UN climate summit Madrid
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Actually, it should have ended on Friday at 6 p.m. But the 25th UN climate conference in Madrid has been extended and continues until the early hours of Saturday. The final statements are expected in the coming hours, but could also take longer.
The political director of the environmental and development organization Germanwatch, Christoph Bals, told the AFP news agency on Friday evening that it is quite possible that the negotiators agreed to a short break in order not to negotiate all night. In this case, his assessment for the end of the conference was: "Anything that would be before Saturday afternoon would be a sensation."
Article 6 is one of the biggest sticking points
There is enough to discuss: the design of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is particularly controversial. It also plans to use market mechanisms to increase and implement national climate protection contributions, the so-called NDCs. For example, a country like Germany could finance a solar power plant in an African country to reduce the use of fossil fuels and have these emissions savings offset against its NDC.
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Countries such as Brazil and Australia insist that pollution rights acquired under the Kyoto Protocol continue to apply under the Paris Agreement. Regulations are also being struggled to avoid double counting of climate protection efforts and to establish social and human rights standards for the projects covered by Article 6. Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) had not ruled out Article 6 failure on Friday morning.
The developing countries also criticize Germany
There is also controversy as to whether and how the review of national climate protection contributions by 2020, the so-called pre-2020, will be included in the conference decisions. The Paris Agreement has already entered into force, but its provisions will not officially apply until 2020. However, the industrialized countries had agreed to step up their climate protection efforts beforehand. Developing countries criticize that hardly anything has happened anyway and that some countries such as Germany have missed their 2020 target.
Climate finance is also being fought for in Madrid. Since the demand from developing countries to set up a separate fund for the compensation of climate-related damage and loss (loss and damage) currently has no chance of implementation, there is discussion about opening the Green Climate Fund to this aspect. However, no additional funding is planned for this.
In the video: Greta Thunberg at the climate summit
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You will meet again in Glasgow next year
Another central negotiating point is the question of how the so-called umbrella decision of the conference addresses the need for all countries to raise their climate protection goals in order to implement the Paris Agreement. The issue of climate protection is not officially on the agenda in Madrid. Only next year at the UN climate conference in Glasgow will the states of the Paris Agreement have to present their new climate protection commitments.
In view of the progressive and increasingly noticeable global warming, environmental associations and activists, for example from the "Fridays for Future" movement, are pressing for the climate targets to be raised significantly now or at least to be firmly committed to 2020.