Governments are meeting for the next round of UN climate change negotiations from Monday, April 30 to Thursday, May 10, 2018 to further develop the guidelines for implementing the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement.

This will allow the Agreement to become operational. The guidelines, or operating manual, are needed to unlock practical actions to realise the full potential of the Agreement.

The final decisions are to be taken at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) in Poland in December, 2018.

Finalising the Paris Agreement guidelines is also necessary to assess whether the world is on track to achieve the Agreement’s goals: to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2°C, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.

“To reach success at COP24, it is essential that nations begin working towards draft negotiating texts at the May meeting. This will provide a solid foundation for work in the second half of 2018 and help them to deliver a strong result,” said Ms. Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change.

At the UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) held last November under the leadership of Fiji, nations agreed to accelerate and complete their work to put in place the guidelines – officially termed the Paris Agreement Work Programme (PAWP) – at COP24 in Katowice, Poland in December.

The Talanoa Dialogue

Another important objective of the May session is holding the “Talanoa Dialogue”, which will facilitate the engagement of countries and a range of stakeholders in a vital international conversation around ambition now and in the future.

The Fiji-led Talanoa Dialogue is facilitated by the UN Climate Change secretariat and will benefit from the presence of high-level officials from Fiji, including the Prime Minister, who is the President of COP23.

The consultative dialogue will check progress, reaffirm the goals of the Paris Agreement and aim to find solutions to how countries can increase their ambition now and in the next round of their national climate action plans, officially termed ‘Nationally Determined Contributions’.

As per tradition in the Pacific region, the goal of a “talanoa” is to share stories and to find solutions for the common good. Similarly, in the context of the international climate change process, the Talanoa Dialogue will invite participants to share stories to find solutions for the global common good.

“Year 2017 witnessed many extreme weather events and disasters that caused suffering for millions of people around the world. The consequences of climate change impacts are already being felt, particularly by the most vulnerable communities,” said Espinosa.

“The Talanoa Dialogue is a key opportunity for all stakeholders to come together and share stories on how we can significantly step up climate action to prevent even greater human suffering in the future. I encourage widespread participation in the Dialogue,” she stated.

This first phase of the Fiji-led Dialogue will write history when countries and non-Party stakeholders including cities, businesses, investors and regions engage in interactive story-telling around current and future ambition for the first time on 6 May.

The output from these story-telling conversations will feed into the Talanoa Dialogue’s political phase at COP24. The political phase will bring together Ministers and high-level government officials for conversations with a view to generating political momentum.

Ambition before 2020

Throughout 2018, countries will also focus on how they can scale up their climate ambition and implementation in the pre-2020 period. All countries share the view that climate action prior to 2020 is essential. COP24 will hold an event to take stock of the pre-2020 efforts.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama of Fiji, President of COP23, and Ms. Espinosa urged countries that are yet to do so to ratify the amendment containing the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. The Doha amendment sets out emission reduction commitments for the period 2012-2020 for many developed countries. The amendment has been ratified by 111 countries and will enter into force after it is ratified by just over 30 more.

Concerned about the need to accelerate action, Ms. Espinosa said, “I strongly urge developed countries to make progress towards mobilising the $100 billion that they have pledged to provide per year by 2020. Many developing countries desperately need this support in order to make their contribution to climate action.”

Projects that increase bicycle use over fossil fuel-burning vehicles can now earn carbon credits, thanks to a decision taken by the Board that oversees the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The CDM is one of the Flexible Mechanisms defined in the Kyoto Protocol that provides for emissions reduction projects which generate Certified Emission Reduction units (CERs) which may be traded in emissions trading schemes.

It has the potential to assist developing countries in achieving sustainable development by promoting environmentally friendly investment from industrialised country governments and businesses.

“Bicycles are a great way to get around, and they’re great for reducing the emissions that cause climate change,” said CDM Executive Board Chair, Arthur Rolle. “It is practicable to consider rewarding and encouraging bicycle use with saleable, certified emission reduction credits.”

The CDM Board at its 99th meeting here in Bonn, Germany approved a new methodology for calculating the volume of emission reductions achieved through projects that establish bicycle lanes, bicycle parking, and bicycle-sharing programmes, encouraging a shift in passenger transport modes from their usual fossil-fuel-burning traffic in favour of clean and green pedal power such as bicycles, three-wheelers or e-bikes.

Transportation of urban passengers accounted for 7 percent of global emissions in 2015. So, efforts to increase bicycle use could result in a significant benefit to the climate, not to mention improve health and well-being.

“Promoting cycling is a practical, healthy way to step up climate action,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, Patricia Espinosa. “I applaud the CDM Board for coming up with this methodology and encourage cities, organisations and others to consider setting up cycling projects under the CDM.”

In 2015 in Paris, countries committed to limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius and to work towards the safer target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Between 2015 and 2050, urban passenger traffic is expected to increase 50 percent, to 5.0 trillion passenger-kilometres, with most of this rise occurring in Asia. Recent studies have shown that increasing cycling’s share of urban travel could negate the climate effects of this increase.

