Indirect Battle: Behind The Dozens of Draft Texts At UN Climate Talks

Within the first two official days, delegates of the UN climate talks could come to just one unanimous conclusion: they have a lot of work ahead of them.
Chief negotiators developing the guidebook that dictates how countries will report emissions, adaptations and other contributions left their previous discussions in Bonn with few deliberations settled. So they meet this week for the SB48–2 in Bangkok with hopes of paring down the reams of draft text. The aim is to culminate a draft of most by the middle of the week, and then a final report by Sunday. The chairs and discussion leaders all mention that taking some discussions to COP24 in December is unavoidable, but they all seem optimistic that negotiators will attend the annual climate change progress assessment with a stable draft of the guidebook.
To an observer, it seems to get banal, but much of the time it all boils down to a discussion on money. In discussion of the rules for communicating countries’ adaptation progress, delegates volleyed for quite some time on whether they should “review” or “revise and update” the process on a regular basis. The room seemed to agree on the sentiment — flexibility to change how countries report their work when change is needed — but whichever language they choose could change the way their contribution is interpreted, critical to a “shared but differentiated” model. For countries with few resources, the view of their economic position, efforts and recent disasters would impact the finance they can access, while for wealthier, industrialized countries, that could impact how much they should finance and support peers’ climate projects. The Green Climate Fund is off the table at this round of discussions, but after the Trump administration pulled $2 billion away from resources, and with a sharp call for more funding to it and the Adaptation Fund, money underlies every conversation.
But language of the rules has also become critical to the parties who feel they historically have been left out of the dialogue. Delegates within the Least Developed Countries group argue for language that better accounts for their contributions, especially considering the damage control. But talking about loss and damage, or the natural disasters, pollution and momentous waste we contend with today, “damage” can be a damning word, because it pushes fault on industrialized countries. For Indigenous Peoples’ Group observers, they simply wish for mention in the language, let alone protection of their sparse untouched land and protection for native, controlled agriculture. In addition, streamlining some of that text is seen as a way to knock the underrepresented interests out of the conversation once again.
The complex system of acronyms and terms can be difficult to navigate for negotiators, even when English. Some of the civil society and community actors are studying up the dialogue because, as one activist from Mangalore said, it’s almost impossible to engage if you’re not speaking that language. Within the sterilized dialogue and orderly, air-conditioned UN center, you lose touch with the drought, deforestation and heavy emissions we’re trying to abate.
There are a few more days of discussion before anyone can see the guidebook through the haze of drafts, but any clarity could also be thrown aside by last minute decisions, pitched to hold a bargaining chip when parties seek to promote specific issue. The practice is common in these negotiations, veteran observers told me, even if most are frustrated by the premise. When there are so many countries — not to mention all the observers — with clashing interests operating in a limited pool of resources, settlements are guaranteed to be unsatisfying. But even if a clean, clear text emerges at the end of the week, those words will only mean something if individual country leaders are willing to contribute effort and finances to them.