Global Policy Forum

Bonn, Officials from some 150 countries are meeting here from 31 May to 11 June to tackle a number of practical and technical questions about how best to advance the aims of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol.

"When governments adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 they agreed on what the international community must do over the next dozen years or so to minimize climate change," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, the Convention's Executive Secretary. "By the end of the year 2000 they must decide the equally important issue of how to achieve the Kyoto target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

"The political commitment that was made in Kyoto will become truly convincing when these complicated technical details are resolved," he added.

The current talks will prepare for the Fifth Session of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention. COP-5 and related meetings will take place in Bonn during the period of 25 October to 5 November 1999; the high-level segement for ministers is expected to be held on 1-2 November.

Delegates will consider the Kyoto Protocol's three "mechanisms", which are designed to help developed countries reduce the costs of meeting their emissions targets. A clean development mechanism (CDM) will grant these countries credits for financing developing-country projects that avoid emissions and promote sustainable development. A joint implementation (JI) programme will offer credits for contributing to projects in other developed countries (including the countries of Central/Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). An international emissions trading regime will allow developed countries to buy and sell emissions credits amongst themselves.

The Parties must still accounting system for allocating credits. To ensure the credibility of the mechanisms and the Kyoto commitments, delegates will also start to organize work on a compliance regime for the Protocol.

The Buenos Aires Plan of Action, adopted at COP-4 last November, sets an ambitious deadline of late 2000 for finalizing all these issues so that the mechanisms can be fully functional when the Protocol eventually enters into force.

The talks are taking place in two concurrent meetings. The meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA) will concentrate on ensuring that technical inputs from government experts, the Convention secretariat, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and other sources contribute to the COP's decision-making process.

In addition to addressing the Kyoto mechanisms, the SBSTA will start a consultative process to decide how to better promote technology transfer. Many governments believe that not enough progress has been made in recent years on helping developing countries obtain energy-saving and other climate-friendly technologies, and they hold great expectations for this new process.

A number of technical workshops held in the margins of the meeting, outside the main negotiating forum, will take a more informal look at technology transfer and at the Protocol's three mechanisms. Workshops held when the subsidiary bodies and the Conference of the Parties are not in session are expected to play an increasingly important role in advancing the intergovernmental process.

Another key item on the SBSTA agenda is improving the guidelines for preparing national communications and emissions inventories. Parties must submit information on a regular basis to inform the world community about national efforts to implement the Convention. Complex methodological questions remain, however. For example, the accounting of net emissions from land-use change and forestry and of emissions from international transport must still be addressed.

SBSTA delegates will also review progress on developing appropriate technologies for adapting to sea-level rise, droughts, and other expected impacts of climate change.

Meanwhile, the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI) will examine the mechanisms as well as the submissions of national communications and inventories by developed countries. Data on greenhouse gas emissions from these countries are vital for tracking trends and gauging the effectiveness of efforts to limit emissions.

The SBI will also work on administrative, budgetary, scheduling, and other practical matters which are essential to keeping the Convention process on track. It will discuss the agenda and other arrangements for COP-5 and consider the Convention secretariat's proposal for a significant budget increase over the next two years for handling the growing technical workload.

By the time the meetings start, the Convention web site -- which posts the meeting documents in all UN languages, the Convention and Protocol texts, country information files, and much more -- will have a new look. A "Resources" section will provide immediate access to a wider range of information, including a new interactive database for the UNFCCC Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

The Climate Change Convention was adopted in 1992 in response to growing scientific evidence about the potential impacts of humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. It now has some 175 Parties.

The Kyoto Protocol commits developed countries to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 5% compared to 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012. It was adopted in December 1997 and signed by 83 countries plus the European Commission during a one-year signature period that ended 15 March 1999. (Governments that did not sign during the signatory period may still become Parties through the procedures of acceptance, approval or accession.) The Protocol will become legally binding when at least 55 countries, including developed countries accounting for at least 55% of developed country emissions, have ratified.

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