John Lanchbery, at the UNFCCC conference
Two days to go at the global climate negotiations in Doha and the sun continues to shine outside, although not much light percolates through to the negotiations. Ministers have arrived now and with them have come the journalists; I am sitting next to John Vidal from the Guardian and may ask him to proof read this blog. Roger Harabin from the BBC has just arrived next to John, Geoffrey Lean from the Telegraph is lurking down the corridor and the Al Jazeera folk are everywhere.
We have been having meetings with ministers as they arrive, starting with UK minister Ed Davey and EU Commissioner Connie Hedegaard earlier in the week and, most recently, with Minister Xie from China last night. (Good sense of humour and answers questions fully so he would probably not make a good western politician.)
Photo: UNFCCC
The main task of this COP is to wrap up two older negotiating tracks and begin a new one in which to negotiate what we hope will be a bigger and better treaty by 2015, and which will come into operation in 2020. However, if we are to keep global temperature rise at anywhere near tolerable levels, we need bigger cuts in emissions now, not after 2020. The key to success is thus ‘short term ambition’ in both reducing emissions and supplying money for adaptation to the climate change that will inevitably occur as a result of our previous and current emissions. There is not much evidence of this ambition so far although the UK, Germany and Denmark have chipped in sizeable chunks of money this week.
As a consequence of many meetings with ministers, an increasingly clear picture of a final deal is emerging although there remain murky areas and things could still go horribly wrong. I am pretty sure that there will be much that we will not like in the likely deal although some issues are going fairly well, including cutting emissions from deforestation, but even there much work will be kicked forward to next year.
This was always going to a process oriented COP to implement the deal done in Durban last year ,so we were not expecting spectacular results. But we are concerned that much good stuff will be swept under the carpet as the furniture in the room is moved around. It looks as though the talks will run late into Friday night or, more probably, Saturday.