The Climate Group

The Climate Group

Progress, of a sort, appears to have been made at last week’s UN climate talks which concluded in Tianjin, China on Saturday.

Speaking on the final day of the meeting, UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres said that negotiators had “gotten closer to the structure of a set of decisions at Cancun” by identifying what was doable at the annual climate conference and what should be left for later.

Figueres explained that Parties had discussed and “made progress” on all the core negotiating elements, including a long-term emissions goal, adaptation, mitigation, technology, finance and the future of the Kyoto Protocol.

This relatively upbeat assessment, however, contrasted with a statement from Connie Hedgaard, the EU Climate Commissioner that progress had been “very patchy and much too slow”.

Continuing differences between the US and China explain a lot of this lack of movement.

The US continued to push hard on the connected issues of ‘Monitoring Reporting and Verification’ (MRV) and ‘International Consultation and Analysis’ (ICA). These two issues are a core part of the Copenhagen Accord for the US, and deal with how developing countries account for the voluntary emission cuts they undertake.

China pushed back against the US, arguing that it (the US) was hardly in a position to ask emerging economies to take on more responsibilities. Many developing countries, including China, see attempts to create stringent MRV and ICA rules as a back door route for converting voluntary actions into formal commitments.