On Friday, 13 February, a key milestone towards a new agreement on climate change was reached in Geneva following seven days of negotiations by over 190 countries: the Lima Draft adopted in December was transformed into the negotiating text that will form the basis for discussion at the June session in Bonn. This text, which now runs to 86 pages, covers the options and ideas for the new agreement, including substantive content on mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, and capacity-building. With that, governments have achieved their primary objective for this session, but negotiations are far from done.
The Geneva conference was the first of several meetings in preparation for the Paris Climate Change Conference that will be held in December 2015. The Paris Conference is mandated to adopt “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all parties,” which will be implemented from 2020 onwards, once the Kyoto Protocol expires. The starting point of the talks was the outcome of December’s Lima conference that delivered the Lima Call for Climate Action, which includes a draft negotiating text.
As for the negotiation text, a plan to completely phase out fossil fuel emissions features prominently in the text, thanks to a growing number of governments now backing this long-term goal. The issue of whether developing nations should be allowed to continue using fossil fuels in order to fuel economic growth, and whether developed nations are obligated to give financial aid to ease the process, is a divide that is however repeatedly reflected in the draft.