Bonn 3 was supposed to be a quiet session, but chairman Michael Zammit Cutajar just raised the stakes. He told NGOs and delegates he views this meeting as part of the next big session in Bangkok… so this is now a major negotiating session, one week in Bonn, 2 weeks in Bangkok in October.

Zammit Cutajar also wants delegates to focus less on structure and more on substance — and there is a lot of substance to deal with before December. We have a negotiating text with 200+ pages, and this week delegates have to clean it up and trim it down into something more concise, consolidate it.

But we know they can do it because we faced a similar situation in Kyoto (1997). At this time in 1997, the draft text was over 120 pages and delegates whittled it down to about 50 pages by December. So it can be done.

The other big focus of this meeeting is to develop the workplan, the Agenda, for the October meeting in Bangkok.

Bonn 3 deal?

So we probably can’t expect some kind of mini-deal by the end of Bonn 3, and we probably won’t see any major breakthroughs in country positions, like numbers for climate adaptation finance, that sort of thing.

But we will see nations refine the details of their positions, narrow the negotiating text and continue to create the building blocks for a December deal in Copenhagen.

And everyone will want to know what is next for the U.S. as the Senate gets ready to take up climate legislation in September.

One of the hottest topics of the conference is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation — REDD. Getting policy discussions underway in the coming year is a top priority for environmentalists heading toward the Copenhagen conference in December 2009. REDD has had a rocky time the last few days here, however, with major U.S. environmental groups petitioning the convention to free it from the shackles of a technical panel. If it is released, the good news is that the approaches of the UNFCCC and the U.S. seem to be converging on some issues (despite U.S. delegation chief Harlan Watson’s admission in today’s press conference that he didn’t know the details of the U.S. position on REDD).

Provisions of REDD were part of the major Senate climate bill discussed earlier this year. In November, many members of the House of Representatives released a draft set of principles for their version of climate legislation, and it also contained REDD provisions. This is important because in early 2009, at the request of President-elect Barack Obama, Congress will draft legislation to reduce U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. It is very likely that this new draft legislation will contain REDD provisions.

In the U.S. legislative debate, market and non-market sources of funding have been part of the REDD provisions. Non-market funding, such as revenue from setting aside a portion of allowances, can be used to help developing countries do the necessary preparation to reduce deforestation. Market funding can pay for reductions once a country establishes its monitoring system, its emissions baseline, and a plan for reducing deforestation and channeling money down to the ground. A market and non-market REDD package is essential because national circumstances differ, country capacity varies greatly, and successfully tackling the problem of deforestation will require vast amounts of money for many decades. The Poznan delegates need to move forward on this and stop making excuses.