 My name is Lou Versho. I'm the environment director at C4 and I'm talking today with Steve Leonard, who's our senior policy analyst here today. Steve, I'd like to just get your feelings as to where you think the negotiations are likely to go. What are the key issues we're likely to see in Lima? Yeah, so the climate negotiations at the moment in terms of a new climate agreement are occurring under a process which is the ad hoc working group on the Durban platform, which was a process that was established in 2011. At this stage of the process, it's looking at five elements within the context of climate, so mitigation, adaptation and means of implementation, which includes capacity building, technology transfer and finance. And in terms of moving into Lima, at the moment, there are a couple of outstanding issues. So one which I think is particularly interesting is around adaptation and moving in the direction of whether or not to establish a global goal for adaptation. And so there's a lot of discussion about how to go about measuring adaptation and so discussion moving in the direction of metrics to measure adaptation, which I find to be quite an interesting shift. We're seeing a significant change in terms of the balance between the discussion concerning adaptation and mitigation. The negotiations and the outcomes to date have been very mitigation focused, as you'd be aware. And so I think that we can possibly expect the new agreement to be more balanced in that context. There's a significant emphasis on scaling up finance. And so the recent IPCC report, which is emphasising the urgency of addressing climate, is important. So that's resonating through the negotiations in terms of finance, which is linked to the Green Climate Fund. Another important issue which is expected in terms of an outcome in Lima is the intended nationally determined contributions, which is known in terms of an acronym as INDCs. Now, the discussion here is the scope of the contributions, whether that will be only limited to mitigation or whether or not it will be a broader scope and include adaptation and means of implementation, so technology transfer, finance and capacity building. In terms of forests and land use, land use is expected to be included in INDCs and there's been some interventions to say that Red Plus will also be expected to be included as an INDC. So we're moving in the direction at the moment to determine the scope of the information and the type of information that will be submitted as a part of country contributions in early 2015. So Lima will provide a decision which will set out the scope of the information, whether or not it's to be limited to mitigation or whether or not it's to be inclusive of the other areas of adaptation and means of implementation. And the other side of the negotiations concerns the pre-2020 mitigation potential and so there's been a lot of work on going in terms of technical expert meetings to establish where there is pre-2020 mitigation potential that can be scaled up between now and 2020 and there's been technical expert meetings held on land use and more recently on non-CO2 emissions and with some focus on the agriculture sector and so there'll be an agreement that will come out of Lima there which is also within the same platform, the ADP and so it's intended to then provide guidance and direction to other institutions within the UNFCC, so the Green Climate Fund or the Adaptation Fund or the Technology Institutions to assist them in terms of prioritizing the direction and the provision of finance. Great. And for forests and land use in general, where do you see things going? There still needs to be some discussions around safeguards, right? Where do you see agriculture going in these negotiations and is it coming out only in adaptation or is it actually getting into the mitigation side of the discussion? Yeah, so just starting off with agriculture, it's currently being discussed within the sub-stop, the subsidiary body on scientific and technical advice which is an advisory body to the COP so the Conference of Parties or the broader UNFCC framework and the agriculture discussion is currently being dealt with within the context of adaptation mostly. There is some consideration of agriculture in a mitigation context that came through very clearly in the recent technical expert meeting which covered non-CO2 emissions so looking at the near-term potential in terms of mitigation from the agriculture sector. There's a roadmap that's been agreed as part of the sub-stop process which takes the agriculture adaptation discussion through to 2016. And where do you see the discussion on safeguards going? We hear a lot of talk that there's a need for additional guidance in the safeguards. Is there anything coming out of the preliminary discussions leading into the dilemma? Yeah, the safeguards discussion is interesting. It's been going on for a number of years so when guidance was originally developed there were a lot of criticisms as to whether or not that guidance was adequate and the reason that it was agreed on at that point in time was because there wasn't enough in terms of demonstration activities and implementation of RED Plus and reducing emissions from the forest sector on the ground. So a lot of countries wanted to wait until there had been more experience and more lessons