‘IMPROMPTU HUDDLES’: FOG OVER ARTICLE 6 OF THE PARIS AGREEMENT
The day of negotiations on Wednesday 12 June was very, very tiring. Accomplicated by the ambitious goal of closing by the evening the package of texts to be brought to the final plenary on Thursday, and then to the COP29 in Baku, on the tricky Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, an eternal unresolved issue of the last decade. The need to close with a ready text on all three strands of work (6.2, bilateral agreements between countries, 6.4, global emissions credit trading system and 6.8, non-market approaches) came at the end of a week that saw a surprising acceleration in this specific negotiation, thanks to the Azerbaijani presidency’s declaration of intent at the next COP29 to close the ‘package’ of decisions on Article 6 by the end of the year, in Baku, together with the other expected decisions on climate finance.
But what is Article 6 about and why has Wednesday been so slow, so muddled? We have often written about Article 6 in our COP Bulletin, and today we could summarise it as follows: Article 6 regulates, under the new governance of the Paris Agreement for the period 2020-2100, bilateral and multilateral trade between countries in emission credits, according to market and non-market criteria. To emission credits – i.e. a credit transferred from one country to another for reduced emissions through a project or financing, thus contributing to the climate plans (NDCs) of one of the two nations involved – we could and indeed should here add credits for absorbed emissions, now largely part of the reasoning and decisions of recent years, as well as the controversial credits for avoided emissions. Precisely avoided emissions, coupled with the concept of ‘conservation enhancement’ on Wednesday, were at the centre of the debate in the room, given their difficult accountability and, according to many, dubious ethicality. We had already discussed this during COP28 and you can find useful information in our analysis at the time.
Basically, hardly anyone wants to talk about avoided emissions under Article 6. Yet in reality, many private operators have already made them a well-sellable market product and the focus of a fast-growing sector, in the absence of any real regulation. A whole day was spent discussing them in Bonn, deciding whether to aim – via negotiating texts – for their gradual inclusion in ITMOs, i.e. in the mitigation achievements transferred from one country to another (i.e. in the relevant credits), and thus whether to make them count, when organised by the public, as achievements under national climate plans (NDCs), or not. A majority of countries still reject this approach, wanting rather to insist on emissions reductions, which are certainly easier to count and more ethically acceptable.
In the words of a European negotiator who has asked to remain anonymous, in fact, ‘any inclusion of avoided emissions, which are impossible to count today in the absence of clear scientific and time reference bases, in the development of national plans could destroy any residual credibility of the Paris Agreement on mitigation’, which would then ‘become a mere wish list updated every now and then, with no real reductions in CO2 concentration’. In other words, at this stage of urgency, it would be important to work on reducing existing emissions, not counting the ones we might not be producing anyway, while we get on with the others.
The discussion in the two sessions on Article 6.2 and Article 6.4 was so chaotic that the facilitators had to resort to ‘huddles’, i.e. instructing delegates to take short informal breaks in the room to discuss verbally, in groups or otherwise, and then restart the session when an agreement in principle was announced. In practice, additional informal – informal sessions, organised on the spur of the moment in view of the expiry of the – now extra – time in which the game was being played. At the end of the session on Article 6.4, the huddle practically created itself when, around dinnertime, one of the two co-facilitators raised his hands in the face of the chaos emerging from the various positions in the room, effectively creating a situation that our friends at CAN Europe masterfully reported in their daily report as ‘impromptu huddle’.
At the end of the two sessions, no consensus was reached on the entirety of the two texts, which were re-sent to the facilitators of the concluding plenary entirely covered by brackets, i.e. without any formula having in fact been adopted beforehand.
Not least, the Ukrainian delegate polemicised the prospect of continuing work on the topic with further interim sessions before Baku, not because of the idea per se but because of the need to have hybrid meetings so as to allow their participation given the obvious logistical difficulties: an obvious provocation aimed at the delegates of the Russian Federation sitting a few seats away who had instead declared themselves in favour of negotiations only in the presence – in turn a provocation, if you like, given the major problems with visas that that same delegation had to get to Germany for the interims in recent days.
Procedural and political quibbles, in short, which have, however, distanced the possibility of closing these intermediate negotiations with a consensus on the two main texts relating to Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a consensus that only a few hours ago seemed much closer. Overall, however, we cannot but note as a positive fact the general dissatisfaction among the delegations with any attempt to include avoided emissions in the measures countable under the Agreement. It will be interesting to see which text, if any, may end up in plenary in the coming hours.
By Jacopo Bencini, European and Multilateral Climate Policy Advisor
Cover image: photo by Jacopo Bencini