COP21 Day 4: Articles, Paragraphs, Options, and Brackets

As I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, country delegations are currently revising the draft agreement proposed by the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This revised text is to be finalized by the end of this week so that it can be taken to the ministerial level and the final round of negotiations can begin. 

Yesterday and today, I’ve sat in on meetings dealing with revisions to the mitigation and finance sections of the agreement, and I wanted to give you a clearer picture of what these meetings and the agreement revision process are like.

Delegates settle in for another round of text revisions.

To start, the text is broken down thematically and spin-off groups are formed to treat these different areas of the text. For example, there are spin-offs dealing with Mitigation (Article 3), Adaptation and Loss and Damage (Articles 4 and 5), and Finance (Article 6). These sections cover a number of paragraphs of the Agreement and Decision texts – more than can be dealt with efficiently in the large spin-off group. The spin-off, therefore, meets to identify sticking points in the text and then breaks off into informal meetings to deal with these issues individually. The spin-off then reconvenes, each informal group provides an update, and the text is revised accordingly. 

Screens like this one are scattered throughout the Conference Center so delegates can follow
what spin-offs and informal meetings are happening when and where. With the impromptu nature
  of some of these meetings, they are often not on the official agenda.

What does the text look like after all of these revisions? Much like with spring cleaning, to clean up a mess, you first have to make a mess. As spin-offs are integrating feedback, different possible phrasing is added in brackets. When there are differences of opinion for entire paragraphs, several different options are provided. The goal is then to consolidate these different options and remove brackets as much as possible. As you might imagine, delegates are more successful at this in some sections than others. In some cases, a delegation (or a group of delegations) is able to put forward a “bridging proposal” that merges and simplifies the different options. And in other cases – as several delegates pointed out in one of the spin-offs today – you reach a point when a drafting group is no longer able to progress until a discussion is made at the political level.

Delegates are working tirelessly on revising this text, but it is a long and complicated process. And there are a lot of options and brackets left that countries are going to have to weed through over the next eight days.