UN climate deal reached in Lima

Negotiators from over 190 countries, including India, today adopted a format for national pledges to cut global carbon emissions, ending a deadlock between rich and poor countries to agree on a new ambitious and binding deal to be signed in Paris next year to combat climate change.

After a marathon UN climate summit in the Peruvian capital of Lima, President of the meeting Manuel Pulgar—Vidal said delegates had approved a broad blueprint for negotiations leading up to a deal in 2015, to take effect in 2020.

“The document is approved,” announced Pulgar—Vidal, who is also the Environment Minister of Peru.

The deal — dubbed the Lima Call for Climate Action — paves the way for what is envisioned as the historic agreement in environmental history.

Commenting on the draft, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said, “all of India’s concerns have been addressed.”

The draft mentioned only that all pledges would be reviewed a month ahead of December 2015 Paris summit to assess their combined effect on climate change.

The main plenary was reconvened at 1:30 am local time and Pulgar—Vidal announced that the draft text has been approved.

Pulgar—Vidal, who had spent entire day meeting separately with delegations, presented the new draft just before midnight, saying “as a text it’s not perfect, but it includes the positions of the parties.”

The negotiators were given an hour to review the revised draft text. The revised draft has added a line in the preamble regarding “loss and damages” provisions which many small island developing states had requested.

Differentiation

Consistent with India and other developing countries push, a separate paragraph was added regarding differentiation — the principle of categorising countries based on their ability to pay for climate action measures.

It reads that any Paris 2015 agreement should reflect “the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances.”

The last portion was lifted directly from the US—China climate agreement announced in November of this year.

The revised draft does not contain any information about an ex—ante review process of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), instead leaving it up to individual countries.

It does outline that all INDCs should contain all of the following elements: “mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and development...capacity—building, and transparency.”

The new date for submission of these INDCs has been moved from June 2015 to October 2015 as many countries had asked for more time.

“Here we have achieved targets and we got what we wanted,” Javadekar said.

Noting that “differentiation was key”, he said India was satisfied that a paragraph containing that information was included in the approved text.

He acknowledged that the text “does not satisfy everyone” but said it was a good building block for a comprehensive Paris 2015 agreement.

The ADP session will continue from February 8, 2015 in Geneva to continue the negotiating process in a series of meetings throughout the year leading up to Paris.

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