 Hello everyone. I'm not the guest presenter. My name is Camille Cameron. I'm the Dean of the Law School and it's my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker for this many law school event, Professor Meinard Doe. And may I say how great it is to see people here? Clearly there's a cross-section of law students undergraduate and graduate, not only from Dalville but from other places and members of the university and the wider community, which is exactly what we hope to get at these many law school events. Today's topic is preparing for Paris, update on the UN climate negotiations and for that you've got a very qualified speaker. I won both of all of Professor Doe's many qualifications, but I'll show you that some of his research interests include climate change, environmental law, international environmental law, marine law, energy law and ocean governance. Right now Professor Doe is the Associate Dean Research at the Schulman School of Law and he's also a Director of our Marine and Environmental Law Institute. He specializes in environmental law and energy law with a focus on climate change and environmental assessment processes. And he's been involved in the practice of environmental law in Nova Scotia. That practice by the way is not only Nova Scotia based, it's also quite international. From 2000 to 2006 Professor Doe was a non-governmental member of the Canadian delegation to the UN, climate change negotiations, and he continues to follow those negotiations as an official observer. From January to May 2008 he was a visiting scholar at the Environmental Law Center of the IUCN in Bonn, Germany. And he co-chaired a strategic environmental assessment on tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy from 2007 to 2008. I could go on, but I won. That just gives you a flavor both from his practice experience and his research experience of his knowledge of this topic. I'm sure we'll all be smarter than when we came. At least I know I will. And so I'll turn it over to Professor Doe. Great. Thanks. So that's the way to do it. Keep expectations low. The one thing Camille didn't say is that she just returned from, she's a born Nova Scotian and worked around the world and we're very thrilled that she came back this summer to become our dean. So she's just starting as our dean. And we're thrilled to have her here. Alright, so climate negotiations. I'm going to give you, I want to spend most of the time talking about what's happening now and what's going to happen in Paris. But I thought I'd give you just a bit of a sense of the context. And we could spend days just on the context. So I won't do that. But I want to give you a sense that this is, and many of you will know this, that these negotiations haven't just started in the last couple of years. In fact, they have been going on for over 25 years. So formal negotiations were initiated by the UN General Assembly in 1989. They led to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. It was open for signature in 1992. It took two years to ratify. So, you know, it all seemed a bit slow at the time, but things have slowed down quite a bit since then. So we actually were making pretty good progress at the time. It then took three years, again seemed like a long time, to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, which contained the first binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We'll talk briefly about those. It took eight years for the protocol to come into force. So now we're starting to see things taking a lot longer. The Kyoto Protocol contained a commitment period, a first commitment period, meaning there were intended to be future ones that started in 2008 and went to the end of 2012. Negotiations for a second commitment period were very slow to get started. The amendments were not finalized until 2010, and they're still not in force, and were two years past the end of the first commitment period. So we kind of have a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, and it runs from 2013 to 2020, but the agreement that brings that into existence is not yet in force. And then since the amendments were agreed to, we've been focusing our attention on what happens after the second commitment period, if it ever comes into force, is over. And it's clear that what happens after 2020 will not be a third commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. It will be a completely new regime. And so the current negotiations, which kind of informally have been underway since 2005 in Montreal, formally were initiated in 2007 in Bali, collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009, where we started in 2010 in Cancun, so have really been underway in earnest now for five years. And so the deadline is Paris this year. So that's what I want to focus our discussion on. Just a bit of context in terms of the existing regime, consisting of the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, just so we have a sense of what the institutions are, because they are still the same institutions or some of those institutions are now negotiating the new regime. First of all, from the start, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been designated by the Framework Convention, by the parties to this convention to be the source of the science. So this was done to avoid having huge debates about the science, so there's a consensus-based science body that provides science advice to negotiators. And initially that focused on heart science, on kind of understanding the problem and understanding the biophysical consequences of increased greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations. But the concept of science for the IPCC has broadened significantly, so it's now looking at socio-economic consequences of various mitigation options and so on. So it's taking a much broader view of the scientific advice that is useful to negotiators. So we have that, we have the IPCC, then we have the Secretariat that provides administrative support for this regime, and then we have the Conference of the Parties, which just means all the parties that have ratified the Framework Convention, which is really all countries, all UN member states. And they are in control of the substance. They're the ones that negotiated the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It is the Conference of the Parties that negotiated the amendments to the Kyoto Protocol in 2010. And it is the Conference of the Parties to this Framework Convention that are currently negotiating the Paris Agreement. Alright, so the first product was the Kyoto Protocol. I know I said at the outset it's about to die in another five years, but it's still relevant to know a bit about it because a lot of the negotiations are about what elements of the Kyoto Protocol worked, which ones maybe worked a little bit too well, so we try to get rid of them, or which part didn't work at all, so we need to fix them. So a lot of the negotiations are kind of in comparison to the Kyoto Protocol. So for example, an element that I think worked too well for some parties was the compliance mechanism. So we're not likely to get as strong a compliance mechanism in the Paris Agreement as we had under the Kyoto Protocol. But at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol were developed country targets. So there was an annex