At the mercy of “Texts”

Report by Akira Hiraishi

Four days passed since the conference started, and a lot of observers (including me) are twisted around by flipping schedule of meetings, and two texts, “Danish Text” and “BASIC draft”, which came out suddenly for us, leaked to medias. Although the texts were prepared by particular parties and invalid at this moment, we are keen to read and take hints of the final output of COP15.

Danish Text is a proposal for final COP decision, Copenhagen Agreement, prepared by US, UK and Denmark. As Marcos mentioned in the previous post, it has set a big impact on the conference in terms of reminding us of the fact that some block walls left for achieving an effective and comprehensive output.
In two days or so, the new leaked text came to an issue. This is called “BASIC draft” since it was developed by 5 emerging country parties, Brazil (B), South Africa (A), China(C), Sudan (S), India (I), and China (C). It is, as you expect, demanding for ambitious commitments of reduction of GHG and also for financial source and technology to support mitigation and adaptation action in developing countries. On the other hand, we can say it contains points of compromise such as national action on developing countries by themselves, though it is not regally binding commitment.

Of course these two texts are no more and no less the draft by few countries, but indeed we do not see any intimation of what is going on behind the curtain besides those copies. More over, we are concerned about the restriction of entrance for observers from the next week. I wish we could see the pivotal moment towards the next stage of climate change talks.