NGO's and concerned citizens will comment and demonstrate from outside COP15 this week
On Saturday 100,000 people marched through the streets of Copenhagen to demand climate action. Most of those people were not registered to participate in the conference, but they came to bear witness to the historic discussions happening inside the Bella Center, the large convention building where the events are held.
The Bella Center itself only holds 15,000 people. This means that less than half of the more than 40,000 COP15 registrants can be let in at any given time, so with ministers, presidents, and their security entourages arriving this week, the amount of NGO observers let into Bella could be less than 1,000 by Friday.
The Conference of the Parties is the culmination of a year’s worth of negotiations about how to continue with the Kyoto Protocol after 2012 and development of other climate mitigation agreements under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Progress has required an intricate combination of scientific understanding, political meetings, and activism. Unfortunately, some of the world’s leading scientists, policy experts, indigenous people representatives, and business representatives will be turned away at the doors of Bella, forced to follow negotiations from their hotel rooms.
“We invite you to join our side event on Friday to the extent that anyone can get access into the Bella Center,” said James Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy during a press conference today. “If not, we’ll see you all on the streets.”
This doesn’t usually happen because 1) never has a COP been so wildly popular and well-attended and 2) never have there been 100 heads-of-state planning to attend.
According to one seasoned negotiator, this COP has been especially crazy compared to others. Civil society has turned up the volume and negotiations are scattered with only four days left. How it typically works:
The most technical aspects of negotiation are finished by Wednesday of the second week of a COP and decision drafts are then submitted to environment ministers for all countries. Past COP decisions include the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Action Plan, which determined how the UNFCCC would decide on a new climate agreement to follow Kyoto Phase I. With three days remaining in a COP the draft language is largely agreed upon but includes certain undecided factors, which are put in brackets. It is then the environment ministers’ job to go through these brackets and find consensus on the options for final text.
In the current texts for a Copenhagen agreement, available from the UNFCCC, there is some bracketed text that lays out clear options for the ministers. For example:
Parties should collectively reduce global emissions by at least [50] [85] [95] per cent from 1990 levels by 2050 and should ensure that global emissions continue to decline thereafter.
However, the text remains extremely vague in many areas. For example, all of these topics are listed in the text as “to be elaborated:”
Various approaches, including opportunities to use markets, to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote, mitigation actions;
Policy approaches and measures to limit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from aviation and marine bunker fuels;
Agricultural programme;
Near-term opportunities for mitigation;
If we are at least to get a “political agreement” out of Copenhagen, these details need to be added in through discussion among ministers and technical staff in the next two days, and then agreed upon by Heads of state on Thursday and Friday. We can expect the Bella Center to be chaotic both inside and out. Civil society will demonstrate in masses outside the Bella Center adding to the resonating messages from the weekend. May those inside remember these voices and the work that got them here, as they remove brackets from text and shape our climate future.
