Paris Negotiators Hunker Down For Long Night Of Informal Negotiations, With Text Expected Saturday
After a long night of difficult talks, negotiators here have dispersed to private meeting rooms to hammer out differences away from the limelight. No big news expected today, but we’ll still keep the LiveBlog going just in case.
11 December 2015 | PARIS | For the first time in all the years we’ve been covering the climate talks, everyone seems happy with the draft negotiating text of the Paris Patchwork Climate Accord – a historical agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally by letting individual countries and blocks of countries meet the challenge in their own way, within the bounds of a framework being hammered out here.
For efforts that aim to slow climate change by saving forests and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), the focus now is on general rules regarding market mechanisms and transparency. The big mews last night on the market front was the addition of text that makes it clear that countries can’t double-count emission-reductions.
“Emission reductions resulting from this mechanism shall not be used to demonstrate achievement of the host Party’s [Climate Action Plan], if used by another Party to demonstrate achievement of its [Climate Action Plan],” the text now says – and basically means that, if one country sells an offset to another country, then the buying country can factor that emission-reduction into its greenhouse-gas inventory, but the selling country no longer can.
By moving out of the limelight, negotiators are able to work out compromise language they can’t achieve when grandstanding in public.
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