The UN climate summit, which tool place in Germany this month, saw slow but steady progress on setting up the rules to implement the Paris Agreement. ARTHUR WYNS provides a comprehensive summary of the technical UN climate talks.
Two weeks, 3,000 diplomats and hundreds of informal notes. During the past two weeks the UN intersessional climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, were set to formulate the “Rules” needed to implement the Paris Agreement. How far did we get, and what still needs to be done? The Ecologist gives you an extensive overview.
Like every year, the ‘intersessional’ UN climate conference takes place halfway between Conferences of the Parties (COPS) in the UNFCCC headquarters in Bonn. Coming from the Fiji-Bonn COP and in the lead-up to the Poland COP, this Bonn session (SB48) had set itself the ambitious goal to hammer out a draft of the Rules that will govern the Paris Agreement, once it enters into force in 2020.
Creating the complete operating manual for the Paris Agreement is no light task, however, and despite steady progress, the Paris Rulebook currently still only consists of hundreds of pages of so-called ‘informal notes’.
Considering the importance of upcoming COP24 in Katowice, Poland, in December, where the Rulebook needs to be finalised and approved on by a global gathering of ministers, negotiators in Bonn decided to add another week of meetings to the equation. Intersessional SB 48.5 is to be held in September in Bangkok.