When ministers concluded negotiations on December 16 morning, 30 hours beyond the allotted time frame, a final deal on climate action at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland, was to some extent achieved.
The ‘Katowice Climate Package’ is the name given to the basket of issues that have been negotiated and agreed upon. Together this makes up the majority of the ‘rulebook’ by which the Paris Agreement can be implemented by countries around the world.
The key elements that were agreed upon include how countries will both define and provide information on national climate action under the Paris Agreement, how to measure cumulative global efforts by 2023, as well as a process to mobilize financing to support this action.
Yet several issues remained contentious, such as rules for carbon markets and trading, referred to under ‘Article 6’ of the Paris Agreement, which have been deferred until next year. Some were also critical that the text was not forceful enough in demanding more urgent and ambitious action.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres returned in the final days of the conference, reinforcing the message that climate change is the number one priority for the United Nations.
In his speech, he said “We must beat climate change before it beats us. It is a race we can win. It is a race we must win.”
Abdoulaye Mar Dieye, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Policy and Programme Bureau, highlighted how UNDP’s work is driving the climate action agenda through the support it provides across 140 countries:
“At UNDP we focus on the alignment between the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda, recognizing that climate change not only threatens development outcomes but ambitious climate action can provide opportunities to unlock economic and social gains.”
Throughout the two weeks of negotiations, UNDP shared its country-level programming experiences through numerous events, all aimed at advocating for three key ingredients needed to scale up countries’ action to meet their national pledges, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Some of the highlights were as follows:
- First, foster public-private partnership to scale up finance
- Second, enhance adaptation
- Third, leverage nature-based solutions
The outcomes of COP24 are lauded as an impressive achievement, given the scale of work negotiators were tasked with over these two weeks; yet, the work has just begun. With this new ‘rulebook’ in place, it is now the responsibility of countries, with support from organizations like UNDP, to turn their pledges into concrete adaptation and mitigation action.
Original source: UNDP
Published on 17 December 2018