Again and Again

COP18 ended a few hours ago and I’m sitting with a delegate from a developing country in the Caribbean.  He has been coming to represent his country for well over a decade.  I ask him what he has learned from these years of effort.

His answer is blunt.  “Dishonesty”.  He pauses for a moment, and then elaborates.

“Developed countries said they were going to do something in 1992.  And it is 20 years later and they have done nothing but lie.  I think sometimes that I should stop coming, but I have a son.  What am I supposed to say to him?  That I stopped fighting?  That I didn’t care enough about him to keep trying?  And so I come.  Again and again.  But still nothing happens”.

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I wake just enough to register the flight’s eerie quiet; there is no chatter, no-one is watching movies, and no-one is getting up to stretch.  The Doha-London flight is full of COP delegates and they are grateful for the chance to sleep. COP18 ended 24 hours late and no-one is happy.

There is a Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions but there is no money in it.

They have pieced together a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol but it has an absurdely insufficient mitigation vision. It excludes several key emitters,  such as the US, Canada, and Japan,  and does not  impose mitigation targets for others, including China, India, and Brazil.  As one European delegate tells me in frustration, “sure we saved the KP, but is it even worth saving?”

There is agreement to continue talking about the Durban Platform (ADP) with the goal of having a long-term climate deal by 2015.  However, with no signs of significantly increased mitigation efforts in developed countries and deep divides about adaptation, developing country emissions and compensation for climate damages, it is almost inevitable that the most vicious disagreements lie ahead. 

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As a relative newcomer to the climate scene, I am always humbled by those I meet who have been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years.  They have tried, and failed, and tried again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

I get off my flight and stumble into a delegate who has invested years of her life trying to foster compromise positions between developed and developing countries.   She smiles but looks like she needs to cry for about a week.  She reaches out to hug me. As I’m enveloped in her diaphanous scarf, she kisses me on both cheeks and whispers in each ear, “Peace. Peace”.

I am tired because I have not had sufficient sleep, but it pales to the weariness I feel for my future.  Because what am I going to do?  Stop fighting?  Decide I don’t care enough to keep trying?

Tempting. 

But unlikely.

I love you to stay here more days

I am becoming rather fond of His Excellency Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah.  It is the morning stocktaking of the last day.  In theory COP will close in 12 hours, but it is becoming clear that this may not happen.

AWG-KP still does not have agreed upon text.

AWG-LCA still does not have agreed upon text.

AWG-ADP still does not have agreed upon text.  In fact, as the youngest of the three tracks it has least priority, the stalemates in the other tracks have prevented the AWG-ADP from having any meetings.

For a negotiation process in which there are three main tracks, no conclusion in any of them does not bode well for the ability of delegates to make their flights in a few short hours.  Not only does there need to be text for each of the tracks, but also must parties be able to agree on a comprehensive package built upon interconnections across all three.

Of course, the possibility of having long term guests does not seem to be unduly bothering the COP President.

“I am not in a rush,  I am at home.  My house is only 10 minutes driving distance.  So I love you to stay here more days.  The text is in your hands.  So at 6 oclock we can come back to have a blessing.  You have time to finalise it if you are in a rush.  If you are not in a rush, you are welcomed to stay with me.”

The negotiations may be a flop, but no-one can doubt his hospitality.

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AWG- KP

I am struck by the lines in the face of the delegate I am speaking with in the hallway.  He has been involved in these negotiations for over 15 years. It is not just age I am seeing but grief.   His eyes temporarily sparkle as he tells me about the original negotiations; “When I think back to 1997 there was so much emotion in the room, it was really exciting”.  But then he stops, “Last night when the KP closed its final plenary there should have been something, but there was not.  There was no emotion in the room.  Now, now its just hopeless I think” he sighs and his shoulders cave in slightly.

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AWG - ADP

It is difficult to know where exactly the problem lays.  It is both everywhere and nowhere.   It is 10:30 pm on the last day of COP and I am sitting in the final plenary of the ADP.  China, the EU and the United States have spent a full hour battling over the words “commitments and action”, versus “range of commitments”, versus “what parties will do”. 