learned in terms of the demonstration activities to then feed into the discussion. Some are still saying that that is needed so I have heard very recently that there's a potential for this discussion to even continue to go on which may well be the case which isn't such a bad thing because the safeguards information system is intended to be something that's evolving and built on over time in any event. So there's been a submissions process that was undertaken and a number of parties and non-governmental organisations have made submissions and the main concerns that are coming out is whether or not further guidance concerning safeguards will be an extra burden that will slow the process down so you have some countries that are further ahead in terms of implementation of RED Plus than others but there's a counter-argument to that when it comes to the capacity of least developed countries in the context of whether or not there's adequate guidance to enable them to be able to be putting safeguards systems in place and reporting on safeguards. So I think that we'll find these discussions will play out quite significantly in Lima with if any further guidance is to come out it will be guidance that attempts to take that balance into consideration. CSOs and Indigenous peoples are making a very strong argument in terms of enhancing emphasis on participation in the implementation of safeguards and reporting of safeguards and so that will also be a significant component in the negotiations in Lima as well. So Lou, I'd be interested to know in the negotiations in Bonn in June this year there was some concerns that were raised by Brazil in terms of the importance of finalising the discussion concerning metrics and the linkage between metrics and the new climate agreement and I'd be interested to know from you where that discussion is headed at the moment in the context of the current metrics issues within the Kyoto Protocol and also the importance of non-CO2 emissions in the pre-2020 term. Well the metrics issue is an interesting one, it's a very technical one and there was a lot of new information that came out of the IPCC report in the Fifth Assessment Report with new what we call global warming potential values which fix of relative value between the different greenhouse gases relative to carbon dioxide. So it allows countries to make trade-offs or decisions about how they're going to deal with the different greenhouse gases and the mix of greenhouse gases in their policies. So for example if you're looking at agricultural emissions and you want to deal with methane you want to try to relate that to carbon dioxide the global warming potential is one metric that you can use to relate methane in terms of carbon dioxide so many tons of reductions of methane is equivalent to so many tons of reduction of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide is also another one that's important in agriculture. The F gases in industry are also important. All of these have different warming potentials and the discussion around the metrics is because none of the metrics are perfect. So the global warming potentials shift over to the time frame that you look at so methane for example has a very high global warming potential if you're looking at 20 years and a very low global warming potential if you're looking over 100 years because it only lives in the atmosphere for about 12 years. So if you're looking at 20 years most of what's been emitted today is already out of the atmosphere. So that has a very variable warming potential. Nitrous oxide is very long and the gas it stays in the atmosphere for over 100 years so it has a very constant value as you look across time or time scales. But the global warming potential is not perfect because although it's called warming potential it's actually an energy measure. It's not a temperature measure and there are temperature measures. So if we're trying to hit a goal of 2 degrees C is the maximum warming we want to achieve the global warming potential isn't the best measure to use. It would be the global temperature factor that would be a better one to use. So these are some of the things that they're wrestling with. There's also trade-offs. The time frame that you use and the values you assign to these have a lot of uncertainty around them. So how do you factor that uncertainty into regulations for example? So if you want to regulate emissions from airlines and you want to factor some of these things into the design and operation of your airlines, your planes, how do you take this uncertainty into account? So it has a lot of implications between country negotiations for trade-offs, for implementation, just what the metrics are. And certain metrics have advantages to certain countries and disadvantages to other countries. Certain countries like New Zealand for example, 50% of their greenhouse gas emissions come from methane from livestock. And so their big emissions reductions are going to come in a non-CO2 greenhouse gas. How does that relate to something that another country is going to achieve if China is reducing its CO2 emissions from coal burning for example? How do those two countries understand what each one of them is contributing and negotiate between them? Who's going to do what and who's going to make what sort of contribution? So it's very technical but