UN Climate Deal to Change Voting ‘Tall Order’ Figueres Says
A proposal to change the rules governing voting at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to receive enough support to be passed, said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres.
The draft amendment to the convention’s rules of procedure, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg, calls for decisions to be ratified by a three-fourths majority “if efforts to reach consensus have been exhausted.”
The proposal, suggested by Mexico and Papua New Guinea, is a “rather tall order,” Figueres said at a press conference in Bonn today. It would change “the very basis of the convention that has existed for 20 years next summer,” she said.
Delegates from almost 200 countries are meeting in Bonn this week to advance negotiations over a global climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, whose targets expire in 2012. The meeting ends today.
“This process is taking too long while climate change is happening out there,” said Elias Freig, manager of carbon finance and economics of climate change at Mexico´s National Water Commission. “The process has to be modernized, updated to match the action that is needed.”
Since 1996, when the rules of the UNFCCC were created, there hasn’t been agreement on voting, Lim Li Lin, legal and environment adviser at the Third World Network said in an interview at Bonn.
Sovereignty Concerns
“The voting rules were never agreed back in 1995, mainly because developed countries were afraid of being overruled by developing countries on finance issues,” Lin said. “Any country would have a concern that their sovereignty isn’t being respected. In the absence of a rule on voting, consensus applies. Consensus isn’t defined in the convention, but an explicit and formal objection would indicate that there is no consensus.”
Nations endorsed the Cancun Agreements last year, a list of pledges to cut emissions, even though Bolivia rejected the deal. This followed more of a general agreement rule, according to Jos Cozijnsen, a former delegate for the Netherlands who participated at the 1997 talks when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed.
“There will be more fireworks” on the voting rules in Durban, said Cozijnsen, who now works as a consulting attorney based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “There really needs to be a better understanding of what consensus means and it can be general agreement.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Catherine Airlie in London at cairlie@bloomberg.net; Ben Sills in Madrid at bsills@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net
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