Katowice, the catalyst?

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Post by: Anna McGinn

COP24 really kicked off yesterday with the first official meetings of all the negotiating streams. The majority of negotiations fall under three main UNFCCC work areas—the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI), the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA).
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa
commenting on climate finance 

My focus at COP is on climate change adaptation, so I follow a series of negotiations including discussions about the Adaptation Fund which fall under the APA; meetings on the Adaptation Committee which works closely with the Least Developed Countries Expert Group (LEG) (under SBI and SBSTA); and National Adaptation Planning efforts under SBI. Over the next few days, delegates will meet in each of these groups for at least one hour per day to work towards agreement on the specific issues they are tasked to address. Although the COP is two weeks long, most of the negotiations on these topics are supposed to wrap up by the end of week one, so that the overall work areas have time to compile all the decisions across the negotiations. So, there is a lot of work to be done!

Negotiators working under all of these groups (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) have been tasked with a substantial job here at COP24—to finish the rulebook which will detail how countries will implement the political decisions laid out in the Paris Agreement. We have learned that the rulebook draft coming into this COP was over 100 pages long, and much of the text is in brackets which means that not all countries agree on the language within the brackets. Their job over the next week and a half is to bring this rulebook from the current draft to a final product—a challenge which almost rivals coming to agreement on the Paris Agreement to begin with. 

At the opening ceremony, one of the speakers said that Katowice will be the catalyst for ambitious implementation of the Paris Agreement. We will see in less than two weeks if countries make this so.

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