The UN Secretary-General has appointed the Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres to replace the outgoing head of the UN Framework Convention on Climte change (UNFCC) Yvo de Boer. The appointment was made after consultations with the Conference of Parties through its bureau. A skilled negotiator, she has represented Latin America and the Caribbean on the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism in 2007 and was elected vice-president of the bureau for 2008-09.
One of the key issues which Ms Figueres will have to apply herself is the present push by the United States and 20 other developed nations to integrate the Copenhagen Accord into the negotiating text. This is going to be raised in the next round of talks to be held in Bonn, Germany, starting May 31. Developing countries are willing to consider the Copenhagen Accord as a parallel track but they are insisting that all negotiations be conducted under the ambit of the Kyoto Protocol. During his recent visit to China, the minister of environment & forests Jairam Ramesh had re-emphasised this point as had his Chine counterpart also. It is for this reason that the outgoing UNFCC head Boer has emphasised that it is unrealistic to expect that the next Conference of Parties (CoP) to be held in Mexico in December in 2010 will produce a legally-binding agreement. He said such a full-fledged treaty would probably have to wait another year, till the next CoP in South Africa in 2011. “I think developing countries especially would want to see what an agreement would entail for them before they are willing to turn it into a legally-binding treaty. So I think if we are to get to a treaty, South Africa a year later is much more realistic,” De Boer said.
The UN process needs the consent of all 193 countries who are members of the UNFCC to give their approval. Therefore while the Copenhagen Accord will be included in the formal UN negotiations, developing nations are not agreeable to it sidelining the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Boer will step down after the Bonn meeting. But Ms Figueres has already made a rather controversial statement when she said that the chair of the Long Term Co-operative Action (LCA) UN working group would table a “new text that integrates parts of the Copenhagen Accord”, which could “significantly enhance that text”.
The status of the Copenhagen Accord has been one of the main sticking points for the long-running negotiations since the end of the Copenhagen summit, with richer nations arguing that it provides a better framework for a binding deal than the existing Kyoto Protocol and poorer nations warning that any move away from the Kyoto Framework risks resulting in a weaker agreement.