They use humour.

They use anger.

They use technicalities.

They refer to historical precedents and appeal to the future of their children.

Finally the Chair of the session hauls them to the front of the room like unruly school children where they have a hushed huddle.   Egypt resolves the problem, using an entirely new phrase, “ways of defining and reflecting enhanced action’.

Hallalujah.

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AWG – LCA

Negotiations for the LCA ground to a halt on Tuesday.  Realizing that any vision of consensus was far out of reach the President started a process of informal consultations.  Pairs of ministers, one each from a developed and developing country, were requested to do “ministerial outreach” on key issues. These bilateral consultations are closed; only the ministers and most senior members of delegations attend.

It is now Friday night.  One by one ministers charged with outreach come to the stocktaking to report on their progress.

The Swiss Minister reports on cross-cutting finance issues: No agreement yet

The South African Minister reports on loss and damage:  No agreement yet

The Gambian Minister reports on reporting guidelines:  We have a success! Parties have agreed to use a tabular format to report back to the COP.

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The President calls a stocktaking for 1am Saturday morning and, as usual, has the last word.

“I have a long time.  I can sit here one year with you but it depends on you, when do you want to leave?”

48 Hours to Go

His Excellency Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah closes the pages of the booklet he has been painstakingly reading from and closes the stocktaking plenary with a beneficient wave of his hands.

“Goodnight” he declares and turns his mic off.

Then he pauses, and turns his mic back on.

I am fairly certain I hear his handlers inhale sharply, oh god, he is going off-script.

“By goodnight I don't mean to go to sleep.  No.  Goodnight it means, go and work hard and bring results to me.  This is what I meant by good night, work hard!”.

So ends the stocktaking meeting on Wednesday night.  We have three negotiating tracks, 195 countries, and few agreed-upon texts for Ministers to work with.

We've got 48 hours to go. 

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At 7 pm Madeleine Diouf, the chair of the AWG-KP, anounces that the AWG-KP will start final consultations at 9 pm, to be followed by a plenary that will run indefinitely.  She assures us it will be “a long night ahead” but is confident that texts will arrive by morning.

46 Hours to Go

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At 8 pm the AWG-ADP is indefinitely postponed.

The Co-chair explains: “ADP is the youngest sibling” of the three negotiating tracks, and due to the lack of agreement on the other two, delegations do not have the capacity to address all three simultaneously.  For now, the other tracks are given priority, but this is also dangerous.  He concludes, “we need to finalize our workplan for next year and beyond, and more importantly, we must demonstrat to the world that the ADP is moving forward”. 

45 Hours to Go

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At 9 pm the AWG-KP plenary is rescheduled for 11 pm.

Countries cannot agree on who should have the right to trade in the market included in the Kyoto Protocol.  Nor can they agree what to do with the ‘hot air’ credits retained by Russia.

44 Hours to Go

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At 4 am the AWG-LCA decides to stop for the day after having made little progress. 

Countries cannot decide what to do about finance.  They cannot decide how the new technology mechanism should be set up.  They cannot agree on the extent to which Intellectual Property Rights should be included in the negotiations.  They have irreconcilable differences about the appropriate strategy for concluding the LCA and starting the ADP.

39 Hours to Go

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The AWG-KP plenary is postponed until 11 am.

32 Hours to Go

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The closing plenary of the AWG-ADP is scheduled for 3 pm.

There is still no agreed upon text to bring to the final COP decision.  There is no agreed upon workplan for creating a new climate agreement. 

There will be 27 Hours to Go.

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I am sitting in the high-level plenary.  It is almost entirely empty.  Minister after minister stresses that :

“we must take greater action together”

“if we continue like this we risk to disappoint the hopes of millions of people around the globe”

“we cannot stress the urgency of this crisis enough”

 “without increasing ambition we are not going to be able to avoid the 2 degree limit that is required to avoid catastrophe”.