created, a list of developed countries. Countries that were considered to be developed countries at the time this was negotiated in the 90s, and those countries, which is essentially Europe, North America, former Soviet Union countries, and Japan, Australia, New Zealand, that's essentially it. So they are given, they accept under the Kyoto Protocol, absolute limits on emissions within their territory. And the emissions that are covered are six greenhouse gases. The most important of those are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. And the focus is on total emissions per country, not on per capita emissions, not on the life cycle emissions of products that are being used. There are all kinds of different ways that you could allocate responsibility, but the choice made was total emissions per country and reductions relative to those emissions. And then in addition to these emission reductions per country, the Kyoto Protocol provides for emission trading, trading between countries that have targets. It provides for the opportunity to develop projects to reduce emissions in countries that don't have targets. So a way of engaging developing countries in emission reductions funded by developed countries. And then joint implementation is kind of a mechanism that allows developed countries to cooperate in achieving emission reductions. Other elements are sinks, which are mechanisms to take carbon back out of the atmosphere, largely so far about A and D forestation. And then the Kyoto Protocol has fairly advanced mechanisms for accounting for all of this, accounting for the emissions, accounting for the credits that countries hold as a result of emissions trading and clean development mechanism projects and so on. So quite a rigorous accounting system. And the strongest compliance system we've seen in any multilateral environmental agreement to date. And at the time it was hoped by the way that it would kind of be leading the way and others would adopt it. There were a few that where there was an active debate about whether a similar system would be adopted. It hasn't happened yet and it's not likely to be repeated in the Paris Agreement. Okay, so now turning to the current negotiations. I think the first thing is that it's important to understand a little bit about the struggles that have led to the long delays in negotiations, the inadequate targets, the battles between developed and developing countries. And it's very complicated, but I do want to identify a couple of key things. One is that there has been an ongoing debate largely between along the lines of developed to developing countries about what is the overriding principle that should guide the allocation of the burden that countries should bear in addressing the problem. And the debate essentially is that developing countries are saying and have said for a long time that historical responsibility is the appropriate way to allocate overall responsibility and developed countries by and large have said its capacity. What's interesting about that is that when you compare the numbers, it actually doesn't make a huge difference. So this is historical pie chart that breaks up the world based on historical emissions. So essentially what you do is you add up all the emissions from the start of industrial revolution to today and you allocate them to countries. You say, okay, U.S., how much of the global emissions to date are you responsible for? The answer is 29%. Do the same with the EU, it's 22%. So that's historical responsibility. Capacity, you can do it different ways, but the difference isn't huge. So I've done it based on GDP and when you look at the numbers, U.S., 29%. EU, the slightly better on this than on historical responsibility, it's 17 compared to 22. So based on that, you would expect that the U.S. wouldn't care, right? And if anyone would care on the developed countryside, it would be the EU. Reality is the reverse. So question, why is that? Well, I think the reason for that is that there are legal implications to liability implications and implications for the negotiations, whether you base the negotiations on historical responsibility or whether you base them on capacity. If you base them on capacity, whatever you can do is great. Whatever you can't do, everyone else has to just live with. If you do it based on historical responsibility, then if you fail, you face liability or at least you face responsibility for the unmitigate climate change. So it was never about the numbers. It was about the responsibility and the liability that we're not just now starting to talk about, and I'll get back to that, because just since 2010, have negotiators even started to talk about loss and damage, which is exactly what is left after you've mitigated and adapted. So kind of the priority is you do whatever you can on mitigation. You adapt to the changes that you can't avoid through mitigation, and loss and damage is what's left over. And the loss and damage bucket is getting bigger and bigger because we're not doing enough on mitigation, and there is a limit to what we can do on adaptation. So the implications of this debate are getting bigger and bigger because it's becoming more and more clear that there's a huge liability on the loss and damage side. Okay, so that's one aspect. The third one that I listed here was potential. And the big issue with potential is simply that where you find the capacity or where you find the responsibility, however you define it, is not necessarily where the potential is to make the emission reductions. So you can have the greatest responsibility in the United States, but the greatest potential to achieve emission reductions may be in China. So that's that challenge, which means that in order to take the most effective approach to reducing emissions, there needs to be willingness from the place that has the highest responsibility, the highest capacity to transfer resources in terms of funding, in terms of capacity, in terms of finance, in terms of technology to countries that have the greatest potential. And global cooperation has just not evolved enough to make that process easy. So this chart is a chart that kind of gives you a bit of a sense of the potential developed to developing countries. So this is a chart on a per capita basis. So I'll just point out a couple of things that it shows. So it goes from, I think, 1992 to 2000 and something, 2005, no, 2008, sorry. So what it shows is, number one, that the green line is developed countries. The blue line is developing countries. So on a per capita basis, there's a huge gap in emissions between developed and developed countries. So if your concept of potential is that we should be reasonably close on a per capita basis, clearly the largest potential is in developed countries. On the other hand, you see developed countries' emissions going down on a per capita basis, 18% over this period, and developing countries' emissions on a per capita basis going up by almost 30% over that same time period. So if you want to avoid emission increases in developing countries, the greatest potential is clearly in developing countries. And we have missed the opportunity over the last 30 years, while we've been negotiating, to avoid a 30% increase in emissions in developing countries because we haven't been willing to help them. Now, we have achieved