After 10 days of “intense” negotiations, delegates are tired and bored, and decided to start playing ‘Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) is lava’ in the Chamber Hall. The rules are simple: in this game, all Parties pretend that the MWP informal note is made of lava, and thus must avoid touching (agreeing to) it.
What Parties are forgetting is that tackling climate change is at the heart of the Convention and of the Paris Agreement, and that the new MWP is our chance to close the 2030 mitigation ambition and implementation gap.
The issue is tricky as some countries see this focus as inequitable and a risk of transferring more responsibility from developed to developing countries since the former have not delivered on their past promises of emissions reduction and support for the latter.
Undelivered climate action by rich countries thus stands in the way of future action by all, as developing countries demand both enhanced action from developed countries, as well as a greater sense of urgency on adaptation and the delivery of loss and damage finance before agreeing to a meaningful UNFCCC process on mitigation.
As a result, we leave Bonn with a document lacking legal standing and a long list of possible elements for a mitigation work programme. Although options in the MWP note are too many and there is a clear need for streamlining, these are really important as a first step in the discussions. If the note is rejected, the work done here will be lost and progress towards a decision to be adopted at COP27 will be drastically slowed.
Parties hold divergent views on intersessional work such as workshops and submissions, with significant support both for and against. Intersessional work will be key on the road to Sharm el-Sheikh. However, a call for submissions is minor progress and won’t advance the process.