Three months after the landmark agreement on a road map towards
strengthened international action on climate change reached in Bali,
Indonesia, the next round of negotiations shifts to the neighboring
country of Thailand and its capital, Bangkok. The talks are taking
place
between 31 March to 4 April 2008 at the United Nations Conference Centre
(UNCC) of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
(ESCAP).
The climate change talks in Bangkok will convene sessions of both the Ad
hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention
(first session) and the Ad hoc Working Group on further Commitments for
Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (first part of the fifth
session), during which Parties need to advance the Bali Road Map agreed
last December.
Parties agreed at Bali to formally launch negotiations on enabling the
full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention. These
negotiations need to conclude in an agreed outcome by the end of 2009.
The challenge is to design a future agreement that will successfully
halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10-15 years,
dramatically cut back emissions by 2050, and do so in a way that is
economically viable and politically equitable worldwide.
The Bangkok meeting of the Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action
under the Convention needs to map out how to tackle this enormous
challenge and begin by establishing without delay a clear work programme
for the next two years.
Concretely, Parties meeting in Bangkok will identify the areas that need
to be further clarified as well as the issues where work needs to be
done and in what order that should happen. They will also establish what
input is needed from the UN at large, the business sector and others,
and how this will be integrated into the overall work plan.
The issues that the new Working Group needs to address were clearly
defined at Bali. In addition to the goal of achieving agreement on
long-term global action, work on on-going issues such as deforestation
and technology needs to be advanced.
The Kyoto Protocol AWG, mandated in 2005 to
consider future commitments for Annex I Parties, will initiate the
second step of its work programme; in particular, the analysis of
possible means available to Annex I Parties to reach their emission
reduction targets. It will provide an informal setting for input from
experts and for Parties to present their views on the issues related to
the different means, as well as on how to enhance their effectiveness
and contribution to sustainable development. Issues under consideration
include emissions trading and the project based mechanisms, land use,
land-use change and forestry, greenhouse gases, sectors and source
categories to be covered, and possible approaches targeting sectoral
emissions. These themes will be addressed in an in-session thematic
workshop.
For both groups, work will continue at the twenty-eighth session of the
Subsidiary Bodies to be held in Bonn in June. After that, both groups
will reconvene at a week-long intersessional meeting at the end of
August before meeting again at the fourteenth session of the Conference
of the Parties and the fourth session of the Conference of the Parties
serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in Poland in
December.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
03/31/2008 at 12:00AM