundering applause from the delegates.

Late in the night on Thursday, a draft decision text indeed was produced as instructed by the COP president. A short seven-page draft, it contained multiple options for many places, reflecting the issues on which there was no agreement and required discussions. The draft decision text will be taken up for discussion on the morning of Friday.