an 18% emission reduction in developed countries. But that's the issue of potential, right? It's a question of how do you define it? And then how do you match potential with responsibility and or capacity? Okay. So the last thing, a slide that I will show you before we get into the details of where we are is the graph that is generally considered to be responsible for the negotiations in Copenhagen failing and collapsing in 2009. So in 2009, there was all kinds of excitement because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had kind of made predictions about what level of emission reduction was needed by developed versus developing countries, made some assumptions about what's an equitable allocation of emission reductions, and it had come up with a two-degree scenario. And that two-degree scenario was kind of endorsed in Bali. It wasn't accepted as binding or anything, but it was endorsed to some extent. So there was all kinds of optimism that the outcome in Copenhagen two years later would result in an allocation of the emission reductions that were needed to meet the two-degree target. And the thought was that it would be reasonably easy to do that because everyone seemed to accept kind of the division of responsibility suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which by the way I thought was a huge risk by the IPCC because there's all kinds of ethics and economics and all kinds of issues kind of underlying whatever assumption you're going to make about how you allocate, but it wasn't controversial. That was the surprising part. So what happened then, I think many developing countries realized what was at stake by the time they got to Copenhagen, and I think this chart illustrates it. So what happened was developed countries went into Copenhagen and they were kind of weak on their short-term targets, but they accepted what the IPCC said they should do by 2050. And they said, we don't even, we have a two-degree target and we want to say what we are going to do between now and 2050. And they said to developed countries, you don't have to say anything. And developing countries said no, and they said no because of this chart, right? So they put this chart out and said, what you're essentially saying, you're prepared to do that and what that leaves for us is this. And they said, that is not fair, that is not an equitable way of distributing responsibility. And the main thing, the main message was, you have not proven to us that this is an adequate development path, that this allows us to develop in a way that allows us to provide reasonably for our populations. Because we never come anywhere close to what you needed to develop to where you are. So this is, as I said, that's generally held up as the chart that resulted in the collapse of the negotiations in Copenhagen. Okay, so now looking at where the negotiations are, first of all, we have targets for 2020, so mission reduction targets for 2020, which largely came out of the Copenhagen Accord, then kind of confirmed in Cancun. They are inadequate, there's no question about that. And then we have commitments, short for it is INDCs, independently determined commitments. So these are commitments identified by countries themselves, not imposed, no principles to determine what a country's commitment should be. Countries are being invited, and same thing happened in Copenhagen. Countries came forward with their own commitments. So many countries have done this, so most countries indicate what they're willing to do by 2020, and 117 countries, by my last count, have done it so far in preparation for Paris. And most of the rest are expected to do this in the next few weeks. And today, like in the last few days, if you go like every day, there are five to 10 more that are coming. So it's coming in pretty fast right now. But they're inadequate, there's clearly a significant emissions gap. So that's one reality that the negotiations are facing. The United States and Canada are not part of the Kyoto Protocol. Japan, Russia and New Zealand are still part of the protocol, but have not accepted second commitment period targets. So that's just more information about why Kyoto is dead. In addition to that, we're in a situation where some developed countries, most notably Japan, Australia and Canada, have lowered their targets since Copenhagen and Cancun. And certainly for Canada, we're not on target to meet those targets. So the message, unfortunately, to developing countries is that these commitments are not being taken seriously. So that is hurting the negotiations. No question about that. Another reality is that the European Union is not as strong a leader on this issue since it expanded to 27. So since the expansion to Eastern Europe, we now have countries like Poland that are quite resistant, very heavily reliant on fossil fuels, especially on coal for electricity. And they have been very reluctant to adopt ambitious targets. I'm not quite sure why internally this can't be worked out within the EU, because you would think that there would be ways of encouraging Poland to come along, the technologies are there. My understanding is a lot of their power plants are way past their commercial life. So they're ripe for replacement. I just have difficulty understanding. But the reality is the EU has not led as strongly as they used to. And then based on what I've just said, it probably won't come as a surprise to you that many developing countries have been reluctant to take on tough commitments. They're insisting on differentiation, they're insisting on differentiation in terms of the substance of what they agree to in terms of the level of review that the international community is entitled and in terms of the compliance mechanism. So their approach is you have proven time and time again that you don't meet your commitments, certainly some countries. But we haven't been in that same situation. We have so far met all our commitments under the Framework Convention. So you should give us an opportunity to demonstrate that we can do it without binding consequences, without perhaps the commitments being binding. So those kinds of dynamics have affected the negotiations. But it's not all bad and actually I think over the last six months the news has been surprisingly good. Well, you might go back almost a full year. So the United States and China signed an agreement last year, provided details of how they plan to implement that agreement. Again, not enough, but a significant commitment to reduce emissions and perhaps most importantly the first clear sign of cooperation between developed and developing countries. So we seem to be getting away from this dichotomy and this standoff. And other key developing countries like Brazil and South Africa also are showing domestic leadership in terms of what they're doing and what they're willing to commit to. So what are the key issues for the negotiations in Paris? So here they are, the legal structure. I'll talk briefly about that, giving this talk in a law school. I have to talk about legal issues. Emission reductions, adaptation, loss and damage, finance, technology and accountability on compliance. So we start with law and we finish with law. So the legal structure. The main issue is about what goes into the core agreement and what goes into what are called COP decisions. And the