Street demonstrations in Bonn, an historic decarbonization commitment from the G7, a multi-billion-Euro coal divestment decision by Norwegian parliamentarians, and Ikea’s €1-billion climate commitment all created “a backdrop of real world momentum for climate action” as 10 days of negotiations reached their conclusion, The Daily Tck reported yesterday.
But Bonn negotiators only managed to cut the draft text of the eventual Paris agreement from 90 pages to 85, and “the sleepy pace over the last fortnight indicates that the talks are yet to harness the signals from the outside world,” the Tck notes.
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Based on the Bonn results, national governments “look set to ratify a global temperature increase of three or four degrees Celsius,” 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote on grist.org, “that is, to lock us into a kind of slow-motion, guaranteed catastrophe.”
Yet “the minor progress in Bonn could set the stage for speeding up the negotiations,” Wiese writes. “Countries were unanimous in giving a mandate to the co-chairs of the Paris Agreement negotiations to produce a more compact draft agreement to guide talks, and set forward initial ideas about how a Paris package covering finance, mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage should be structured.”
Negotiators must come up with solid implementation plans for their climate commitments—from 2020 on, and in the next five years, the Tck stressed. “Cuts before 2020 must be a clear outcome of the Paris talks. These cuts must be achieved by collaborative action to scale up renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as through developed countries increasing their targets and delivering on their promised $100 billion finance package. This work needs to speed up if the world is to avoid the very worst impacts of climate change.”
