The first week of negotiations at the climate change conference was ending the way it has always been — without any early breakthroughs, having seen ugly battles on contentious issues, and with the hope that all outstanding issues will get resolved in time in the second week for an agreement to emerge.
The only progress made in the first four days of talks here in Paris was that the draft negotiating text, which was 55-page long while coming into this conference, has been trimmed down to 38 pages in the latest version released Friday morning. Significant as it looks, the contentious issues remain as they were, with all the options suggested by various countries, being captured in square brackets.
“I think we have made reasonably good progress, if you look at how things have moved in earlier conferences. In the next couple of days, we should be able to narrow down the differences on some other issues as well,” said Ajay Mathur, one of India’s negotiators.
Mathur was possibly referring to the 2009 Copenhagen conference, the last time the world had taken a shot at finalising a global climate change agreement, when the draft negotiating text at the end of the first week was more than 100 pages.
US negotiator Todd Stern said the latest draft text showed that some good work had been going on behind the scenes.
Negotiators continued to be huddled in small informal groups, contact groups, spin-off groups, sub-groups — different names are used and probably have different significance — on Friday as well. On Saturday morning, another version of the draft text is likely to emerge and that will become the basis for formal negotiations to begin.
In the formal negotiations from Saturday, all the country representatives will sit in a large room and go through the draft text word by word, line by line, to approve what they agree on and reject the others. Next week, ministers will arrive here for the high-level segment to take the big decisions for which political capital is required.
With all the action happening behind the scenes, the small island countries and least developed countries, two different groupings, reopened their demand that the world should strive for keeping the global average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degree Celsius, not 2 degrees.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Science and Environment, an observer organisation, accused the developed nations of carrying out a “well-orchestrated campaign” against India by raking up its plans for continued use of coal for electricity generation.
