LRQA COP 16 Blog, Day 8 – Hard facts difficult to obtain and uncertainty is rife
9th December 2010 by Andy Ritchie
By Andrew Ritchie, Climate Change Services Manager, LRQA
Follow LRQA on Twitter @LRQA_CC_CSR
I spent Day 8 of the COP 16 negotiations here in Cancun involved in two principle activities.
- Trying to find out what was happening in the High Level negotiations, and the potential impact that any progress could have.
- Taking part in an IETA Side Event on ‘Aligning MRV to compare and harmonise climate efforts’.
The first of those activities, determining the status of the High Level negotiations, involved attending a number of briefing sessions at both the Messe and the Moon Palace in an attempt to obtain any information on what has happened so far, and what could potentially happen in the next few days.
Unfortunately, as is to be expected at this stage of the COP negotiations, hard facts are difficult to obtain and uncertainty is rife.
The mood at this morning’s BINGO briefing session was pessimistic to say the least, reflective of a day which saw little apparent progress on nearly all the major issues facing the negotiating teams. Any lingering hopes that Cancun will be able to provide the world with a binding post-Kyoto agreement appear to be slowly ebbing away, and it is now looking more and more likely that the principle aim of the last few days of the COP will be more one of damage limitation as all parties look to salvage something from the event that can be carried forward to next year in Durban.
On a more positive note, the IETA Side Event in which I was involved was, in spite of the relatively small audience, enjoyable and interesting. The discussions, which focused predominantly on the consideration of MRV as it applies to NAMAs, enabled me to re-emphasise the need for, and benefits of, a consistent approach to MRV across all current and potential future schemes, not only as a basis of ensuring effective and consistent verification, but also as a means of contributing to the widespread acceptance of credits generated by many different schemes across the global carbon market.
Looking ahead to tomorrow, I find myself struggling to remain optimistic about what we will be told at the morning briefing sessions with regard to the progress that has been made in negotiations that have taken place this evening.
In particular, I find the lack of clarity on the post-2012 structure of mechanisms such as CDM deeply troubling because, as we are all aware, uncertainty itself has the potential to deal a fatal blow to any mechanism that requires the confidence of the markets for it to be successful.
Andy’s Mexican Fact of the Day
Mexico has one of the largest educational budgets in the world measured by actual spending and as a percentage of GDP. In 2009 the educational budget was $148 billion, equivalent to 9.7% of total GDP. This has enabled Mexico students to achieve impressive results in comparisons by the OECD with students from the world’s thirty most developed nations. Mexican students came in fourth in problem solving, third in science and technology and eighth in mathematics.
Andy’s Thought for the Day
Definition of opportunism. The birds in the Moon Palace restaurant that were eating the left-overs from diners’ plates.
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Andy Ritchie is the Group Environmental Products Manager for the