Cancun

Okay. Let's try this again.

So, Cancun. What does it all mean?

Some very brief background. Climate negotiations are carried out under the UNFCCC framework. That's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The idea is that the Convention represents a regular, rules-bound forum for nations to meet and negotiate over draft texts of agreements relating to climate change. Most meetings produce some sort of text or texts that are formally accepted into the Convention. Sometimes these are minor tweaks; sometimes they've very important milestones, like the Kyoto Protocol. The meetings (and the major treaty texts produced at them) are named for where they take place. Hence "Kyoto Protocol" and last year's "Copenhagen Accord".

The Kyoto Protocol grouped signatories into two groups - basically, developed nations and developing nations. It contained a list of emissions reductions targets, one for each of the developed nations, which they committed to meeting by 2012 (the "first commitment period"). Most of these were baby-steps targets. It did not require developing nations to commit to any emissions reduction targets (though the hope was that eventually, they would, and in the meantime, Kyoto contained mechanisms - ultimately not very successful ones - for funneling aid to developing nations to support emissions reduction and low-carbon growth).

Because the first Kyoto commitment period runs out in 2012, and there are no existing targets beyond that, the goal of Copenhagen, last year, was supposed to be to come up with a new set of targets and get everyone to commit to those targets, creating a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol framework so things could move on. That didn't happen; negotiations fell apart. At the last minute, negotiators tried to salvage things with the Copenhagen Accord, a document which records voluntary pledges from any nations willing to make them, for whatever amount they're willing to promise. About 80% of the world's nations - including many developing nations - have made voluntary pledges at this point. That sounds great, right? The problem is that the Copenhagen Accord is totally non-binding. In fact, it isn't even formally accepted into the UNFCCC framework. (Why? Because the UNFCCC works by consensus, and there was one nation at Copenhagen that refused to consent to accept the Copenhagen Accord. Bolivia, in case you're wondering. They did it again at Cancun.)

So what happened at Cancun? Depending on who you ask, there were three major strands of conversation going on. These were as follows:

1) Incremental Progress on Multiple Related Areas

The establishment line, basically, promulgated by the UN and lots of secondary powers. From this perspective, Cancun was about rebuilding trust between negotiators following Copenhagen. This was to be done not by trying to come up with a major breakthrough or negotiating a new round of emissions targets, but by making solid if limited progress on several subsidiary issues, including deforestation, establishing mechanisms for technology transfer to developing nations, and coming up with a framework for administering the Green Fund promised by developing nations at Copenhagen. Progress on these would rebuild confidence and set the stage for a renewed attack on core problems at the next meeting.

2) Transitioning Away from Kyoto?

However, a more pointed argument quickly blew up when Japan announced at the beginning of the talks that they would not under any circumstances sign on to an extension of Kyoto through a second commitment period. They felt Kyoto was unfair (because it required commitments from developed but not developing nations) and wanted to ditch it entirely and reopen negotiations on a new basis, perhaps the Copenhagen Accord, that didn't assume from the outset that developed countries alone must necessarily make mitigation commitments.

The problem is that for many developing nations, Kyoto has great weight - newspapers' favorite phrase was "totemic status" - and so this caused an unholy fuss. The Japanese were joined by Canada and Russia. They were opposed by most of the developing world, including at least two specific factions. On the one hand, a radical group led by Bolivia that threatened walkouts if Kyoto was abandoned. On the other, China, which also took a strong line against abandoning Kyoto, but suggested that a two-track negotiation was possible, in which Kyoto was renewed, but some kind of second track of negotiation around developing country commitments could take place in parallel.

The Japanese refused to budge throughout most of the meeting, in spite of supposedly quite a lot of diplomatic pressure from pretty much everyone.

3) MRV and Expansion

Basically, this was what the US went in wanting. Two things: first, the establishment of a mechanism for measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of emissions reductions amongst participants (to keep everyone honest). Second, a continued push to expand emissions reduction commitments into the developing world. This second is of course sort of what the Japanese wanted, but the US was being much less specific and aggressive about what form this should take than Japan was.

Who got what they wanted?

Well, (1) was the most obvious winner. Incremental progress was made on all the areas the UN was pushing to make progress on, though personally I think only time will tell how useful the specifics are; for instance, although there is now a UN technology transfer mechanism, it has no formal power to enforce transfer; it acts entirely in the advisory/encouragement/networking/facilitation sphere.

(3) was also a winner. There is now language in the Cancun texts calling for MRV, and China was apparently less obstructionist about this than expected. Moreover, although the US pooh-poohed it and perhaps I'm being naively optimistic, it seems to me that both China and India are thinking hard about ways to commit to reductions in some acceptable way, even if they avoid a formal binding promise. A psychological shift, if you will.

Nobody really got what they wanted on (2). The Cancun texts ended up using ambiguous language that essentially came down on nobody's side, and failed to settle the issue.

Does Cancun provide reason for optimism?

Lately, people ask me this as soon as they hear what I'm researching. This review hasn't changed my initial opinion: basically, the answer is, very very cautious optimism. Cancun didn't end in failure. That's important. And it did take some baby steps forward. That's good. And I do think there are signs of a psychological shift on reduction commitments from the biggest developing players. That's also good. But psychological shifts, even if real, can take years to play out. And the next steps climate negotiations have to take are more like leaps: getting a second round of reduction commitments (under whatever framework works), figuring out where the funding that now has a mechanism will be raised from, seeing if we can really solve tech transfer in practice. The fact that we successfully took baby steps at Cancun is nice, but it doesn't prove we're ready for leaps.

Tomorrow: a quick rundown on where I think the individual key players stand, following Cancun, and where there are shifts.