UNFCCC: That’s a Wrap in Poznań

After almost two weeks of negotiations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has come to a close.

“In addition to having agreed the work program for next year, we have cleared the decks of many technical issues,” said the President of the conference, Polish Minister of the Environment Maciej Nowicki. “Poznań is the place where the partnership between the developing and developed world to fight climate change has shifted beyond rhetoric and turned into real action,” he said.

What were the results of these negotiations? Here’s a brief review:

• Progress was made in the area of technology with the endorsement of the Global Environment Facility’s “Poznań Strategic Programme on Technology Transfer.”
• The finishing touches were put to the Kyoto Protocol’s adaptation fund, thereby enabling the fund to receive projects in the course of 2009. Parties agreed that the fund, fed by a share of proceeds from the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism and voluntary contributions, would have a legal capacity granting developing countries direct access.
• Governments meeting under the Kyoto Protocol agreed that commitments of industrialized countries post-2012 should primarily take the form of quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives.
• Parties agreed that a first draft of the text to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 would be available at a UNFCCC gathering in Bonn, Germany, in June of 2009.

“We now have a much clearer sense of where we need to go in designing an outcome which will spell out the commitments of developed countries, the financial support required and the institutions that will deliver that support as part of the Copenhagen outcome,”said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary to the UNFCCC.  In his last press conference, de Boer also added that, “From now on, it’s for real.”

There is much to be done on the road to Copenhagen 2009, with the world watching as leaders will come together to finalize the next step beyond Kyoto in 2012.