'Rogue attitude' of US hampered progress at Bonn summit: CSE

The "rogue and obstructionist attitude" of the US ensured progress at the UN climate summit in Germany's Bonn city was extremely slow and the "old divide" between the developed and the developing nations remained, a green body said here today.
The 23rd meeting of the Conference of Parties (CoP-23) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which ended in Bonn on Friday, had no real headway in resolving outstanding issues on the agenda, according to an analysis by the Delhi- based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
A CSE team was stationed in Bonn through the conference.
"The US's rogue and obstructionist attitude in the CoP process ensured that progress was extremely slow and hampered on several occasions and the old divide between developed and developing nations remained," the analysis said.

The Bonn summit was the first UN meeting on climate change since the US President Donald Trump announced intention to pull out of the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change in June.
The CSE, however, said that the US continued to dictate the terms of negotiations, blocked progress on equity and finance at the Bonn summit.

"Instead of working together and standing united against the US intransigence, the old bickering between developed and developing nations continued. This meant that the US continued with its business-as-usual obstructionist agenda in the negotiations and hampered meaningful progress on equity and finance issues across a range of agenda items, including stock take, accounting, enhanced transparency framework, adaptation, technology transfer," said Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of the CSE.

Vijeta Rattani, another climate analyst at the CSE, maintained that the US announcement was only a political decision with no legal bearing on the Paris Agreement, which has almost no legal options to contain the United States.
"Ideally, the US, having made its anti-climate agenda clear, should not have been allowed under any circumstances to determine the course of negotiations. Unfortunately, that did not happen," Rattani said.
The main outcomes, CSE maintained, were the 'Talanoa Dialogue, earlier referred to as the Facilitative Dialogue.
It is about stock take of the collective efforts, the outcome of which would determine the next round of the Nationally Determined Contributions in 2020.

The Dialogue would contain a technical phase - where Parties would provide the inputs - and a political phase, in which the outcome would inform improving of NDCs in 2020.
The final decision of the CoP, however, does not provide the details of the content and scope of the NDCs, the CSE said.
Another outcome, the CSE said, was that the developing countries succeeded in bringing immediate actions and pre-2020 commitments into the limelight.
"India was leading the demand on pre-2020 action. Parties agreed that there will be two stock takes to discuss pre-2020 commitments - in 2018 and 2019 - before the Paris Agreement becomes operative in 2020," the CSE said.

"India's stress on pre-2020 actions is encouraging, but it is more in the nature of procedure than action. It will require more than the ratification of the Doha amendment to make developed countries raise ambition and support commitments. The big question now is how to ensure that the rulebook for Paris Agreement is fair, equitable and ambitious, keeping in mind the fact that the US remains active and obstructionist in negotiations," Bhushan added.