CLIMATE FINANCE, TIME IS RUNNING OUT IN BONN
On the first day of the second week of negotiations in Bonn, the Ad Hoc Work Programme on the new global quantitative target in climate finance or, to call it by its English acronym, NCQG (New Collective Quantified Goal) also got underway. Theoretically, 2024 should be the year in which this negotiation comes to an end, to provide the world’s governments with a new climate finance mobilisation target for the neediest countries in the period from 2025 onwards. But after a few hours in the room on Monday afternoon in Bonn, we can assure you that we are still far from the goal.
In theory, Monday afternoon’s meeting was to be the penultimate one before COP29, the next UN climate conference in November in Azerbaijan. Given the state of play this is quite worrying, even though on the same afternoon the head of Azerbaijan’s delegation promised in a speech here in Bonn that the Baku COP would deliver a ‘fair and ambitious’ agreement on the next global climate finance target. Attempts to raise an ambition that we do not perceive in the room to date.
On Monday morning, in fact, we had breakfast by pure chance with a group of delegates who were discussing among themselves the illegibility of the current negotiating draft, 35 pages long and structured in paragraphs juxtaposed without any apparent criteria (according to the delegates at the table). This text, unlike the usual drafts that come out on negotiating nights, is not a draft decision but an ‘input paper’ yet to be finalised in detail, sent by the chairs of the Work Programme.
But what does this paper contain? Basically, a series of considerations expressed over the past year by the main negotiating groups, amalgamated and lined up in a single text while waiting for the negotiations to resolve the most problematic parts paragraph by paragraph. Again in theory, the Bonn commitments should produce the actual negotiating draft on which the work in Baku will then start in November.
In the text circulated among the delegations, from what we have glimpsed, the following key issues are addressed: adherence to the Paris Agreement, adequate access for all to mobilised finance (including through facilitated instruments), time and intermediate deadlines, transparency and reporting on financial flows; some key principles such as the need for only new resources mobilised for each new year to be counted without additionality or double counting and, last but not least, that these funds are then available to all developing countries (and thus with national plans, NDCs, conditional on external aid) and not only to the most fragile ones. On all these points, we have witnessed a broad and rich debate, with often overlapping or unexpected positions among the various negotiating groups and individual countries. For example, there was an interesting debate within the developing country groups about the possibility of working ‘by levels’ rather than towards a single quantitative target.
One theme that has emerged clearly is precisely that of adherence to the Paris Agreement. Not only as textual citations and references in the draft under construction, but also in contrast to some passages – present in the current text – that instead explicitly refer to both the 2015 Agreement and the 1992 Framework Convention, or only to the Framework Convention. A confusing and disjointed situation from a legal point of view, given that in 2015 the Paris Agreement (although adopted under the Convention), set new criteria for participation in the global climate effort, also involving developing countries that can contribute to policies and finance, such as India and China to name the two most populous. The problem, therefore, of the correct identification of the legal frame of reference affects participation in terms of formal accountability – from this point of view, however, the issue should be easy to solve, since the Working Group operates under the mandate of the Paris Agreement (CMA, in jargon) and is therefore capable of producing drafts, texts, decisions under that mandate and not others.
What is missing, in any case, is the ‘quantum’. Even in English-language negotiations, the Latin term is used to denote the figure, the number, we might say. The new global quantum target, a new target-number capable of replacing, to the minimal satisfaction of all delegations, the outdated and badly aged target of 100 billion dollars per year by 2020, only reached in 2022. The quantum is missing, and many countries have begun to point out that it is precisely this lack that is holding up the rest of the negotiations – on this, Egypt, a fairly visible and influential country in the negotiations after the unexpected results of the Sharm el-Sheikh COP two years ago, has spoken out very strongly.
The fact that there is no discussion in the room on the quantum makes it clear that there is still a lot going on behind the scenes to get to, or at least get close to, an acceptable range in which a quantum proposal can fit. It is clear, in fact, that when a symbolic figure arrives on the negotiating table, the discussion will take a completely different turn, reducing the other – albeit important – issues to collateral technicalities. But a few months before COP29, the cards are still all covered and there are not, it seems, the political conditions for an agreement. Perhaps not even for a minimally ‘prepared’ discussion.
At the end of the session, which lasted a whole afternoon, still 20 countries were on the speaking list and were postponed to the next meeting. We are undoubtedly still in an interlocutory phase and very, very far from the goal.
By Jacopo Bencini, European and Multilateral Climate Policy Advisor
Cover image: E3G