Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Ne­go­tia­tors, jour­nal­ists, ad­min­is­tra­tors and every­one in­volved in COP28 in Dubai get a chance to catch their breath on Thurs­day as the Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence takes a one day break. Un­til now, each day seemed to lead in­to the next.

Ear­ly signs in­di­cate ne­go­ti­a­tions have been in­tense but cor­dial.

As the night crawled to a close yes­ter­day, T&T’s Lead Cli­mate Ne­go­tia­tor, Kis­han Ku­mars­ingh, out­lined to Guardian Me­dia the Caribbean’s agen­da for the on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions.

This coun­try has made its po­si­tion clear re­gard­ing the glob­al stock­take, the first since the Paris Agree­ment was signed in 2015.

“We want an hon­est, ro­bust out­come for the glob­al stock­take so that par­ties can then use that out­come to make any course cor­rec­tion that they have de­vi­at­ed from.”Ku­mars­ingh said

Ku­mars­ingh says he is hop­ing for a “strong po­lit­i­cal out­come.”

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, Pen­ne­lope Beck­les, will cham­pi­on the glob­al stock­take on be­half of the Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS).

Mean­while, Ku­mars­ingh said he will con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor what pledges are be­ing made to the loss and dam­age fund which was his­tor­i­cal­ly adopt­ed on the first day of COP28 last Thurs­day.

“We now look for­ward to see what pledges will be made to cap­i­talise the fund but more than that whether these pledges are, in fact, go­ing to be kept be­cause we are still await the $100bn pledge to be ful­filled that was made in 2009,” the coun­try’s cli­mate ne­go­tia­tor said.

Among oth­er items on his agen­da, he will al­so like to see progress and a strong out­come on the glob­al goal on adap­ta­tion as well as is­sues re­lat­ed to just tran­si­tion. Cli­mate fi­nance is al­so a key point which he says un­der­lays each agen­da item.

Ku­mars­ingh sat through meet­ings of Sub­sidiary Bod­ies on Wednes­day.

When asked what was the tone of some of the ne­go­ti­a­tion, he said, “There is no in­di­ca­tion thus far that any of the ne­go­ti­a­tions have been ad­ver­sar­i­al to the point of break­ing down so we hope that at the min­is­te­r­i­al lev­el some of these di­a­met­ri­cal­ly op­posed po­si­tions can be brought to bear to com­pro­mise.”

Min­is­te­r­i­al seg­ments will be chaired next week and are usu­al­ly chaired by a min­is­ter from a de­vel­oped coun­try and a de­vel­op­ing coun­try to en­sure suf­fi­cient bal­ance.

Ku­mars­ingh con­firmed that as the Sub­sidiary Bod­ies closed on Wednes­day, there was suc­cess in some of the tech­ni­cal items of the ne­go­ti­a­tions as they closed. How­ev­er, there re­mained some items that were still un­der ne­go­ti­a­tion.

Next week will mark the start of po­lit­i­cal meet­ings where the min­is­ters will get in­volved to re­solve is­sues that have been lin­ger­ing with­out a so­lu­tion at the tech­ni­cal lev­el. Ku­mars­ingh says the glob­al stock­take is a large­ly po­lit­i­cal is­sue and he ex­pects it to go in­to the sec­ond week.