Thursday, June 3, 2010
The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 16) negotiations continued this week in Bonn, Germany. The 4,500 attendees include government delegates from 182 governments, representatives from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions. COP 16 is scheduled to take place November 29 – December 10, 2010 in Cancún, Mexico.
Luis Alfonso de Alba, Mexico’s special representative for climate change, told Reuters, “Mexico does not want to raise false expectations but we certainly are ambitious”. He criticised the outgoing head of the U.N.’s climate secretariat, Yvo de Boer, and the European Union’s climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard for their scepticism.
Negotiating under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the next negotiating session is scheduled to take place in August, followed by another, final one-week intersessional meeting, before Cancún. The talks were designed to discuss issues that were not resolved at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen.
The two working groups are the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex (AWG-KP). These groups were specifically designed to negotiate a long-term response to climate change.
The AWG-LCA is the negotiating group tasked to deliver a new “COP16 negotiative text” ahead of the June negotiating session. The AWG-KP is to focus on emissions reduction commitments for the 37 industrialised countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol for the period beyond 2012.
There are also two UNFCCC standing committees meetings, the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI).
The conference is officially referred to as the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 6th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties (CMP 6) to the Kyoto Protocol.