Was the Bonn Intersessional a(nother) climate failure?
23 June 2023 - What happened at the Bonn Climate Change Conference? Our Senior Programme Manager, Katherine Quinn, reports back...
Last week, the Bonn Climate Change Conference wrapped up after two weeks of discord and gridlock. Often called the ‘SBs’ (short for Subsidiary Bodies) or the ‘Bonn Intersessional’, the meeting takes place annually at the UNFCCC headquarters in Germany, at the halfway point between each Conference of the Parties (COP). With COP28 on the horizon at the end of November, this year’s Bonn Conference needed to deliver a range of technical and administrative agreements, including laying the groundwork for the first Global Stocktake, which will hold countries accountable for their climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.
But the technical forum quickly became a political one. American and European lawmakers called for the removal of Sultan Al Jaber as COP President, due to his role as the head of the UAE’s national oil company. The EU became gridlocked with the G77 and China over the details of the Mitigation Work Programme, which was initially agreed in 2021, and remains a crucial enabler for keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees. And the agenda for the Conference was only agreed between the parties on the second last day, when it was all… over?!
It's easy to see the fiasco with the agenda as an allegory for global climate action in general: states taking action at the very last moment, when it is too late to make a difference. So was the Bonn Conference another climate failure? And if so, what does this mean for humanity, in what experts are calling the ‘critical decade’ for climate action?
In summary: yes. The negotiations were a failure. They failed to achieve what they set out to achieve; they even failed to set out what they hoped to achieve (until the second last day).
While the outgoing Egyptian presidency remains formally in charge until COP28 starts, meetings in Bonn provided an opportunity for the incoming presidency to outline strategic direction for the negotiations and set a clear and ambitious agenda for COP28. The Presidency failed to do so; it was a missed opportunity, but there is still time to get the climate agenda back on track.
With just over 150 days until COP28, it is critical that the UAE, as COP President, infuses this year’s climate negotiations with the sense of urgency that is required to agree a range of important and overdue issues. These include accelerating the phase out of fossil fuels, defining the Global Goal on Adaptation, and closing the gap in the $100 billion annual commitment developed countries made in 2009, but which has never been fulfilled. At the Bonn Conference, many of the 198 member nations of the UNFCCC used these issues as tools to score political points and sow division, instead of trying to reach agreement, or even mounting genuine opposition based on the substance of the issues. Strong leadership is required to overcome these political and ideological divisions.
There are some central issues that must be agreed at COP28 this year, to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. We need to agree not only an adaptation goal, but goals on renewable energy capacity and energy efficiency too. Developed nations need to stump up not just for the financial commitments they have already made, but additional ones, with the cooperation of traditional financial institutions and multilateral development banks like the World Bank. The key requirements of transition plans must be identified and harmonised. Risk assessment data must be shared widely. Nations must invest in developing technologies such as carbon capture and storage, without using it as an excuse to continue emitting greenhouse gases. Most importantly, we must agree to stop extracting, selling and utilising fossil fuels, including gas.
The good news is that this is where businesses and non-state actors have a role to play. The key to any good business strategy is identifying a gap in the market, and currently there is a vacuum of leadership and momentum in the climate space. Business leaders know that climate action is both essential and inevitable, but to be successful in this context they need clear policies which create a level playing field, stable regulatory conditions that they can plan for and rely on, and an enabling environment for investment. Organisations like CISL have long played a central role in accelerating climate action, and holding governments accountable for their international responsibilities by taking the voice of business to policymakers.
The Bonn Conference made it clear: we can’t continue to wait for states to provide leadership ahead of COP28. It’s time for businesses, NGOs and broader civil society to step up.