GG News Bureau
New Delhi, 19th Nov. The UN climate talks have been extended by one day in an attempt to break the impasse over key issues such as the mitigation work program, loss and damage, and climate finance.
Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said COP27 was supposed to wrap up on Friday but has been “extended by a day to attempt to take the ongoing negotiations to a logical end”.
Providing an update on the negotiations in a blog post, he said a lot of issues, including the mitigation work program, the global goal on adaptation, loss and damage, and climate finance are being negotiated as they remain contentious.
“COP is a party-driven process and hence consensus on key issues is vital to the process. The extension is an attempt towards achieving just that,” he said.
In an effort to break the impasse, European Union chief negotiator Frans Timmermans proposed a plan that linked loss and damage to emission reductions.
The success of the talks is dependent on establishing a fund to address loss and damage, a term used to describe irreparable damage caused by climate-change-related disasters.
In exchange for the fund, the EU proposal requires countries to reach a peak in emissions by 2025 and phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal. The fund’s specifics will be worked out next year.
Another important aspect of the proposal is that big developing countries such as China would be required to contribute to this fund because it would have a “broad funder base.”
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change published a formal draft of the agreement earlier in the day, but it made no mention of India’s call to phase out all fossil fuels.
Experts said it was surprising that the call to phase out all fossil fuels, the COP’s second-most discussed new element, did not find a place in the draft text, despite widespread support from developing countries and some developed countries, including the United States and the European Union.
Some also said it seemed more like a statement from India — a tactical move to deflect criticism over the use of coal — and not its stand.
The draft showed little progress on key issues like adaptation fund replenishment and a new collective quantified goal on climate finance.
It also omits references to the need for rich nations to attain “net-negative carbon emissions by 2030” and their disproportionate consumption of the global carbon budget, something that India and other poor and developing countries have stressed throughout the summit in Egypt.
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