this is the text of The Durban Mandate that is causing so much anguish and argument here in Durban tonight.
Follow the twitter feed for the live drama as it unfolds.
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Time to come up with solutions
by Samuli Sinisalo
The final negotitations in Durban just began. The different negotiating bodies will meet in this order: Ad-hod working group on Kyoto Protocol, Ad-hoc working group on Long Term Cooperative Action, Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to Kyoto Protocol and finally the closing plenary of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC.
It’s 9pm on Saturday, the conference was supposed to be over by Friday night and we are just in the AWG-KP meeting. It looks like tonight is going to be the long night.
At the moment, there are three possible results for the outcome of Durban. Either the talks will collapse, without any decision. This would not be the ideal solution for anyone. A lot of hard work has been done throughout the two weeks, some progress has been made. The need for immediate action to address climate change is ever-growing. I believe collapse is not on anyones agenda.
Another option is to adopt the texts as they stand. That would also be a suboptimal outcome. The Kyoto text is weak in ambition and lacks legal strength. The LCA text is watered down to two different documents. One is about 40 pages long, includes a lot of good things about 1,5 degrees, ambitious goals for 2050 etc, and those are being pushed forward to COP 18. The other text is about 50 pages, but it too lacks ambition. The AWG-LCA would be closed in Durban, and ultimately killed in Qatar next year. At the same time the LCA would be replaced by a new negotiation mandate, which probably would not be as ambitious as the Bali Action Plan.
The third option is to close the COP in Durban unresolved and pick up the work in Bonn in the intersessional in June. This way the Parties would have time to really analyze the texts and options and contemplate on different options. At the moment as everyone is tired and sleepdeprived, some ministers and negotiatiors have left Durban, we are running a risk of goveling down decisions in haste, without due democratic process and debate. COP bis seems to be the optimum solution at the moment.
unF**C our future
-nathan thanki
So while the AWG-KP plenary is suspended for Parties to get their heads together, let’s have a little fun. Late one night in the first week a few of us were sitting round the table of Hippo Hide backpackers. Samuli came in shouting about final outcomes, and we decided to all write down our predictions and keep them for the final night.
Well that night is now upon us friends. Here are our predictions. They’re all pretty grim, so we’re hoping against hope to be way off the mark.
Nathan: KP-2 will go ahead, with no/little reductions. Some sort of GCF will get approved – an empty shell, and some big concessions for developing countries. The price of this is that LCA will yield a new mandate for a climate regime involving all countries. India and China will be blamed. TEC and Adaptation Committee could go through but will be undermined later.
Graham: LCA will give us mandate for bottom up approach involving China, India, US. There will be a political KP-2, with more markets. India will lead blocking and get blamed. Loss and damage work programme will go through, NAPs won’t, Adaptation Committee will be blocked by SICA, there’ll be no GCF, the Adaptation fund is empty. Africa will sell out.
Samuli: We’ll get a political KP-2. LCA will be concluded with a durban mandate, consisting of 3 pillars: mitigation, adaptation, poverty eradication. To be concluded by 2015. The GCF will be established.
Anjali: KP-2 will happen. the BAP will continue but with more parties doing pledge and review under LCA (2018-2020). Japan and Canada will be doing that. The shared vision will be weak. The GCF will get established, but with too much private sector involvement and a private sector facility. The TEC will be launched, also with much private sector involvement.
Ethan (from SustainUS): The LCA will go out the window. There won’t be a KP-2. But CDM will be around for a while. GCF won’t be operational. There will be a 2nd transitional committee to re-design the GCF.
Currently it looks bad. Really bad. There are three options.
1. Collapse. Copenhagen take 2.
2. COP17 bis. In 6 months or so we’d have a resumed session to try and get it right.
3. The Durban Mandate gets pushed through as is. It’s the end of the UNFCCC (and the world) as we know it.
An appeal to sanity
by nathan thanki
Yesterday, a large group of civil society–mostly youth–took the voice and anger of the street into the halls of the UN. While it could never have been a true #occupy–COP is inherently segregated into those with badges and those without; those with pink badges and those with yellow–the idea was still to say: enough is enough. You have had 20 years to negotiate a fair, ambitious, legal treaty. You have failed. We pass a vote of no confidence in you, governments of the developed world.
