Blog Posts: COP-17 Durban

In the recent UN climate negotiations (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa, the issue of transparency of climate finance appeared in a variety of contexts in the final agreement on long-term cooperative action. From the sections on reporting and review for developed and developing countries, to the Standing Committee, to the registry, and to fast-start finance, making sense of this multitude of provisions on climate finance transparency is a challenge.

The UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa, concluded over the weekend with a consensus to negotiate an agreement that will include all major emitters of warming gases.

Jennifer Morgan, Edward Cameron, and our team of climate experts look back on the key decisions from Durban and give a first take on their implications for global efforts to tackle climate change.

At the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP-17) in Durban – “the longest COP ever” -- Parties agreed to establish an Ad Hoc Working Group on a Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (AWG-DP). The AWG-DP has the mandate to develop “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties.”

I touched down in Durban, South Africa, on Sunday night met by a cool tropical breeze. Since I arrived in this large port city, I’ve been thinking about Africa, which serves as a powerful backdrop for this year’s annual climate conference. Like many places I’ve visited, especially among developing countries, there is great diversity to the surroundings. The convention center is large and modern. Nearby you find industrial buildings, shopping malls, and hotels – and lots of people in a city pulsating with life.

This post was written in collaboration with Kevin McCall.

Despite the urgency of the climate challenge, emissions are still on the rise, and countries’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions still fall short, in aggregate, of what science suggests is necessary.

So what more can we do to bridge this ambition gap?

Three years ago, I attended a performance of Athol Fugard’s powerful play “My Children! My Africa!” Set in South Africa at the end of apartheid, the play deals with a conflict over the most effective means to address a great injustice. Throughout the play, there are signs of progress but it’s slow and it’s hard-won. The protagonists struggle to reconcile the growing demand for urgent change with the need to show patience with a fragile process. Sound familiar?

Delegates from around the world attending the UN climate conference in South Africa got two unfortunate, but timely reminders this week of what is at stake.

As the climate negotiations open in Durban, we find a peculiar paradox. While expectations for the talks remain quite low, the urgency is very high. This dynamic is even more pronounced in the United States, where climate change continues to be largely ignored in political circles; except, that is, when the science is under attack. Meanwhile study after study show that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise as the climate crisis worsens.

The first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end in 2012, and the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have yet to reach an “agreed outcome” to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions post-2012. This impasse raises the prospect that in a year’s time – even as the scientific evidence mounts that human impact on the climate system is veering out of control – there will be no internationally agreed legally binding commitments regulating greenhouse gas emissions.