importance of that division is that whatever is in so-called COP decisions, conference of the parties decisions, is generally considered to be non-binding. It's easy to change. It doesn't get ratified. And so the big issue is what's in the core agreement on the assumption that the core agreement will have a higher status than the COP decisions. But that's not a given. There are countries that would like to see everything in the form of decisions of the conference of the parties that don't have to be ratified, that are not binding, that can be changed from year to year. A lot of flexibility, but on the other hand there's a lot of concern about whether countries will take those kinds of decisions seriously and whether there will be backtracking in future years. Having said all of that, you know, we had a binding agreement in the Kyoto Protocol and we had a country, Canada, who had a binding commitment that then simply withdrew from the protocol. So it kind of shows you a bit of, yeah, you know, symbolically this may be an important issue, but it remains to be seen how important it is from a practical perspective. It would, however, at the minimum show the level of commitment that countries have currently in the issue. One of the big challenges in terms of the legal nature of the agreement is that I think President Obama is trying to avoid having to go to the Senate in his country for ratification. And so they're pushing very hard for an agreement to ratify without it. And there's lots of debate among legal academics in the United States about what is required for the different forms of agreement that are possible, but far from any agreement on that. So at the end of the day it almost doesn't matter. What matters is what advice is Obama getting about what options he has. And also there's always a question, is he using the issue to get something that maybe he doesn't need but like to have? So then the key issue then becomes what is in the core agreement? So there's been some pressure to have new principles in the core agreement. They're not likely to go very far, but there are many kind of new emerging principles that countries and many non-state actors have been pushing for inclusion, consideration of human rights, climate justice concept, gender equity and others. Those principles are not likely to go very far in this agreement, but it'll be interesting to see. Then clearly mitigation and finance commitments will have to be in the agreement, in the core agreement in some form. There's a huge debate about whether loss and damage will be in the core agreement or not. This is being resisted very strongly by most developed countries. Having said that, there was a signal in negotiations in June this summer from the US and the EU that seemed to indicate some willingness to bring loss and damage into the Paris Agreement. Then there are all kinds of questions about what kind of accountability and compliance provisions will be in this agreement. It's clear that it won't be a strong enforcement mechanism like we had in the Kyoto Protocol, but this is an issue that really doesn't seem to have gotten the attention of negotiators, so there's a lot of concern that there just won't be very much because all the focus is on what are the targets and no one's thinking about how do we ensure compliance at the end of the day. Then in terms of the COP decision, this is where all the detail goes and everything that countries can agree to put in the core agreement. Then the third piece will likely be annexes, which one would expect will have the individual targets that countries are putting forward. The big question there is what is their legal status? Do they consider to be part of the core agreement or not? The advantage, of course, again, is the legal status. The disadvantage is that it may be difficult to amend them. For example, under the Kyoto Protocol, there was lots of debate about countries that were in annexes that were listed as developing countries, having become developed countries since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated and there were all kinds of efforts to move countries from one annex to another and they generally haven't worked. If the annexes with the targets are embedded in the core agreement, there needs to be an effective mechanism for updating those because, as I said at the outset, we know that the targets are inadequate. So that's the legal structure. The next issue is the mitigation, the emission reduction part. So there is general agreement on the two-degree goal with the exception that some countries are still pushing for 1.5 and they're largely small island states because they have pretty credible evidence, scientific evidence that at two degrees they're going to disappear. So for them, the two-degree target doesn't really help very much. So the question about whether two degrees is enough is a live issue in the negotiations. But then the second question is, will it be met? And so far we're far from that. As I said, we have, by last count, 117 countries have made their post-2020 commitments. There will be a review of those, but a very mechanical review by the secretariat. More importantly, many non-state actors have done all kinds of analysis and that analysis is going on and I'll show you a couple of graphs about that. So that's where the, I think, more credible information is coming from in terms of who is doing their share and who isn't. The bigger question is what will happen after Paris because it's unlikely that the gaps will be made up between now and Paris. It's not really the focus of the negotiations even. So it is unlikely that unless there is domestic pressure in individual countries, it's unlikely that the targets will change. So that puts the issue front and center for the negotiators. How do we get from what we agree to in Paris two adequate targets? And so the interesting thing about that and the key difference between this situation and what we had in Copenhagen and what we had in Kyoto is that there is a formal acknowledgement that the targets are inadequate. So like lots of people said, the Kyoto targets were inadequate. But the parties didn't agree that they were inadequate. So here we have an agreement that they're inadequate. So that puts a lot of pressure on countries to come up with an effective mechanism or effective ways to upgrade those. So there seems to be agreement that countries will not be allowed to do what Canada has been doing, which is backsliding. So there will be a provision against backsliding. But I think the more important question is how do you decide who has to up their target? Does it continue to be up to individual countries? Or can we reach some kind of agreement about what is an equitable distribution of the target? And so can there be a top-down element to the question of whose targets are adequate and inadequate? So what's the process after Paris? How long are the cycles? There was a long debate. I think the debate is now resolved, whether the cycles would be five or 10 years. The debate seems to be resolved in the favor of five-year cycles. So, yeah, and then issues like fair distribution, funding, and technology support. So many developing countries, not surprisingly, have put forward emission reduction goals that are contingent on access to technology and access to resources. So working those elements