Cop 21: Paris deal aims for GHG peakl

OREANDA-NEWS. December 15, 2015. A post-Kyoto climate deal that is to be agreed in Paris tomorrow will aim for peaking GHG emissions "as soon as possible" and reaching "climate neutrality" before the end of the century if adopted in its current form.

The latest draft deal outlines an overall long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C — and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. An earlier option — to cut GHG emissions by either 40–70pc or 70–95pc below 2010 levels by 2050 — has been completely omitted.

A new, 27-page draft released last night contains only around 50 sections still in brackets, so agreement on these is still pending. That said, today parties continued to deliberate over parts that were not in brackets, with the most difficult issues such as climate finance, transparency and loss and damage still unresolved.

A final deal is now not expected before tomorrow and the two-week UN summit, which was scheduled to end today, is set to overrun by at least a day.

Differentiation

The latest draft moves towards a more nuanced differentiation between rich and poor nations and departs from a rigid annex-1 one and non-annex 1 division established under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 1992.

The new draft stipulates that countries that have previously pledged absolute economy-wide emission cuts or limits should continue to do so, and "all parties should aim to do so over time."

Global stock-take

The core agreement stipulates that parties' intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) should represent a progression over time and a country may only adjust its INDC to increase ambition rather than weaken it.

Under the current proposal, parties will be invited to confirm or update their INDCs by either 2020 or 2021 and every five years thereafter, regardless of whether their pledge covers the period up to 2025 or 2030. This means that the EU will have to review its 40pc GHG reduction goal for 2030 before the end of this decade, earlier than required under its own legislative framework.

That said, China and India are reportedly resisting the obligation to account for progress against their INDC and reviewing their national commitments every five years, which is stalling progress.

The latest text proposes a facilitative dialogue in 2019 to aid the finalisation of INDCs for 2020, followed by a first global stocktake in 2023 to assess collective progress towards the long-term goal.

This falls short from meeting civil society demands for a formal pre-2020 review — and strengthening — of pledges before the Paris deal enters into force.

The current draft provides for a transparency framework to be established to track countries' progress towards achieving their INDCs. But similar to mitigation, developing countries are given more flexibility in meeting these transparency requirements and it is made explicit that their ability to comply will depend on support from rich nations.

Each party will report on its mitigation actions and the climate finance it has provided to help assess global GHG emissions, aggregate financial support and the support needed by developing countries, as well as ensuring double counting of financial resources is avoided.

Finance

Finance remains a key unresolved issue, even if only nine sets of square brackets remain in Article 6 in the core text that deals with the topic, down from thirty-six in the previous draft.

The latest draft clearly places the obligation for climate finance provision on developed countries, while financial support from other parties, including through "south-south" cooperation initiatives, will be purely on a voluntary basis. This resolves a key sticking point: if richer, developing economies like China should assume a larger part of the burden.

Also in the core text, language from the most robust of three sets of options from the previous draft has been adopted saying the finance must represent a "progression" beyond the "previous floor" of \\$100bn/yr that will be assessed against "short term" quantified goals. There is also clear language around the need for transparency and common rules in reporting the levels of such finance.

If adopted, these provisions will represent a victory for developing countries, which have long complained that the \\$100bn/yr promised at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 has been slow to materialise.

That said, the US and EU were reportedly pushing for a provision placing an obligation on rich nations to scale up climate finance provision from \\$100bn/yr in 2020, to be moved from the core agreement to the decision text to give less legal force.

In the section outlining some parameters for an international mechanism to deal with climate-related losses and damages, the US inserted a clause that will invalidate any claims to liability or compensation. This is considered contentious and drew strong opposition from developing countries, especially the most vulnerable states such as low-lying islands.