While there aren’t always clear good and bad guys in these negotiations (despite the US and Canada’s best efforts to be the absolute worst), there is a clear divide of North and South. The North has historically exploited the South, and has historically used up it’s share of natural resources and atmospheric space. All at the detriment of the South. All you need to do is see a flow chart diagram of money, trade, and resources to see. The wealth of the world accumulates in Europe, in North America, in Australia and Japan. But they can’t afford to pay for adaptation and mitigation? They tell the poor of the world to do it for themselves. They’ve gotten rich from burning mountains of coal and oceans of oil, but now they refuse to cut their emissions unless the poor take that burden too? Civil society is divided over whether or not this is a fair ask. The calls for “treaty now” are fine - so long as it is a fair treaty. The concern that some NGOs have is that demanding a treaty by 2015 for everyone is asking India and China to write off their hopes of tackling poverty. More than that, because of low ambition and loopholes, it writes off all our hopes of a livable world in the future.
The media, eager to feed the hatred that Europeans and Americans seem to have toward any kind of competitor – India, China, Iran, Brasil etc – are running with the theme: blame the big developing nations. The EU is loving this. They can split G77 unity by appropriating the calls of the island states and LDCs for emissions reductions, and point the finger at India. Some elements of civil society are helping: Avaaz ran an ad in the Financial Times that showed Africa burning, while grim reapers from USA, Canada, Russia and India floated overhead. So the march yesterday was somewhat split. There were back and forth shouts of “treaty now” and “equity now.”
As well as substantive differences, there were also procedural ones. Most of us were ready to get kicked out, to lose our badges, to stay there all night if need be. The whole point was to bring our voice to the door of the plenary. So most of us rejected the idea of moving the protest outside in exchange for no repercussions. Besides, I for one did not believe the UNFCCC secretariat and security. They’d tell you anything, sure. But then voices from within the protest began sowing the seeds of doubt. “You will not be able to come to subsequent COPs.” “You will be arrested by the South African police for trespassing.” The pressure to leave was too great. We weren’t kettled in, so the protest disintegrated until there were a few dozen left, stubborn as mules, to be removed by the guards. We let our protest be appropriated.
The same must not happen to our message. I understand that the Avaaz blunder is causing them some grief, but it was only an expression of an idea that seems to be gaining ground among civil soceity – that the blockers should be blamed and shamed. But, wouldn’t you block a suicide pact? It is better to frame it like this: who does a block actually benefit? Not China, not India, but the developed nations. Europe and the States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. If it all falls to pieces, then hey presto – they don’t have to live up to their promises, and they don’t have to fulfill their responsibility. If it goes through as it stands, then it’s curtains for ambition, it’s curtains for AWG-LCA, and it’s curtains for the planet. The islands will sink, Africa will burn, the political status quo will remain. We can’t let our planet be taken hostage by the greedy, just like we can’t let our democracy be taken hostage by the greedy. Greed is the right term. Notice how the only thing the rich countries want to share with the poor is the responsibility to reduce emissions. They do not want to share their wealth, their technology, their patented intellectual property.
We should not help perpetuate the lies of the rich and powerful.
I implore activists and others engaging in the struggle to think. Think about who you represent and how. When you find yourself talking about urgency in the negotiations, ask; where are we urgently going, and who gets hurt aslong the way? Who suffers from a “better than nothing” EU deal? Think about who has already suffered from climate change. Think about who has already acted to stop it. Then think about who the real blockers are. Please consider the true grassroots. The millions living in poverty in India, China, Brazil. Are you seriously going to condemn them to death? Or are you going to stand with them against the real polluters?
