By lunchtime Ed King,head of international communications for the European Climate Foundation,shared a screenshot of the UNFCCC style guide section regarding the use of “invitations and requests” listed in order of strength from strongest to weakest.
“Requests” is stronger than “strongly urges” and “urged”.
“Active verbs,commas and colons. This is apparently how we save the planet at COP26,” King tweeted.
Shortly afterwards at an update session,COP president Alok Sharma reminded delegates that history was watching and requested they go back to the work of pursuing resolution and consensus. “This is our time to deliver on the high ambition set by our leaders at the start of this summit. We must rise to the occasion.”
For years vulnerable nations had tried to force this matter to the centre of the COP agenda and for years they had failed. Advanced economies sought to keep the focus on reducing emissions rather than creating a mechanism to pay the poor to fix damage largely caused by the wealthy.
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Advanced economies feared not just the cost of paying for damage and loss,but the tacit acceptance of culpability.
Talk in the corridors was that the EU and the US,climate progressives in other aspects of these negotiations,were not budging.
But with the backing of India and China,the developing world was not budging either.
The Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege,a stateswoman who carries real weight in these talks for her firm moral advocacy and as a chair of the High Ambition Coalition,a bloc of both wealthy and developing states that helped reshape the Paris Agreement,made the point with typical power.
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“Small island states are always the ones who are asked to compromise our interests in order to reach consensus,” she said as tensions increased over the finance showdown.
“These are not just words that we are conceding,it is our lives,livelihoods and our future.”
Some hours after dark the presidency accepted that COP26 would not end on Friday as scheduled,tweeting that a new draft would be released the following morning,and setting up another day of negotiations,of close reading of texts,of testing and pushing words.
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