out will be critical. And then what kind of mix of bottom-up and top-down? So I want to just give you a bit of a sense of where we are compared to where we need to be. So if you're an advocate of the two-degree target, then this gives you a rough idea of where we should be. If you're an advocate of 1.5, then this is the trajectory we should be on. And the blue are current policy projections, and the pink are the pledges that have been made. So the difference between the blue and the pink gives you a sense of how much of the gap we have bridged with the commitments that have been made, the post-2020 commitments that have been made, and the yellow-green to blue area, depending on where you end up, gives you a sense of where we need to go. So the gap is significant. This is not just the situation where we have to tinker with the targets that are being put forward. It's a significant gap. In terms of who is doing what, again, lots of sources of information for this. I just pulled one out that nicely had some of the key of the countries I was most interested in on, but there are many others. So this one has, don't worry about the numbers in the middle. So we have Australia, Canada, EU, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, and the US here. And the only ones that show or kind of have medium ambition, which means they come close to being adequate, are the EU, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States. Okay, so the next one is adaptation. I won't spend a lot of time on this. It's a very interesting area, but really the most controversial part of this for the negotiations is funding. The question is how much of our effort, in terms of funding, do we spend on this versus mitigation versus loss and damage? So in the interest of time, I'll skip over that. I'm happy to talk more about that if there are questions. Loss and damage, as I said first, made it on the agenda of the UN climate negotiations after about 10 years of trying from developing countries. In 2010, in 2013, parties agreed to the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage, but it was part of the adaptation issue. It wasn't a standalone issue at the time. It has a very weak institution. There's no substance. So in other words, there's no agreement on what this mechanism shall do. There's no agreement that it will provide funding. So it's a starting point, but it's a very small step. And in the two years that it's been in operation, it hasn't really done anything of substance. Long delays and getting members appointed, it's clear that there are parties that don't want this issue to progress. They agreed in a moment of weakness after two days of no sleep in Cancun to putting this on the agenda, and in 2013 to address the issue as part of adaptation, but they don't want to be held liable for loss and damage, and they're doing everything they can to prevent that from happening. So this will be a critical issue, and if the negotiations in Paris fall apart, I would say this will likely be the issue. My sense is if developed countries do not agree to adequate progress on this issue, developing countries will walk away. And I think what we saw from the EU and the United States this summer when they signaled that they were open to having this included in the core agreement is in part a recognition that this is a live and die issue for developing countries now. So it'll be interesting to see how far that goes. Finance is in reasonably good shape in the sense that we have robust institutions. These institutions were agreed to in Copenhagen and formally adopted in Cancun and have done a lot of good work in terms of how to ensure that the money, when it comes, is actually spent properly and that there's proper supervision of that. The problem is the amount of money. So the commitment that was made in Copenhagen in 2009 was that there would be $30 billion over a three-year period from 2010 to 2013 and that the amount of funding would be increased to $100 billion a year by 2020. And Hillary Clinton made that commitment initially on behalf of the United States that they would contribute to this but it became part of the Copenhagen agreement and was then endorsed in Cancun the next year. The problem is the $30 billion were more or less provided but since then there's been very little. So the expectation from developing countries I think was that this commitment meant that you start with $10 billion a year and you gradually ratchet up to $100 billion a year. And when negotiations didn't go very well developed countries said no, we didn't commit to that. If we have an agreement for 2020 then we'll make $100 billion available but there's no commitment about what will happen in the meantime. Now recently as negotiations have gone better developed countries have made new commitments but we're still very far from figuring out where the $100 billion will come from and one of the things that wasn't clear in the original commitment was that for developed countries this was a mix of public and private money. Developing countries were expecting all public money. So developed countries want to use market mechanisms to mobilize the $100 billion. Developing countries want a check put to the Green Climate Fund that they can then access as of January 1, 2020. And they wanted to increase after that. And by the way, the $100 billion a year is pretty conservative relative to what credible institutions have estimated developing countries will need to do their share of mitigating and adapting let alone dealing with loss and damage. So it's not an unreasonable request but it's a huge challenge. Technology again in pretty good shape. A mechanism was again agreed to in 2009 established starting in 2010. The mechanisms up and running. The two missing pieces are the main one is again funding but the other piece that could reduce the amount of funding needed is an agreement on how to deal with intellectual property rights. This is an issue about most intellectual property that is needed by developing countries is owned by private companies. Generally private companies whose primary market is in developed countries. So often the technology isn't suitable in developing countries without further innovation. No one wants to spend the money doing it. But also even if you did it, it would be too expensive. So the question is do you change intellectual property rules to require companies to make these technologies available to developing countries at a reduced cost or do you spend public money to ensure that they be available? Those are the two choices and neither of those two choices seem all that attractive to developed countries at the moment. So that'll be a key issue. Accountability and compliance I won't spend a lot of time on because I want to make sure we have a good amount of time for questions. But it's about... So the bottom line is in terms of the negotiations we have very little indication of what they're going to agree to other than it's clear that we will not have a continuation of the Kyoto compliance system. The accounting part has generally worked reasonably well so I expect that the new system in terms of keeping track of emissions and any credits will continue kind of generally along the same lines but it is very unclear what of any kind of a compliance system we're going to get out of Paris. So how do we assess