At least we can produce paper

Time is starting to run short. It is Saturday morning. Ministers, and the few heads of state deigning to attend, will start arriving on Tuesday or Wednesday so the basic negotiations must be completed by then. Sunday is officially a day off, although many activities will continue.

The document distribution desk is barely visible behind the crush of people trying to reach mounds of paper. I stand politely in line until I realize that there isn't a line and that I'm never going to make it to the front if I am not more aggressive. I exchange rueful looks with a Norwegian delegate, “well, if we cannot produce a decision, at least we can produce paper”, he says.

I catch the eyes of one of the young men behind the desk. He sees my smile, nods and holds up one finger. A few moments later he reappears and hands me a giant package of papers still warm from the copier. I hug them to my chest, pick up my earphones and translation receiver, and head to the plenary. The stack of paper is so thick that I can still feel its warmth seeping into my tired body 10 minutes later. Its the UNFCCC version of a hot water bottle.

The 76 page document is an attempt to summarize the current state of play in each of the 19 sub-issues under negotiation in just one of the two negotiation tracks, the AWG-LCA. The chair explains that the purpose of this plenary is to introduce this document so that everyone can figure out where negotiations stand on each of the sub-issues. He spends the next 45 minutes explaining the source of each section. We go through finance, REDD, special sectors, mitigation obligations, adaptation governance, technology sharing, capacity building and the list goes on. Some sections have text that negotiators have written and are in the process of finalizing. In other areas, like shared vision for the future, there is so little convergence in parties' positions that the facilitators have chosen to write a summary instead.

The instant he stops country placards start flying up. Bolivia does not think their view was captured in the long term vision section. The United States would like to state that the text in paragraph 9 was not what was captured in the negotiations. Saudi Arabia would like to formally note that it does not think that any text that does not solely emerge through negotiation should have been included in this document.

The chair listens to all these comments and addresses a few specific questions. Acknowledging that there is a mix of negotiator and facilitator text in the document, he eventually calls the conversation to to a halt. “Colleagues”, he calls out, “I've known that we had 19 issues to deal with and that we have had 19 groups and 19 facilitators to try to do this, but it is really important to see this text in one place to see just how huge this task is”. With that he abruptly adjourns the meeting, leaving us all with a barely cooled-down 76 page single-spaced document that meticulously outlines one undecided issue after another, after another, after another.....