The little-known backroom fight at the heart of the climate negotiations

Every year the world watches as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) climate negotiations’ annual mega-meetings (COPs) unfold in November/December.

But their lesser-known counterpart, the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, are actually where a lot of the technical work happens and sets the stage for the end-year spectacle.

This year’s negotiations have plenty of hot topics, including the new climate finance goal, the just transition, the role of carbon markets and the global goal for adaptation. On each, there are parties (governments) and observers (non-government actors) fighting tooth and nail to have their say.

And yet I found myself in one of the smallest rooms, following a topic which largely goes unnoticed every year — arrangements for intergovernmental meetings (AIMs).

AIMs are topics for agreeing on how meetings work. The UNFCCC is, in practice, just a long series of meetings, with complex rules governing them. These meetings culminate in one text at the end of the year, and the rules about how the meetings work are both mind-numbingly boring and crucial to the outcome of the UNFCCC. This might explain why AIMs get so little public attention, but still draw some of the toughest senior government negotiators.

This year was no different, except the negotiations received a little more attention than usual. Many within the media have started referring to the COPs as a climate “circus” and public trust in the UNFCCC process is low.

Even though the COPs have ballooned to include up to 84,000 people, more people than ever think they are a huge waste of time.

Climate negotiations or trade fair?

So how can it be that the UNFCCC climate conferences are one of the largest international meetings in the world, and yet people are fed up with them and malign their importance?

COPs are surrounded by hundreds of expensive pavilions paid for by industry, governments and international NGOs so that they can host events around the clock for two weeks. The vast majority of these appear to have nothing to do with the negotiations, but instead facilitate networking, branding and deal-making.

It doesn’t help that thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists and global management consultants continue to attend, often on government delegation badges, despite the obvious conflict of interest.

Perhaps most importantly, 30-plus years of negotiations have produced too little action, despite the huge numbers, the eye-watering cost, the endless stream of self-congratulatory side events and complimentary water bottles.

The problem with the COPs isn’t only their size, there is also a large imbalance between the Global North and Global South.

There has always been a huge difference in the size of negotiating delegations. The US, for example, would bring 100 negotiators, while Jamaica might have only seven. This divide has narrowed considerably in recent years.

Last year, Brazil and the UAE had the largest delegations of around 4,000 people, including many private sector actors and representatives from civil society and the media. Not all were official negotiators, which can make it hard to compare delegation sizes. Kenya had a delegation of 765, for example, but clarified that only 51 were “essential delegates” or negotiators.

However, the data indicate that the divide remains very stark among NGO observers (effectively civil society). Roughly 55-68% of NGO observers attending recent negotiations were from developed countries. This is a huge imbalance as nearly 85% of the world lives in developing countries, which is where the majority of climate impacts will be felt.

It is not just the size of the COPs that is growing, it’s the complexity of the negotiated topics. The number of agenda items and mandated events have increased significantly as new issues need to be dealt with.

As the scope and complexity of the negotiations increase, the budget of the UNFCCC has not. The secretariat is facing “severe financial challenges” with a budget shortfall of €78-million as of March 2024.

The UNFCCC is largely supposed to be funded by governments, and it is governments that decide on new agenda items and events and mandate the UNFCCC to carry them out. But those governments haven’t paid the growing bill.

This doesn’t mean all hope is lost, nor does it mean no progress has been made. Every single half-degree of warming matters and global treaties are still one of the only mechanisms to hold developed countries accountable to limit future emissions and pay their fair share.

Negotiating the negotiations

So back to that small room in Bonn, where parties met to discuss what, if anything, could be done about this mess. The UNFCCC secretariat put forward several detailed suggestions, none of which were uncontroversial. They could:

• Streamline agenda items, removing old “unnecessary” agenda items and monitor/limit new agenda items;


• Change the frequency of COPs or alternate COP locations, with the option of every second year at a small venue, and the “trade fair” staying home;


• Start charging for side events or conference attendance or both, relative to the means of each actor, and use that money to fund more developing-country NGOs;


• Prioritise giving more badges (access passes) to underrepresented groups/regions (basically, developing-country NGOs) and fewer badges to others;


• Livestream the negotiations for virtual participation; and/or


• Designate new zoning to separate the trade fair from the negotiations.

Developed countries pushed hard for streamlining agenda items in the name of efficiency, expressing concern about the size of COPs and their ability to follow all agenda items, given that multiple tracks take place in parallel.

Developing countries pushed back, largely because they know that developed countries can use “streamlining” as yet another tool to limit negotiation topics they want to obstruct anyway. While both developed and developing countries agreed that the regional imbalance in civil society representation should urgently be addressed, none agreed on how to find the badges and funds.

Developed countries expressed dismay at the UNFCCC cancelling the livestreaming platform “without consulting them”. Developing countries weren’t as dismayed, since limited internet access limits the public usefulness of this feature anyway. And no one mentioned the much bigger cut — that all regional climate weeks have been cancelled too.

Brazil pointed out that the size of COP wasn’t the real issue. The real issue is the massive imbalances of power in geopolitics, which cannot be solved simply by making COPs smaller. To this, no one responded.

There was one brief glimmering moment in which some developing and developed countries seemed to agree that the high-level political events that politicians fly in for on their private jets don’t matter. Maybe they could be done away with entirely? However, that evaporated almost as quickly as it was spoken about.

Almost all developed countries voiced hollow calls for parties to pay more money to the UNFCCC. These were directed at no one in particular and responded to by no one. Eventually, the sessions ran out of time to discuss any further matters.

Not a single action was agreed on that would make any difference.

They’ll all be back again in a few months at COP29 in Baku, while in halls and hotel rooms, civil society wonders if this isn’t a deliberate strategy — the gradual de-funding of a crucial global agreement in a slow war of attrition.

This year’s AIMs reflected the stark realities and contradictions within the UNFCCC process: the increasing size and complexity of the climate challenge, financial shortfalls in the context of huge wealth inequality and historical accountability, the persistent imbalance and mistrust between developed and developing nations — and an inability to find consensus on any action that might materially address the problem.

Yet, as these discussions grind on slowly from Bonn to Baku, they still carry with them the potential for genuine and lasting change by reshaping the form and function of the negotiations.

The UNFCCC may stumble, but it persists. We can only hope that while it stumbles, it may yet stumble forward. DM

Charlotte Scott is a programme manager and the Global Engagement and Learning lead for SouthSouthNorth in the Voices for Just Climate Action Alliance.  She is a PhD candidate and Canon Collins Sol Plaatje scholar at the University of Cape Town. She writes in her personal capacity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk