Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 14 • Number 7 • 24th February 2010

UNFCCC Announces Climate Talks Schedule for 2010

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The secretariat of the UN climate convention announced on Tuesday that the next round of formal talks will be held from 9 to 11 April in Bonn, Germany. Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), described the move as “a quick return to the negotiations.”

“The decision to intensify the negotiating schedule underlines the commitment by governments to move the negotiations forward towards success in Cancun,” de Boer said, referring to the end-of-year meeting at which countries will try again to hammer out a legally binding deal to reduce global emissions of climate-warming gases.

The newly announced April gathering is in addition to the annual June meetings of the convention’s subsidiary bodies, which are responsible for technical, scientific and implementation-related negotiations under the climate convention. Before Tuesday’s announcement, the subsidiary body meetings, which will also be held in Bonn, had been the only opportunity for formal negotiations before ministers gather in Cancun from 29 November to 10 December.

The announcement of the April meeting validates calls from the many developing countries that have stressed that the climate negotiations must continue on two fronts - in discussions for a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as discussions under the Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action to carry forward the so-called ‘Bali Action Plan’, a roadmap set out by ministers at the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in December 2008 that is geared towards developing a new global deal to address climate change.

Negotiations have been underway for nearly three years on the details of a second phase for the Kyoto Protocol, but many rich countries want to abandon the 12-year-old deal and negotiate a new agreement. Meanwhile, developing countries have refused to let go of the Protocol, even as they admit that it is an insufficient tool for addressing climate change. From their perspective, it is their only guarantee of binding emissions cuts from the developed world.

The meetings announced for April and June will continue the negotiations on both tracks.

ICTSD reporting.