“Why are we hauling giant container shiploads of Christmas decorations from Vietnam to England? Don’t the English know how to make decorations?”
At this writing, negotiators struggle to get the most out of a relatively ambition-free meeting of the parties to the UN’s Paris Agreement. They’ll burn the candles late into the night as they attempt to craft something more press-release-worthy than what they have at the moment.
Draft Agreement 1/CP.25, for instance, calls for all Parties to revise and enhance their Nationally Determined Commitments — their mitigation and adaptation intentions — by October 2020. Regrettably, the draft is not framed as a mandate, merely as advice. It is possible to hope it will be revised to include at least a mandate for the Secretariat to calculate the size of the gap between all nations’ pledges in aggregate and the threshold for human survival, in time for pledge revision at the Paris-mandated 5-year “stocktake” at COP26 next year in Glasgow. In any event, public interest groups like Carbon Tracker and Climate Action Network will dependably be totaling the deficit.
It is good to see ocean ecosystems finally mentioned in some draft provisions. In his…