UN Climate Talks in Bonn Result in More Climate Talks in Bangkok

The annual subsidiary body meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Bonn, Germany over the past two weeks have made so little progress that another week of talks has been scheduled in Bangkok in September. The goal this year in Bonn was to work out the details of a “rulebook” to implement the 2015 Paris climate treaty. This rulebook would then be approved at the twenty-fourth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, to be held in Katowice, Poland in November. 

As always, the main obstacle to progress was the unsatisfactory answer given by the developed countries to the question from the developing countries: Where’s the cash? Here is the first sentence from Mark Carr’s story for Bloomberg: “Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations finished with developing countries demanding more clarity from their richer counterparts on when a promised package of $100 billion in [annual] aid will materialize.”

Several meetings to build political momentum leading up to COP-24 have also been scheduled. The first will be a ministerial meeting in June called the Petersberg Climate Dialogue. California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is also organizing a Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in mid-September.