And yet this process is not speeding up.  It is slowing down.  As the Canadian negotiator – clearly content that the KP negotiatons are not his problem and do not involve him signficantly -  remarks smugly, “they said they were going to get the text done by yesterday.  Now they have no text and no time for the lawyers to work on it so its not clear what is going to happen with that”.

The Canadians may be smug that the KP is proving hard to negotiate – afterall, they withdrew last year and have been busy dismantling their own environmental protection systems – but no-one should be smug that none of the other agreements are coming together. 

And so it goes.   Hit that snooze button. 

31 hours to go.

(P.S. I suggest listening to Johnny Cash's 25 Minutes to Go as a soundtrack for this post!)

Beyond Us?

Her head is heavy on my shoulder as we bounce and lurch through a series of early morning traffic jams.  I worry she will fall off the edge of the seat but she does not; the next bounce throws her into my side and she slides into me.  I am crocheting as we drive and keep my movements to a minimum so I don’t wake her.  Sleep, I think to her, sleep.

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I’m sitting in the main plenary room attending a stocktaking meeting along with hundreds of other people.  The chairs of each of the three negotiating tracks and several high level officials are seated on the stage, along with a handful of support staff.   TV cameras zoom in on the speakers in turn so everyone can see them on screens flanking the stage.  While the Chair of the AWG-LCA describes ongoing challenges, the staff member attending him fights to keep her eyes open.  She loses.  We all watch sympathetically as her sleeping image is projected across the massive screens. 

By the second week of negotiations everyone is exhausted.  The delegate for Swaziland makes an official complaint: neogtiations for the SBI (Subsidiary Body for Implementation) went until 3 am.  Multiple sets of negotiations are occuring simultaneously and small delegations can barely manage to attend all of them, much less fully participate without repreive for negotiators working on little sleep.

I run into a note-taker for the ENB – the official newsletter that summarizes all the key negotiations every day – and she is pale with tiredness.  “It’s two weeks of your life you never get back”, she tells me, “I didn’t get to the hotel until 6 am last night”. 

Two NGO colleagues are walking down the hall. They are talking about demands facing the negotiators.  “I couldn’t do it”, the older one says, “I couldn’t work 20 hour days but some of them just seem to thrive on it”.  The younger one retorts, “I know, just think of their poor families when they get home”.  “Oh”, responds the older one, “you do realize most of them are divorced, right?”.  Even the most energetic people have only so much energy.

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Today’s agenda lists over 120 separate meetings, press conferences, and official side events.  This does not include informal-informal negotiations (although it does include official ‘informal’ negotiations) or bilateral discussions that remain unannounced and occur behind doors.    In one negotiating track alone I count 82 documents that negotiatiors have either presented, been presented with, or commissioned. 

The complexity of the task at hand is overwhelming and the thousands of people here are all scrambling to make sense of it.  Sessions are held on finance debates, technology transfer, and commitment periods. Meetings and negotiations hammer out on the details of ‘AAUs’, the ‘hot air credits held largely by Russia from the first Kyoto Protocol negotiations. Countries and NGOs host water events, discuss the challenges and opportunities of generating carbon credits from forests, and debate strategies for supporting electric transportation.   Ongoing discussions focus on carbon capture and storage, alternative energy strategies, the challenges of including bunker fuels in a global deal.  High level panels and small NGO protests highlight the complexities of carbon markets, industry and researchers have heated debtes about competitiveness losses, and acountants fuss about the need for clearer measurement standards. 

At any given moment roughly 10 000 thoughtful, engaged and committed people are in this building.  But the reality of the situation is that we are all being pushed beyond our limits.  This is beyond the capacity for any one person.  The challenge is that it may be beyond us collectively as well. 

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She wakes up as the bus thuds to a halt at the conference centre.  While she was sleeping the Chinese business cards she was holding have spread across her lap.  I’ve never met her before, and can’t see her name badge, but suspect she is part of the Chinese youth delegation as I have met several of her colleagues.  

She nods.  

I nod back.  

And we get off the bus, two strangers who, if not refreshed, are at least as ready as we will ever be for yet another day.