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La Cour suprême du Canada tranche : les cadres ne pourront se syndiquer au Québec
Le 19 avril dernier, la Cour suprême du Canada a rendu une décision fort attendue en matière de syndicalisation des cadres.
Publication | August 2010
Yesterday, the Bonn story developed in the way we are now accustomed to: several AWG LCA drafting groups taking place in private and AWG KP meetings, all public, looking relatively amicable. Parties have crafted a rudimentary solution to the problem of a potential gap between Kyoto commitment periods, by deciding to amend Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol, where commitments are inscribed.
The EU is now on record with saying that Parties here are going backwards, re-opening matters agreed in the Copenhagen Accord in December 2009. In conversation, negotiators are hard pushed to find positive things to say about Cancun prospects.
Yesterday there were two interesting sessions, outside the main negotiations:
Nick Stern gave a masterclass on public finance from the AGF rostrum. While some developing countries feel that this group's mandate is questionable, it's clear the AGF is attempting to come up with more answers to the question of where climate finance will come from than others have done in the past. Some have suggested that their current suggestions do not appear to bring anything new to the table and there seems to be a desire to “get it over with”. The AGF will publish their report in October and only gave us a taster of what to expect. We do know that the group is considering carbon taxes and taxes on bunker fuels, among other potential fiscal measures.
The Mexican government appears to be in favour of deciding that Cancun will result in COP Decisions by Parties and not a binding deal on climate change, but consultations on the proposed outcome will continue among Parties.
On Monday we will summarise the main outcomes achieved by this conference.
Wednesday’s biggest talking point was the moment that Christiana Figueres was seen to cry during a Q&A session yesterday. The trigger for these tears was an innocuous question that a member of the delegation for youth asked her: “what kind of world do you think that we and our children will live in?”. The UNFCCC talks are no stranger to tearful speeches, or for that matter tantrums, but this has attracted notice because the Secretary-General’s role is under huge scrutiny and this is only Christiana’s first week in the job. Tears aside, the answers Christiana gave in the Q&A tell us a few things about our new Secretary-General:
Elsewhere, last month’s failed US Senate Bill on climate change overshadows events. The idea that the US will make good the emission reduction pledge it made at Copenhagen of 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020 (4 per cent on 1990 levels, where the EU is proposing cuts of 20-30 per cent) now seems improbable and this takes collective ambition levels down a notch. Another factor is that many Annex 1 Parties face a real/perceived threat of credit rating downgrades and climate change is a less pressing domestic issue for a government whose bonds may become junk.
The other important news is that the AWG LCA drafting groups are producing prodigious quantities of text and, negotiators are suggesting, moving further away from agreement. The negotiating text for the LCA track has grown to over 100 pages. Those parts that have been disclosed to Observers are full of provisional clauses and subclauses, enclosed in brackets. Most of the AWG LCA drafting groups is closed to Observers, so we can only conjecture what the big discussions on Finance (to be provided by Annex 1 Parties to developing countries) and (emission reduction) Numbers are about or whether tears are being shed in these rooms too.
Will our children and children’s children inherit dangerous climate change? Christiana, we feel your pain!
Here in Bonn, the once glorious capital of the FDR, Charles Dickens’ “Tales of Two Cities” famous opening line seems to sum up the mood.
The bad news is that, with only nine negotiating days until Cancun, Parties are not inclined to find new solutions to old problems. As we flagged in our Introduction to this negotiating session, the new AWG KP paper about the legal consequences of a gap between Kyoto commitment periods has set off a few ripples here in Bonn. With only seventeen months to go until the end of the first Kyoto commitment period, this paper should be focussing Parties’ attention on the endgame but in fact seems to be an added distraction from the goal of an agreement at Cancun, or more likely, Johannesburg. The paper puts three legal options on the table:
A contact group of Kyoto Protocol Parties met to discuss this paper on Tuesday but the discussion appears not to have been constructive. Parties don’t want to discuss ‘failure’ of the UNFCCC negotiations, which is what this paper represents, they would prefer to keep negotiating for a second commitment period even at this, the 11th hour.
The good news from Bonn is that discussions on Technology, Adaptation and REDD are proceeding with enough clarity and harmony for UNFCCC oldtimers here to contemplate agreement on these discrete areas before an agreement on emission reduction objectives, referred to here as “numbers”, is in the bag. Would a curate’s egg agreement on these three points, without a binding deal that actually reduces emissions globally, be a good thing?
The thirteenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP 13) and the eleventh session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA 11) are being held from Monday 2 August to Friday 6 August 2010 in Bonn, Germany.
An overview of the session can be found here: http://unfccc.int/meetings/ad_hoc_working_groups/lca/items/4381.php
Both groups will present their decisions to the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP 16) and sixth session of the Conference of the parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP 6), in Cancún, Mexico, which will take place between 29 November and 10 December 2010.
We will be attending the negotiations. We will be reporting back on interesting developments over the course of this week.
There remain limited opportunities for the Parties to hash out agreements, ahead of the Cancún negotiations, so the pressure is on for negotiators to resolve the trickier points and to come clean on their emission reduction objectives.
It will be interesting to note what use Parties make of the new documents, and in particular the AWG-KP document setting out the legal considerations relating to a potential gap between the first and second commitment periods, which document has caused significant discussion among Observers: http://unfccc.int/documentation/documents/advanced_search/items/3594.php?rec=j&priref=600005922#beg
Last August's negotiations were not fruitful, as UNFCCC sessions go, because walkouts by various Parties brought negotiations to a standstill. Can things only get better... ?
The following documents have been prepared for the session and are available at http://unfccc.int/meetings/ad_hoc_working_groups/lca/items/4381.php
The following documents have been prepared for the session and are available at http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/4577.php
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