The most prominent of the issue during the negotiations was the workshop by the Parties in relation to their obligations and efforts towards emission reductions. It must be acknowledged that the usual suspects, like Canada, and USA presented their efforts. While the other parties like the Denmark, Croatia actually made efforts to explain their actions domestically, the countries like the Canada and USA actually did not go in that way. Especially Canada, who actually fudged the reporting in their national communications. In its presentation it did not included the tar sands related data, and they have not reported it. Their delegation actually painted a picture that they are going to meet the Kyoto Targets in time. This shows that the countries can actually play with the rules of the game and yet can be out of the hook.
For US it was a bit different case. The workshop was meant for sharing of information. And the US negotiator actually put up slides which is US wish-list of things they would have loved to have from the system on the rules. IT did not capture the focus of the mitigation workshop at all and yet they got of the board. There were no information as to how they are going to meet their already declared targets, their sectors contributing to the targets, and finally the EU questioned the US about their willingness to abide by the comparability of efforts in terms of emission reductions. The focus of the discussion regarding US presentation was to actually point out to them the types of flaws that they are using in a soft way. In a nutshell, the US behaviour was utter mockery of the workshop, as it totally disregarded the objective of the workshop.
The technology group rather did constructive progress on the informal group. As per the information received from the parties, it was understood that the meetings were based on specific questions posed by the Facilitator. They have agreed to progress on the basis on the step approach. Fist they will be developing the ToRs of the CTCN, and subsequently look into the funding question, and finally the interlinkages. In this regard there are some important sub-questions. First, the funding has to be ideally for the three types of work i.e. this will be for immediate requirements, for making the TEC and CTCN functional, for core funding of the TEC and CTCN, and finally the funding of the activities. In none of these issues there were not major disagreements, but it is also true that they could not agree to a single solution as well. Further, the parties were converging on the idea of functions the CTCN needs to carry out, but they cannot develop the ToRs as they realised that the issue is more complex than they have thought off.
It was a bit of backward movement of the finance spin off group was talking about. They actually started discussing the agenda of the spin-off group. This is a reflection of what happened in Bangkok, on a smaller scale. And finally the chair was able to come to a compromise situation. Basically the spin off groups discussed about the modalities of the finance mechanism including the sources of finances. However, they are yet to get into that level.
The SBSTA today started discussion on the items rather than the agenda after being held up for the last four days. In all of these major groups, the problem that the G77 Chair has identified is the fact that the fight over agenda tantamount to the divergence from the Convention as well as they agenda did not consider how the CBDR can be made part of the whole process, and can be engraved in these SBs discussion.
The other important discussion took place here in Bonn was the presentation of the budget of the UNFCCC. The Executive Secretary iterated that the inventory money of the secretariat has dried up and therefore, the secretariat will not be able to bear the cost of organising another extra session between now and Durban. This can be cutting in two ways, either there is not session, or there is session, but the Chair wants to keep it with her, just to make the negotiators work and make substantial progress. The clear policy should have been the focus of the delegates on the content and not stalling the process once more.
Finally we have had two good meetings took place on the question of the larger political issues. Securing future of the KP, through the CP2. This has been the central of all discussions thus far. So the talks were about how there is going to be package. The CAN has prepared its Durban Expectations Paper here during 9th June 2011. The intervention from the parties were very helpful for developing further positions around this. However, the central message is that there has to be KP CP2, and to achieve this there are locked-step movements to be made on the elements of LCA.
