SA’s president of the COP17 climate summit, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, is tohost informal talks with delegates in the next few days in an attempt to break a deadlock on bringing the $100 billion (R811.5bn) a year Green Climate Fund into operation.
The fund, which has its origins in the Copenhagen Accord from COP15 in the Danish capital, is designed to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to the impacts of global climate change.
There are high hopes that its approval will be one of the major outcomes of the Durban conference.
However, as expected, the US and Saudi Arabia blocked the adoption of a technical report on how the fund should be set up, managed and capitalised – “operationalised” in summit jargon – so it can reach the expected $100bn annually by 2020.
Yesterday the US and Saudi Arabia, which had expressed reservations at the conclusion of a seven-month, four-meeting process to draw up the report, refused to agree to the plenary adopting the report by consensus – the only way in which anything can be approved in the UN climate treaty system.
However, Nkoana-Mashabane persuaded the plenary – including the US and Saudi Arabia – not to re-open the report for debate, but to allow her to hold informal but “open and transparent” talks to try to break the deadlock and then report back.
Planning Minister Trevor Manuel, who was one of three co-chairs of the technical committee that had drawn up the report, said reverting to a debate about the report would probably prove fatal to the process.
The fund involved “complex processes” and he had known from the outset that a compromise would be needed at the end.
“In compromises you’ve got to strike a balance.
“I think we’ve struck a fairly well-balanced argument in the document itself – that’s what we have to go with.
“We need a document that will allow us to proceed to the next phase, and the next phase is implementation.”
Jonathan Pershing, the US’s deputy special envoy for climate change, told the plenary that his country had been “consistently supportive” of the fund since it was first proposed in 2009.
“We are committed to working with all of you to operationalise an effective and ambitious fund that can achieve its full potential.”
However, the US believed that work on the fund’s governing institution with its substantial detail had been rushed and that the final draft text had “raised a substantive number of concerns and included certain errors and inconsistencies”.
This was why it would support efforts by Nkoana-Mashabane to “design a suitable procedural approach” to take the matter forward and to address “a small number of problems”, he said.