whether we have a good agreement? I just jotted down some thoughts and then we can have a discussion. So I think a valid question to ask is whether the mitigation and funding commitments are adequate. I think you probably already have a sense that the short-term commitments are likely to be inadequate certainly on the mitigation side. On the funding side we'll have to wait and see. Then more importantly perhaps are there good mechanisms for reviewing and adjusting the commitments to make them effective and fair? Are we striking a good balance between ensuring that these commitments are firm and that we have the ability to make the adjustments because if we learned one thing from the Kyoto process is that if you have a process that's difficult to adjust you can be stuck in a rut for a long time and so hopefully we'll strike a good balance there. Does it fairly allocate the burden and benefits? Will it help the global community meet the Sustainable Development Goals? Just recently adopted. Appropriate allocation between the core agreement and the other two components. I think I've talked about the rest of this. So what to watch out for? The draft text, the next version of the draft text should be out sometime soon and then shortly, so probably in the first to second week of October then shortly after that is the last negotiating session before Paris and then the Paris conference is from November 30th to December 11th and so the last couple of bullets are just about recognizing that their negotiations happening and they've been happening for a long time at different levels. So you have heads of state negotiating at very high levels, you have negotiations happening at the senior negotiating level about some of the key technical issues and then you have technical negotiations that are looking at the minutiae and one of the unfortunate things about these negotiations is that we tend to spend a lot of time on the minutiae before the big picture is resolved because negotiators, heads of state, senior negotiators don't want to give up any of the big issues until the last minute. So that means that the technical negotiators have to work out 20 different scenarios on how to resolve an issue so that when the heads of states come to Paris they can pick one once they've agreed and all the technical stuff is ready to go. That is an inordinate waste of time. It's a little bit better this time than it was in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen we had like a 200 page text and no one had any idea which options that were in the various sections would make it out and in the end none of them really did. So here there's a much better sense now of there's still many options in the text but there's a much better sense of which options countries are taking seriously so hopefully that will get resolved. But just so you have a sense that these negotiations happen at those three different levels and of course they also happen at sub-national, national, bilateral and regional and global levels. We recently heard about the EU meeting with Brazil and the United States meeting with China and now with India and so on so this stuff is going on all the time to try to work out and build alliances on some of the key issues. And what's interesting is that one of the I think big differences between this and prior negotiations is a lot of the bilaterals are between key-developed and key-developed countries. So I'll leave it at that and hopefully that leaves enough time for questions. Go ahead. Do you want me to go back to it? Sure. Just wondering if dare I ask the residents, Hans, I think that's the right term, was calculated into that or is that just like is this a immediate reduction or is this a cap for the carbon and what's being needed now to stand out here for 100 years? It does account for that. It does. So these are the emissions that you need just to still be able to meet the 2 or the 1.5 degree target taking that issue into account. That's why they're pretty steep emission reduction. That's a good question. So you mentioned the EU and I just want to dive in a bit deeper in there. Right. So what's their current stance then and like within the COP? Are they involved? I know they are from what you've been telling me but I mean how far are they? Okay. So a very good question. I don't want to leave the impression that the EU has become a lagger than this. Right. So the EU's targets are still more ambitious than any other targets in terms of straight numbers. When you actually compare the level of effort that is needed to meet those targets I think it's fair to say that currently the US is offering to do more between 2020 and 2030. The EU is in a situation where they're going to exceed their 2020 target based on policies that have already been implemented. Right. So after that the level of effort they have to put depends a bit on what they accept in the end but the target that they've put forward so far is generally recognized to be at the same time adequate in the sense that it's a fair share of the burden but at the same time certainly a lot easier than what the US is proposing but at the same time for example a lot more ambitious than what Canada is putting forward. Okay. Thank you. So after October 19th if there's still a harper led conservative government what will Canada's will be at the negotiations and then the same question if there isn't a harper led government? Okay, so I mean if there is a harper led government I expect business as usual which means that the INC that has been the target that has been put forward will stay and beyond that to be blunt I don't think they will have much impact on the negotiations. Canada is not in a position to object to anything the United States accepts they may grumble about it but other than the target which is weaker than the United States target they really can't do much to block the negotiations because this is the target they put forward so I'm not sure that they're going to be they're going to cause a lot of damage to the negotiations but the flip side is there are opportunities to ensure and I'm less concerned about the target but I think there are opportunities to ensure that we learn from the past and put in mechanisms that actually help us match it up efforts and so what I'd like to see for example is we have the no backtracking agreement what we don't have what I think is critical I think you want to have a mechanism whereby any time that a country is willing to increase its ambition it should be allowed to do that so whether we have a government that is willing to do that in 2016 or in 2018 or in 2020 whenever that government is in power it should not take 10 years to convince the global community that Canada is willing to accept a tougher target it should be easy and no backtracking commitment should apply to that I think that is the way that you move towards higher levels of ambition not this idea that we need to all negotiate and put forward our targets at the same time we all do it at the same time there's always going to be a mix of countries that have progressive governments on this issue and governments that don't want to do anything so I think that is one of the critical things and that is something that a new government might put forward I'd certainly like to see that so I think it's on that front that I think a new government