Towards Consensus on Equity
10 June 2013
ECO was overjoyed on Saturday when a number of Parties publicly called for a process to develop an Equity Reference Framework. Such a process would be an opportunity of the first order, one that could allow us to unlock ambition, maximise participation, and ensure success in Paris.
South Africa, Kenya, Gambia on behalf of the LDCs – ECO warmly welcomes your constructive interventions on this matter. We now encourage all Parties to make submissions to the ADP co-chairs ahead of Warsaw, and to support a Party-led process with extensive expert input designed to get us to a workable framework for assessing both mitigation and finance commitments.
Singapore – ECO agrees with you on the primacy of the Convention! But let’s please be clear on one critical point: No Party proposing an Equity Reference Framework has any desire to re-write the Convention. Just the contrary. The goal here is to ensure that the Convention’s all-important equity principles can be put effectively into practice.
ECO encourages all Parties to now put forward views on indicators that simply but adequately represent these principles. With these views on the table, Parties could then define a basket of indicators that help inform and bound the discussion. Such a basket would give the Parties and Observers a standardised context within which commitments can be prepared and compared, and against which both Parties and independent experts could test the adequacy and fairness of all commitments.
US – if it’s any comfort, we can assure you that nobody believes that it will be easy to focus the diversity of views on equity into a working consensus. But it is possible, and such an effort, pursued in good faith, would yield its own benefits. The next few years will not see us agree on every detail, but we can reach a consensus that is sufficiently precise, and sufficiently robust, to allow the Parties to agree to commitments that accord with both the science and a full operationalisation of the Convention.
The 2015 accord will only be ambitious and inclusive if it is also fair. On that we can all agree. With the EU, Switzerland and other Parties also showing openness to this discussion, week one of Bonn gave us hope for genuine progress on equity. ECO looks forward to many more constructive discussions over the week ahead.