The climate summit: This is what they are negotiating about
– The mood is mixed.
This is what Henrik Hallgrim Eriksen, Norway’s chief negotiator at the COP26 climate summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow, says.
The practical framework has been demanding. As many as 25,000 people are accredited to the climate conference, but Glasgow has only 15,000 hotels, and the first days have been marked by both train chaos and long queues at the conference center – not to mention the rat invasion in the city and the rubbish that has piled up in the streets. of strike.
But for Eriksen and his colleagues, the focus is on a completely different issue. The climate negotiators have over a hundred mandates to deliver on.
– It naturally leads to a lot of bad mood when people do not make it to their meetings and have to stand in line for a long time, many after traveling for a long time, Eriksen says by phone from Glasgow.
– But it seems as if the countries are busy getting the work done, he says.
Here are some of the key issues facing the dealers’ table:
1.5 degrees
A major theme in Glasgow is the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.
The British hosts have had as a slogan for the summit that the 1.5-degree goal must be “kept alive”, and the hope is that the climate negotiations will culminate in a statement that promises this goal.
But it is uncertain how binding the wording of the statement will be.
– There are many opinions here, and all countries must become one. So this is one of the themes that remains challenging, says Eriksen.
At the same time, the gap is large. The UN’s own calculations show that the globe is on its way to a warming of 2.7 degrees with the climate promises given so far.
The goal of the Paris Agreement is that heating should be kept «well below» 2 degrees and preferably limited to 1.5.
Reporting tables
The discussions about the 1.5-degree target is one of the issues that has received the most attention during the climate summit, which lasts until Friday 12 November.
But the negotiations are also about issues that largely go under the public radar. One such issue is the standard reporting tables.
Eriksen explains that already at the climate summit in Katowice in Poland in 2018, agreement was reached on the regulations for reporting. These regulations are common to all countries, but in some areas provide flexibility to poor countries that rich countries do not get.
What is now being negotiated are the detailed tables and forms that are to be used in the reporting.
– It’s very technical. But it also opens up for rematch, says Eriksen.
The big question is whether one will succeed in reaching agreement on a system that is common to all, and avoid separate reporting systems for industrialized and developing countries.
Norway’s position in the negotiations that such a split has been avoided.
Common time frames
Another question is what time frame one should have for the national climate goals that apply to the UN.
The Paris Agreement stipulates that all countries must report updated national targets every five years. But the agreement does not say anything directly about what time frame the climate goals should have, and practices have varied. While the EU and Norway have set targets for 2030, countries such as the USA, Brazil and South Africa have set targets for 2025.
The big question now is whether a common system should be introduced.
As NTB understands, in that case it is most likely with five years as a common framework.
Article 6
Perhaps the biggest topic of negotiation, however, is the market mechanism described in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Detailed rules are still lacking here, and negotiations have already failed twice – first in Katowice in 2018 and then in Madrid in 2019.
The negotiations on the Article 6 rules will also be a fiery test for Climate and Environment Minister Espen Barth Eide (Labor Party), who has been given a key role in organizing these negotiations together with Singapore’s Environment Minister Grace Fu.
One of the things that is still missing is a central mechanism for buying and selling emission cuts between countries. This intended “shop” for quota trading is described in Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. But the store cannot open its doors until the world community has elected a board and decided which rules will apply.
Another question is what to do with quotas that are left over from the time before 2020, when the Kyoto Protocol applied. The ordinary CDM quotas from the Kyoto era have gained a very bad reputation over the years.
At the same time, there are difficult discussions about how the revenue from quota sales should be used.
Cautious optimism
The coming days are the technical negotiations, which are on the agenda in Glasgow, after a grand opening on Monday and Tuesday in which heads of state and government from around the world attended. Then the discussions will be lifted to the political level again next week.
When the world leaders thanked him on Tuesday afternoon, in the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he is then due to «cautious optimism».
Judgment Day is still ticking. But we have bomb technicians on site and they have started cutting wires. I just want it to be the right wires, he said.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Labor Party) also calls himself a cautious optimist. He says that he experienced a will and a seriousness in Glasgow that, according to Støre, was not seen at the climate summits in Paris in 2015 and in Copenhagen in 2009.
– So I see it at least the reason for a cautious optimism that government leaders now deliver something that means something, says Støre to NTB.