Negotiating parties hope to break impasse at Warsaw COP
The session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI, a key UNFCCC working body) at the climate talks in Bonn ended unceremoniously on Friday afternoon without adopting its agenda. At its closing, both observer organisations and Parties expressed their disappointment and dismay over the inability to adopt an agenda for the SBI session despite efforts made by the co-chair. Mexico said the postponing of work because no agenda could be adopted was unacceptable. According to the delegate from Mexico, “The SBI session did open since the agenda was not adopted. This is unacceptable to us” (see SBI update: session at Bonn suspended without adopting agenda).
Many other parties including the chair of SBI, who explicitly declared his disappointment over the turn of events, spoke of the need to now look forward to the Conference of Parties (COP) at Warsaw in Poland later this year and see how the process can be moved ahead to break the impasse. Many parties expressed their solidarity with the chair and their intent to cooperate with other Parties in finding a way forward.
Belarus, one of the Parties that wanted an exclusive agenda item on addressing procedural issues within COP, said, “each of our countries (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan) made attempts to introduce an additional agenda item to analyse the negative trends we have seen and put an end to this which will create the necessary conditions .. towards a new comprehensive agreement. These questions being raised by us has been identified as important by everyone else in the room but after that we find ourselves in a very paradoxical situation. After this unfair approach to our countries, we have reached an impasse in this situation and see how right we are.”
The delegate from Tuvalu called the events of the past two weeks as “supreme irony”; he said “those concerned about the procedure were using these procedures to make things worse. “It's like someone deliberately crashing the car to show seat belts don't work! As someone from the youth constituency pointed out, this is putting egos in front of what is needed of us. Let's hope the same egos don't come to Warsaw again to crash the car again.”
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