Leaders haggling over Paris climate agreement
Environment minister concerned indigenous rights will be left out in the cold
PARIS— Environment Minister Catherine McKenna stressed Wednesday evening that any climate agreement to come out of the UN summit must emphasize the importance of respecting human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples.
During an unusually long late-night session — at least for this stage of negotiations — McKenna expressed concern that a paragraph in the latest draft text recognizing basic and indigenous rights had been bracketed, meaning there was a risk that it could be cut from document language.
She also said that wording needed to extend beyond the document’s preamble. “These rights need to be maintained in the operational graphs,” McKenna said.
Dozens of countries raised concerns of their own late into the evening, suggesting enough disagreement still exists that negotiations may end up extending beyond Friday. McKenna was asked to facilitate a session starting at 1 a.m. Paris time, prompting her chief of staff Marlo Raynolds to tweet that the minister “will be going for coffee.”
Earlier in the day, summit chair Laurent Fabius, the French foreign affairs minister, released the first “clean” version of text expected to serve as basis for a final agreement.
Fabius said three-quarters of “square bracket” issues — remaining points of contention in the 29-page document — had been removed and represented “substantial progress.”
Still, he urged delegates to raise their game over the next 24 hours. “We must all together make these crucial choices.”
For example, the choice of words such as “shall” or “should” or “may” could still weaken or strengthen the final text and it is unclear whether the final agreement will keep the rise in global temperatures “below 2” or “well below 2” or “below 1.5” degrees C.
In the afternoon, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate, 45-minute plea for countries to dig deeper and work harder over the next two days to divert the world from its “catastrophic” path damaging the planet’s environment.
“If a global community cannot come together and refuses to rise to this challenge, if we continue to allow calculated destruction to derail the urgency of this moment, we will be liable for a collective moral failure of historic consequences,” Kerry said.
Asked about “fault lines” that still exist between vulnerable and rich countries, McKenna told reporters there are still issues to work out and that negotiators are working tirelessly to get past them.
“Fault lines is a dramatic way of putting it,” she said. But clearly, “there is more work to be done.”
One big sticking point has to do with “differentiation,” the idea that all countries need to step up to the climate challenge but that richer countries bear more responsibility for historical greenhouse-gas emissions than others. Canada and New Zealand drew some criticism from environmental groups for backing a U.S. request to have language in the agreement that protects rich countries from having to compensate those that can’t adapt, such as island nations that end up completely submerged under water from rising sea levels.
That U.S. request is still in play in the form of a footnote buried in the latest document. Critics called the move petty and unnecessary, pointing to the fact that vulnerable countries had already agreed in October not to push the issue of compensation.
“It is a total bogeyman,” said Dale Marshall, a spokesmann for Toronto-based Environmental Defence.
Meanwhile, consensus is beginning to emerge on a periodic “stock-take” to check in on how countries are meeting their commitments while giving them a chance to update and enhance their actions.
This would start in either 2023 or 2024, and occur every five years after.
“Everything we need for an ambitious, equitable agreement is still in play,” said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the World Resources Institute climate program.
Morgan said an announcement by Kerry that the U.S. would double its adaptation financing to $860 million (U.S.) and has joined a coalition of about 100 African, Caribbean, Pacific and European countries has created a positive dynamic heading into the home stretch of negotiations.
Called the High Ambition Coalition, the group has emerged as a powerful force in efforts to negotiate a binding and ambitious global agreement.
“We will not accept an agreement that just takes in the lowest common denominators,” said the chief negotiator for coalition country Colombia, addressing the worry among some environmental groups that the determination to land a deal will spark a race to the bottom.
Kerry said an inability to take bold steps this week will lead to “unthinkable harm” to habitat, infrastructure, food and water supplies, and “life” itself.