Durban finished with the now commonplace but contradictory sense of achievement and disappointment. Achievement that something has been agreed, disappointment that because expectations are so low, any agreement seems like an achievement. REDD+, however, has finished COP17 with a less pessimistic sentiment [...]

REDD+ is one of the building blocks for a new international agreement, and like other blocks, such as finance and technology transfer, it is one that many observers are hoping will become operational relatively soon, perhaps even in absence of a post-Kyoto agreement and the merging of the AWG-LCA with the AWG-KP [...]

Authors: Sabrina Chesterman & Nyla Sarwar. As the climate talks gain pace in Bonn, progress is being made on a new text, designed to resurrect chances of a global agreement in Cancun in December. Many, including outgoing UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer, are still hesitant about Cancun being able to achieve a deal, which was originally supposed [...]

Author: Dafydd Elis It’s crunch time in Copenhagen: the governmental leaders are here and they will have to find an agreement during the next two days if they are to leave with their credibility intact. Having now seen two official drafts of the text being discussed by AWG-LCA, it’s possible to glean some insights into [...]

The 45th meeting of the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism was carried between Feb.12th and 13th.     New EB Chair and Vice-Chair The EB elected Mr. Lex de Jonge and Mr. Clifford Mahlung as Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively, of the Executive Board until the first meeting of the Board in 2010. Mr. [...]

At the beginning of the negotiations at Poznan, it was suggested that the Adaptation Fund (AF) was one of the few areas on which significant progress would be made (see my previous post). In the end, negotiations even on this issue went right to the wire, after there was failure to reach an agreement by [...]

Increasingly, attention here in Poland is focusing on determining the mechanisms and transfers that will underpin the more contentious issues around targets that have largely been deferred to COP15.  Specifically, one of the Bali Road Map groups (focused on long term cooperative action) has been almost exclusively focused on questions about regional and North-South transfer. [...]

The UNFCCC Climate Change Conference is drawing ever closer (9 days at time of writing). But what are we expecting from this mass meeting? What is Poznan actually aiming at? The answers to these questions initially seem obvious: to prepare the ground for the near-legendary ‘Copenhagen Protocol’. However, dig any deeper than this and it [...]