can make a difference I think to expect a new government between October and December to come up with incredible new targets is unrealistic and I think it's actually dangerous I'd prefer to set a target next year to be clear when you come to Paris that you want a way of doing that as soon as you're ready you mentioned that developing countries might insist on having loss in damages and I can understand why the developing countries are really going to fight against that so are the developing countries coming up with some strategy or some method for determining let's say there's a severe weather that could cause damage to the proposal as to determine what fraction of that damage should be borne by the development I guess the first thing is to say that there is quite a bit of work that has been done on that broad issue so the first differentiation is between slow onset and severe weather events so slow onset stuff is pretty easy to allocate to or to attribute to climate change with severe weather events I think that's a choice to be made by the global community but I think once you have a commitment to contribute to severe weather events based on the climate component of that we already have all kinds of commitments based on capacity to help with severe weather events so if you're willing to bring the two together the whole issue becomes somewhat moot I think the bigger question is how do you fund it because I think the issue of how you fund it is separate from the question of how do you allocate I think at the end of the day if it's adequately funded we will help countries that face severe weather events whether we do it because we have the capacity to help them or whether we do it because of our responsibility to climate change that's a different matter but I think the key will be to come up with a funding mechanism that provides an incentive to mitigate and adapt so in other words what I'd love to see is a funding mechanism where those that admit the most contribute the most and you could actually potentially and there is a proposal on this that has been put forward you could force the contribution directly from the emitter into the fund where you say okay, you know, per ton of carbon 50 cents goes into a fund and that fund is then available for, you know you set up an institution that makes good decisions about the kinds of issues you're raising but that fund then has a mandate to ensure that the countries are fairly compensated for loss of damage yes oh sorry I was just going to ask if you said that some of the issues such as climate justice are not going to really get very far I don't know why do you say that it seems like a very important issue but my point is only so far I haven't seen countries push for the explicit inclusion of climate justice as a principle in the core agreement that doesn't mean that climate justice isn't affecting how you allocate responsibilities whether you, for example, have a loss of damage mechanism all of those kinds of things are consistent with the principles of climate justice but what I was referring to was in the Framework Convention you have certain principles that are set out as guiding parties in their decision making afterwards so they include things like precaution common but differentiated responsibilities and so on and so there is a push mainly by non-state actors to bring in human rights gender equity and climate justice and it just doesn't look likely to me because I haven't seen it reflected in party positions the federal IDP has committed to introducing new IDCs if they win so it's interesting to hear you say that you feel it might be dangerous actually for so what I said was or what I meant was it's dangerous to develop it between now between the election and the COP I mean if you have a well thought out target that has been developed with a good understanding of what can be done that's a different matter my question is how do countries access that fund that $30 billion fund like how does that get distributed? you talked about the $30 billion that were made available between 2010 and 2013 so there's an institution that most of the funding went to although not all of them went to that so the short answer is at the end of the day for the $30 million that was up to the donor country so if you wanted to you could put some of the money into the adaptation fund which then had rules for who could access it under what conditions what they could do with it or you can put it into the green climate fund which then meant it was available for other things there's a special climate fund there's a special fund for least developed countries so there are a bunch of different funds that countries could commit to and some of the money was also bilateral so there is a process that was initiated again by the collapse of Copenhagen called nationally appropriate mitigation actions which meant that developing countries could essentially put on a registry projects, mitigation projects that they thought would be effective in reducing emissions in their countries and essentially the registry was then seeking the fund for those projects so that's one way in which developing countries have used their contribution to the 30 billion they just looked at the project and said this looks like a good project so we'll fund it short answers in a variety of ways yes, oh sorry I'll go with it because you didn't have a question before go ahead my question is more about enforcement mechanisms and I don't even mention that the Kyoto Protocol had the strongest that we've ever seen so far and I guess the Kyoto Protocol personally is not considering countries to just drop out so I'm curious if there's really any point in wasting a lot of time developing funding for enforcement mechanisms I feel like it's just kind of fluff in that sense first of all we have experience from elsewhere about how you can solve the problem that we ran into with Kyoto so it's just a question are countries willing to do that so they're number one you can make it harder to revoke your ratification of a treaty of course the risk you take is if you do that countries may not ratify in the first place but I think that's actually an effective thing to do because certainly it would have worked in this case so the other part is that you need to think about how you can provide an incentive for being a party if you can do that then you have a much better chance of encouraging countries to stay in and to comply and then if you have a strong compliance system within the mechanism then I think you have the package and I'll give you an example of what countries did in another regime that could be applied here and that is in the Montreal Protocol and also depleting substances countries are not allowed to trade in also depleting substances with countries with non-parties so if you're a non-party then you're excluded from a significant trade so for example one of the things that we could do that is similar there may be better ways of doing it and you're not allowed to buy fossil fuels from a country that is not a party seems like a pretty effective way of getting a whole bunch of countries motivated to want to be part of the Kyoto Protocol that may not work for all situations but it's the kind of thing if you think carefully about how do you provide an incentive to be part of the regime and then you implement