‘Planet at a Crossroads’: Climate Summit Makes Progress but Leaves Much to Do

The UN negotiations in Bonn lay the groundwork for implementing the landmark Paris deal, but tough decisions lay ahead.

The world’s nations were confident they were making important progress in turning continued political commitment into real world action, as the global climate change summit in Bonn was drawing to a close on Friday.

The UN talks were tasked with the vital, if unglamorous, task of converting the unprecedented global agreement sealed in Paris in 2015 from a symbolic moment into a set of rules by which nations can combine to defeat global warming.  Currently, the world is on track for at least 3C of global warming – a catastrophic outcome that would lead to severe impacts around the world.
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The Paris rulebook, which must be finalized by the end of 2018, now has a skeleton: a set of headings relating to how action on emissions is reported and monitored.  Nations have also fleshed this out with suggested detailed texts, but these are often contradictory and will need to be resolved next year.  “The worst outcome would have been to end up with empty pages, but that is not going to happen,” said a German negotiator.

One issue that did flare up during talks was the action being taken by rich nations before the Paris deal kicks in in 2020.  Developing nations argued not enough is being done and, with the UN climate negotiations running largely on trust, the issue became unexpectedly serious before being defused by commitments to a “stocktake” of action in 2018 and 2019.

Read more at ‘Planet at a Crossroads’:  Climate Summit Makes Progress but Leaves Much to Do