 Today is Friday, the fifth day of the first week of the COP. It's the last day for the technical negotiations. They're supposed to be rounded up today and tomorrow in order for the ministers coming in on Monday morning to finalize things. But as typically happens in the COP, almost nothing gets resolved in the first week. Difficult issues get thrown up to the ministers and it looks like that is what might happen. I'm going to spend this video log talking about one particular issue that I follow. It's called loss and damage and it has both a long and a short history in the UNFCC process. The long history is that from the very beginning of the UNFCC we have heard from some of the most vulnerable island states in particular about the need to address potentially catastrophic losses and damages which we won't be able to prevent or we won't be able to adapt to. The rich countries, the annex one countries have fought this tooth and nail. It has been a taboo subject for them. For 19 years they fought it. They didn't allow it to happen. Until last year in Warsaw at the 19th Conference of Parties the developing countries got together and formed a very strong coalition led by small island states along with the least developed countries and the African countries and all the other G77 countries very strongly aligned and pushed for this issue to be finally recognized. And they got most of what they wanted which was to recognize it and allow it to be discussed in a separate mechanism which is now called the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. It has its own executive committee. It started with an interim executive committee. It will go on to a full executive committee. It has a two-year work plan that goes over COP 20 in Lima, goes over COP 21 in Paris and lands in COP 22 in December 2016 possibly in Marrakesh in Morocco. The interim executive committee has come up with a work plan that's being presented for endorsement here in Lima by the COP. COP is discussing it. There are two contentious issues. One is some countries are not happy with the work plan and want to open it up. The other one is the contention about how to set up the permanent executive committee. There are various formulations and suggestions for that. They're still discussing it. They will talk about it later tonight. They'll talk about it again tomorrow. If they can't resolve it at the negotiators level then unfortunately it will have to go to the ministers next week and we shall see what happens. That's with regard to the Warsaw International Mechanism. There is another issue here which is should Loss and Damage be recognized within the Lima text for Paris next year? Again, very contentious. Developing countries want it to be in there. Developed countries don't. Again, there is no agreement on it yet. We shall see what happens at the end of this week and then what the ministers do with it next week. This is something that is still on the table and remains to be seen but the result will be.