it's central to what they're doing. The good news is that the ultimate metric that's used has very little impact on the overall cost of emissions reductions. But it does have an impact on who pays the cost and that's where the rub really is. If I could just ask you another question. In terms of non-CO2 emissions there was a technical expert meeting that was held most recently in Bonn as part of the negotiations in October. And one of the interesting policy approaches that came out of that discussion in terms of pre-2020 near-term mitigation potential was the landscapes approach, specifically identified and it would be interesting to know how a landscapes approach is relevant to non-CO2 emissions and near-term mitigation potential in a pre-2020 context. The landscape approach is extremely important. The carbon emissions in landscapes only happens associated with land use change. But everything else is really the non-CO2 gases. So if you're fertilizing crops, it's nitrous oxide that's coming out. If you're managing soil, it's nitrous oxide that you're producing. If you're managing manure, it's nitrous oxide and methane that you're producing. And if you have livestock in there, it's enteric fermentation, the fermentation inside the animal that's producing the methane. So if you want to manage these landscapes and take a landscape approach to it, you have to deal with all these gases because at least half of what's coming out of those landscapes is typically not CO2 and these other gases. So I'd like to ask you, Steve, a bit about what's happening with finance and the Green Climate Fund. We have a major commitment by the U.S. government of $3 billion. We know that the target is to get $10 billion in the door by Lima and then scale that up. Where is that going? Are we on track to meet the targets that people are setting? And what can we expect over the next couple of years as we move towards Paris and beyond? The Green Climate Fund has been an interesting process to be following. Over the first couple of years, there were a lot of criticisms and a lot of people were commenting to me that they weren't expecting that it was going to be something that managed to get off the ground and the Green Climate Fund board has worked significantly hard to get all of the pieces in place to be able to have a framework that's suitable to potential donors. A resource mobilisation process was put in place around midway through this year where the Fund started to engage with donors and hold a series of meetings to inform potential donors on the framework and to look at obtaining potential pledges. There's been a number of pledges that have been made over the last couple of months. One of the most recent ones, as you correctly point out, is the $3 billion pledge by the US. Japan have also recently announced a $1.5 billion pledge and there are some reports at the moment about a potential pledge from Canada and potentially a pledge from the UK. I think that the Green Climate Fund will make it to the $10 billion mark or not it makes it beyond that and to the higher end of the desires there in terms of $15 billion then that remains to be seen. Perhaps not, but even so $10 billion in 2014 questions remain as to when that finance will be delivered, over what period of time that finance will be delivered bearing in mind also the ultimate goal there of the Green Climate Fund has pledged previously to reach $100 billion and be mobilising $100 billion in finance for climate adaptation and mitigation per year. By 2020 we still do seem quite a long way off in that context. There was a meeting recently in Barbados I believe that had some interesting outcomes for finance for red. Can you tell me a bit about what that was? Barbados meeting was interesting because it was the first meeting that was being held by the Green Climate Fund after it had put what it refers to as its eight pillars in place to be in a position to begin to mobilise finance and it was also its first meeting after a number of pledges had come in so the board had a much better idea as to what it was that the countries were seeking in terms of the fund itself. One of the interesting outcomes from Barbados was a decision concerning red plus and a results based payments framework and so the Green Climate Fund out of all of the areas of mitigation and adaptation red plus seems to be one which is being singled out for further development now there are some discussions concerning whether or not there should be a specific red plus window and perhaps as things develop within the Green Climate Fund there might be more understanding as to the specific requirements for red plus so two that come to mind immediately where the Green Climate Fund does need to do some further work are around alignment with the red plus Cancun safeguards and the Green Climate Fund safeguards which are inconsistent with one another so there does need to be a certain level of harmonisation between those two different approaches and also in terms of non-carbon benefits there's currently no clarity within the Green Climate Fund as to how the fund will incentivise non-carbon benefits in the context of red plus and so that then takes us in the direction of discussions concerning mitigation, adaptation, linkages to non-carbon benefits and these types of more technical and somewhat political discussions.