LRQA COP 16 Blog, Day One – Views from The Front
30th November 2010 by Madlen King
By Madlen King, Global Head of Climate Change and Sustainability, LRQA
Follow LRQA on Twitter @LRQA_CC_CSR
As the thousands of participants began to converge in Cancun, the 16th Conference of the Parties commenced yesterday with a somewhat tempered message from the UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres – that despite it being in no-one’s interest to see further delays, expectations for Cancun are ‘ to keep the ambition alive’ and not to ‘solve everything’.
There was a clear recognition that even if all of the targets put forward to-date by the individual nations were to be achieved, we would not meet our ultimate goal of restricting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Thus a request was made for compromise, to enable the efforts of the whole to be greater than the sum of the individual parts.
In line with this plea for collaboration, the CDM DOE Forum met for a day-long meeting to discuss a number of key issues of great significance for CDM reform. These included amongst others: the recognised need to introduce agreed levels of assurance and materiality to the scheme; changes to the accreditation requirements placed on DOE’s and consistency of interpretations; and how to resolve the slow progression of Programme of Activities (POA’s). The meeting attended by representatives of the UNFCCC secretariat, was one of the twice yearly formal opportunities that DOE’s have to liaise directly with the secretariat and to understand their concerns and desires for improvement of the CDM. A prominent topic of the discussions was how to improve the communication channels between the parties and all attendees welcomed the proposals for joint workshops to further the combined understanding on some of these key issues.
If day 1 is a sign of the weeks ahead then collaboration and compromise is very much alive and my optimism for progress to be achieved remains.
Visit LRQA website to see the full event coverage from Madlen King.
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Madlen King is the Global Head of Climate Change & Sustainability. She ensures the technical integrity of LRQA climate change and sustainability services and liaises with external bodies and governments on climate change. Within this role, Madlen is responsible for the service design, delivery and maintenance of accreditations for all GHG validation and verification schemes [...]