MITIGATION WORK PROGRAMME: ‘FRUSTRATION’

The Bonn interim negotiations also discuss how to advance the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) launched in Sharm el-Sheikh a year and a half ago to push ambition on emissions reductions after the failure to update National Climate Plans (NDCs) from Glasgow onwards. The work of the MWP is of particular relevance to the negotiation process because it represents, in a complementary and synergetic way with the processes of updating the NDCs (every 5 years) and the Global Stocktake (every 5 years, two before the NDCs), what is in fact the only opportunity to discuss mitigation, the great absentee of the last two years of negotiations, on an ongoing basis. But how is this work progressing, what is being discussed?

According to the mandate received through paragraph 27 of the final decision of the Sharm el-Sheikh COP, the Work Programme was created to ‘increase the scale of ambition and implementation (of policies) on mitigation in this crucial decade’ […] ‘so as to be complementary to the Global Stocktake process’. At the subsequent Dubai COP, the mandate was more clearly defined, indicating that the Work Programme should continue its work through 2026, with at least two events per year in the form of ‘dialogues’ between countries to share ideas and best practices to push for rapid reductions in climate emissions.

The strong political polarisation witnessed over the past three years in the climate negotiations has led to a great deal of media and political attention on the legitimate demands of developing countries for aid and support through serious commitments in climate finance after years of broken promises by the big incumbent emitters. 

This focus on climate finance, a topic on which any possible progress has become a conditio sine qua non for any other debate or negotiation on other tables, has marginalised – due to the very complicated geopolitical and energy scenario from February 2022 onwards – the key issue of reducing climate-changing emissions under the Paris Agreement, relegated to the other two strands: the Global Stocktake (in retrospective terms and giving indications for the future) and the updating of the NDCs (in terms of national targets).

The Global Stocktake, however, is precisely discussed and elaborated every 5 years, the NDCs with the same update cycle but drafted in individual ministries, outside the negotiation rooms, far from the international debate. So what do countries do to ‘upscale ambition’ during regular negotiations?

‘Frustration’

Frustration is the word of choice from an experienced European negotiator, with whom we had the pleasure of having a chat on Tuesday before the negotiating session, which we then followed in full. The work of the MWP is not moving forward, and many countries are explicitly reluctant with respect to any proposal to go beyond vague “dialogues” and exchange of best practices, proposals they say are alien to the mandate they received with the Sharm el-Sheikh decision. In short, a pattern already seen in past years is repeated, whereby any (European) attempt to push forward the global ambition toward new emissions targets meets a political wall of Chinese and Arab invoice. In fact, it is no coincidence that those hindering the widening and strengthening of the process are mainly the delegations of Beijing, reluctant to have conditions dictated by Brussels and allies, and Riyadh, which sees in a negotiation aimed at going beyond the literal mandate of COP27 a further threat to its own exports, especially after the “transition away” badly swallowed in Dubai.

The negotiating group AILAC, the alliance of Latin American and Caribbean countries, through the delegation of Honduras made it clear that it would instead be necessary to understand that “complementarity” evoked by the COP27 decision according to an expansive reading, linking the work of the MWP precisely to the results of the first Global Stocktake (which gave quite clear indications to countries, for example, the need for the exit from fossil fuels in the coming years) and to the drafting, therefore, of the new NDCs.

Totally opposite is the view of the Saudis, who by “complementary” process mean parallel work, neither overlapping nor too connected, simply confined to the original mandate.

“A blank page”

“We cannot present ourselves in Baku with a blank page in our hands,” said the delegate from the state of Samoa. In what sense? As of today, with only a whisker away from the end of negotiations on this issue (in fact, the last meeting before Baku will be held on Wednesday), there is no consensus on how to close the session. The co-facilitators of the Work Program on Monday proposed to draw up a draft “informal note” in which to record the positions of all countries as expressed in these two weeks of work. This proposal has found firm opposition from China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait, Egypt, Qatar, and South Africa, who are instead calling for the negotiations to be closed with, at most, a “procedural note” referring precisely to the discussion on how to read the original MWP mandate. The discussion in the room was decidedly heated, with very heartfelt speeches from Samoa, Cook Islands, and Gambia, who were calling for strong steps forward in Bonn in light of the growing urgency for better work, planning, and policies on global emissions reductions.

Some delegates (Honduras, Switzerland) even asked for additional working sessions in the coming months, and additional intermediaries to be made even remotely, in order to keep the work going. On the finale then chilled the room was the intervention of the Kuwait delegate who, responding precisely to The Gambia, said that “the (climate) urgency certainly cannot impose new targets on us”. In the more composed words of the South African delegate, “the MWP is not the panacea of climate action, we already deal with the emissions problem through NDCs.”

Procedural excuses

It is clear that no breakthrough may come on mitigation without, in parallel, satisfactory developments on the tables dealing with climate finance.

The discussion in the room about whether to postpone the discussion to Baku with an informal note or with a procedural note reflects the willingness on the part of many developing countries, especially the large emitters and exporters of oil and gas, to waste time and do nothing more than the minimum required. The fear, for these countries, is that the MWP participatory process may result in proposals for formal decisions for the next COP, perhaps including new targets: a hypothesis, they say, to be avoided and extraneous, precisely, to the mandate received and, if anything, to be analyzed at the national level through the NDCs.

From Paris to the quid pro quo

The spirit under which the Paris Agreement was christened nine years ago was that of a new, broadened collaboration of all countries in the climate effort, from the bottom up, regardless of their economic and social starting points, and in any case according to the inviolable principle of everyone’s historical responsibilities.

Nearly a decade since Paris we are now witnessing (actually, since the closing plenary in Glasgow in 2021) what many see as a step backward in the quality of multilateral relations, with the return of pre-Paris divisions between rich and poor countries in the discussions, given the chronic failure of Western efforts to secure what was promised to the rest of the world in terms of financial support, and the consequent response in terms of obstructionism on every other issue. 

Halfway between the just and shared reasons of the majority of developing countries asking for financial and know-how support and a certain ambitious Western rigidity in (attempting to) demand more ambition and transparency for all, a small but fierce group of countries fond of their oil and gas sectors that exploit their formal membership of the developing world to condition the negotiations according to geopolitically questionable criteria and distance it from the Paris objective. Fossil fuel tightrope walkers balancing the middle of the scales, between do’s and don’ts.

The MWP co-facilitators will send a draft informal note to the delegates on Wednesday, to be considered for possible adoption in the last useful working hour, an unlikely scenario given the climate in the room.

By Jacopo Bencini, European and Multilateral Climate Policy Advisor

Cover image: photo by Jacopo Bencini