The CDM was established to incentivise projects that reduce emissions and contribute to sustainable development. The ability to earn saleable credits under the mechanism inspired the registration of more than 8,000 projects and programme in 111 developing countries, everything from clean cookstove projects, to wind power projects, to large industrial gases projects.

Recording an estimated $300 billion of climate change damages, 2017 went down as the costliest year as well as the third hottest on record. Large tracts of the world’s oceans are being suffocated, and according to World Bank estimates, hundreds of millions of people are at risk of being displaced in the coming decades.

It is against this background that negotiators from the world’s governments gather in Bonn from April 30 to May 10, 2018 for three simultaneous meetings under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Their aim as ever is to figure out how to further implement the many agreements they have made over the past 28 years, and crucially how to put the 2015 Paris Agreement into practice. Their self-imposed deadline to finish this work is the end of this year at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to be held in Katowice, Poland. However some key questions have to be resolved before this can happen, including:

• Will countries step-up their contributions in this critical window for climate action?
• Will countries stick with the plan to deliver comprehensive national contributions?
• Will real progress be seen on finance—the key enabling condition for climate action?
• How can the process itself advance given the role of the US and polluting corporations?

With the window to avoid breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold closing fast – by some estimates less than four years remain – and with the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) projected to result in 3°C warming, countries know they must radically step up their efforts in the immediate-term as well as the long-term.

Will the Talanoa Dialogue increase ambition?

The Paris Agreement set up a process by which Parties could review the adequacy of their NDCs and increase their ambition accordingly. Though not a legal obligation, there is building political pressure around this so-called ratchet mechanism, and the Fijian Presidency has taken on the task of running what they have dubbed the “Talanoa Dialogue.”

The Dialogue is organised around three questions: 1) where are we; 2) where do we want to go; and 3) how do we get there? The Presidency invited both Parties and civil society to submit their inputs which the UNFCCC Secretariat will compile into materials used during the April/May meeting.

Previous dialogues of this nature, such as the 2016 Facilitative Dialogue on pre-2020 action, have seen Parties largely ignore the input from civil society experts and fail to revise up their commitments, so expectations are tempered for the Talanoa Dialogue. However, there is a determination among both developing countries and global civil society to use the Talanoa Dialogue to have a meaningful conversation can take place around what constitutes fair and adequate efforts, and to translate this into a badly needed concrete increase in ambition.

Having fought so hard in at COP23 in Bonn for attention to be paid to pre-2020 climate actions, developing countries are expected to maintain their strong call for more ambition in this period. Countries did agree in Bonn to submit progress reports on their pre-2020 actions for all to see but whether or not there is any kind of meaningful review of the adequacy of these critical near-term efforts is not guaranteed.

Will the scope of the NDCs be comprehensive?

A major point of contention within the negotiations continues to be the “scope” of the NDCs which Parties have made as part of their efforts to meet the objective of the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to below 1.5°C.

This highly political debate has seen developing countries fighting to maintain a holistic approach to the NDCs – as enshrined in the Paris Agreement – and the differentiation between developing and developed countries. On the other side, many developed countries would like to see the focus limited to emissions reductions only, with no clear differentiation, and without meaningful conversation about the financial support they have put forward.

Will there be progress on finance?

Finance, an eternal sticking point within the talks, has recently become much stickier with the withdrawal of $2 billion by the U.S. under Trump’s administration. A high-level segment on finance is slotted for COP24, but with the U.S. delegation adamant that they do not want to discuss finance at all, it remains unclear how the item can advance unless other developed countries such as the European Union find some more margin to revise their approach to climate finance. Without a clear roadmap for delivering $100 billion per year by 2020, as pledged by developed countries since 2009, developing countries are hindered in their ability to carry out their own mitigation and adaptation actions.

How will the process advance?

Parties are also expected to continue negotiations on how to best address conflicts of interest in business groups, especially those that represent the fossil fuel industry’s interests. Developed countries, where most fossil fuel corporations are based, have continually tried to block these negotiations but their efforts have been largely overpowered by negotiators from Latin America and Africa who have championed the issue.

The Co-Chairs of the Paris Work Programme track of the negotiations (the “APA” for short) have outlined a process to conclude negotiations which involves picking up the same streams of work, with the same facilitators, as their previous sessions. Notably, the US – which has indicated its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement – is facilitating talks on the issue of transparency which may raise some concerns among other countries and civil society.

Negotiators will be working to narrow down the textual proposals in order to arrive at a negotiating text well before COP24 in Katowice, Poland, this December. The actual shape of the outcome on the Paris Work Programme remains undecided, with developing countries in favour of a single decision to ensure coherence between all the issues and avoid the severing of any links between issues being taken forward in the APA and related issues being advanced in the other negotiating bodies, the SBI and SBSTA, which also meet next week.