The climate change negotiations in Cancun started into their second and last week this morning. Ministers are beginning to trickle in and the President of Mexico has arrived. With the politicians arriving, the final documents of the COP –UN speak for the climate negotiations- will have to be finalized any day now to then be agreed upon by the politicians. Writing this, I am sitting at the GMF booth in the Cancun Messe, where all the NGOs have taken up shop and the negotiators come by to see what’s what before going on to the Plenary and Working Sessions, which take place at the Moon palace Hotel, a few miles from the Messe. It is palpable how the buzz of activity has picked up since last week –the halls are full, and people from all over the world are walking by. It may be for the beautiful weather and the no-tie policy, but there definitely is a sense of optimism in the air. People do actually seem to believe that the ministers will be able to sign a document of some sort by the end of the week. Talking to a senior negotiator from an African country this morning, he told me how pleased he was with the progress in some areas of the negotiations, in particular on issues relating to the Least Developed Countries. However, he also warned that more needed to be done on capacity-building, which includes technology transfer as well as financing, if developing countries were to agree to a text.
Could that statement point to a dark cloud on the otherwise sunny Cancun horizon? Will developed and developing nations split on the issue of their respective rights and obligations, on -frankly speaking – who should pay for the mess, as they did in Copenhagen? Is this, yet again, going to be the crux of the talks? To be sure, Europeans and Americans have been suspicious about the developing countries all year. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now know of talks as early as February between European Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and Jonathan Pershing of the United States on exactly this issue. According to the cables, Pershing said that the so-called BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) were opposed to turning the Copenhagen Accord into a binding agreement. And both were skeptical about whether India and China would honor the commitments they made in the Copenhagen Accord. Clearly, trust for the BASIC countries wasn’t at an all-time high.
At the same time, developing countries have reason to mistrust the developed world. The Wikileaks report reveals that Hedegaard and Pershing also talked about one of the most important, but also contested issues: Financing. In Copenhagen, the developed world agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020, and $30 billion from 2010-2012 (the so-called “fast-start financing”). While both Hedegaard and Pershing agreed that finding the funds pledged in Copenhagen was essential, Hedegaard asked Pershing if the U.S. would need to do some “creative accounting” to come up with the money. While Pershing did not confirm this, some observers in Cancun say that this is exactly what is happening. When last week the EU outlined the details of its 7.2 billion Euro contribution between 2010 and 2012, questions remained how much new money was contained in that pledge. NGOs and poorer countries were also alarmed by the fact that loans rather than grants are to make up about half of the money.
It is clear that the developed and the developing world still have to do more to rebuild the trust which was lost in Copenhagen. While progress on the negotiations has been made, the negotiators will have to work hard with their ministers to agree on a text that will give hope for a more comprehensive agreement at COP17 in South Africa next year.
Last December, right after Copenhagen, Herman van Rompuy’s chief of staff said, when asked about the possibilities for Cancun: “Who wants to see that horror movie again?” Let’s hope that the talks end up not being a horror movie, but rather a mirror of the weather: Sunny and pleasant.
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