a mechanism and then I agree it could have been strengthened but if you do a combination of those two things then I think you can have an effective response is it our emissions reductions carbon emissions or does it encompass emissions targets on all the green gas gases before it's built to the extreme it's the latter so it's all six gases so it's referred to as CO2 equivalent I'll just go back to previous answer who would seem that international trade agreements are, I don't understand international trade is a way of enforcing compliance is there any hope for this lessons in fact there is some sort of melding of WTO agreements and lessons of this well so that's a huge problem so I would say currently what you're raising is a potential problem because we have never been tested but there were those that argued certain from the trade law side that argued that the mechanism in the Montreal protocol was in violation of the WTO so it potentially could have been a challenge on those WTO and then you would have had to work out whether in fact that's the reason why I think it would have had a reasonable chance of being outheld because the WTO reluctance to strike kind of things that have been negotiated in good faith in a multi-lateral context but there potentially could have been a challenge but you're right that there's all kinds of potential for using trade rules for the good but I have seen no signs of that so far in fact I was just in Ottawa a couple of days ago giving a presentation on the investor protection provisions under CEDA the Canada EU trade agreement and some of the environmental implications that I saw of that and it wasn't a lot of interest in what I had to say so I'm not optimistic that we're soon going to get trade agreements that are sensitive to environmental issues yes to what extent do these types of negotiations now for future and post-financial to account breakthroughs and perhaps unknown things like activity in the Arctic so can you explain a little bit more about what you mean I guess to the extent that we're not sure what our missions might be if we were to say open up activity extraction activity or the light in the Arctic so how can we anticipate a reduction now if we don't know where our missions might be for 2020 or something right so I guess the basic idea is that you have a choice you can either choose your path and then your economic path or whatever and then decide how much you can deviate from that or you can choose where you need to go in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and then choose an economic path that will get you there that would be I don't see any scenario any two degree scenario that allows us a vibrant fossil fuel extraction industry in the long term if we want to make a fair contribution to addressing climate change we have to get off the extraction of fossil fuels there's no question about that it's a choice you do one or the other right so I don't know if that answers your question I guess because it looks like the developing countries don't want to make changes they're going to be so that in many ways is the fundamental legitimate fundamental question about the climate how to solve the climate crisis and I guess what I could say is that the biggest hurdle we had for the longest time was that there wasn't an adequate recognition from developed countries that you cannot expect developing countries to take on targets without assurance that you're going to help them meet the needs of their population and attain a reasonable standard of life I think there's a growing there are a couple of things that have happened one is that there is more willingness from developed countries to help developing countries the second is that there is more and more recognition that there are synergies between addressing climate change in developing countries and addressing other basic needs so for example on the electricity side if you are in a country that doesn't have any electrical infrastructure now the combination of solar and batteries is likely to be a cheaper way of providing electricity to rural places in developing countries than building a coal burning power plant so there are huge and India is at the forefront of this they have recognized that they have hundreds of millions of people that don't have access to electricity and it is a lot easier and cheaper for them to put a solar panel on somebody's roof with a little battery so that they can run a light at night for reading and so on then to build the infrastructure that is required to get the power from a coal burning power plant to introduce these rural communities and that is just one example a more controversial one is transportation I mean I think if we haven't already the Volkswagen thing hasn't helped we are eventually going to recognize that the idea of private transportation as a primary mode of transportation was a huge mistake and the problem is we can't tell developing countries you can't have a car but I am hopeful that developing countries will recognize you know by maybe going to Europe once in a while and seeing how wonderful it is to be able to take a train everywhere you go and not having to own a car not having to worry about parking it and maintaining and so on so I think there are opportunities to leapfrog a completely different development path that can result in higher quality of life address climate change and reduce pollution and poverty and so on so I mean I can go on about that but it's amazing the opportunities that are there in that regard having said all of that none of that should diminish the challenge that developing countries face and the need for developed countries to to be very clear that they're not going to leave developing countries hanging on this issue that in return for developing countries making an effort developed countries need to commit to helping them find a low emissions sustainable development path that's the path that we need any other questions yeah so you mentioned before like when you were talking about the developed and the developing countries you did say about the developed ones that it would be a market driven way to generate their funding right for the clock but then you did mention the developing ones it was like a check type of thing so did you mean that they would just rely on public finance yeah I think the assumption from developing countries was that developed countries would include a contribution to the fund in their annual budget and they would make public funds available to aid the other developing countries that doesn't mean that the money would go straight to the government of the developing country that is a huge question but on that front I think a lot of progress has been made I'm sure there will be all kinds of problems but a lot of progress has been made in trying to figure out how you ensure that the money is well spent and who should it go to and public participation at a community level in decision making and those kinds of things but not to diminish the challenge of that yeah because I mean like you're saying right now it's a great challenge because a lot of times that money is misused especially well coming from South America I mean the governments are very corrupt so I'm generalizing but from what I've learned from history it's a huge challenge well, if there are any more questions thank you