 Today is Tuesday the 8th of December and negotiations continue behind the scenes by the ministers in consultation. These are not negotiating on text but trying to find common ground. Ministers have been charged to do this and they continue to do that as we speak. I'm going to talk about an initiative that started here on Monday the 30th of November under the presidency of President Aquino of Philippines who is the current chair of the Climate Vulnerable Group. They had a big meeting with many leaders of the Climate Vulnerable Group with one demand for a 1.5 degree temperature goal. I'm very pleased to say that we started off with 43 countries and we had 105 countries from the LDCs Africa and small island states supporting it and now we are well up to 126 plus countries including some developed countries as well supporting the 1.5 degree goal and the momentum is on our side. We also had a civil society action on this we're getting tremendous support from civil society for this 1.5 degree goal and I'm fairly certain that we should be able to get it into the text on Friday when we end. However in exchange for this there will be some horse trading and we may have to give on others we are trying to hold the line that the mitigation target in order to get a 1.5 degree goal has to be stringent enough to get the goal so we don't want the goal to be symbolic we want it to be reality and for that to be the case we need stringent decarbonization within a 2050 time frame which is still tough to get and particularly large developing countries like India and China who still want to have the room to burn fossil fuels for a while are reluctant to sign up to a fast pace of decarbonization which is what a 1.5 degree goal means and so it's very much between the users of fossil fuels the sellers of fossil fuel like Saudi Arabia and the oil states who are opposing having a 1.5 degree goal because it will affect their business it will affect their economies and it will affect their perception of the way forward. However the Climate Voluntary Forum is extremely united Philippines is handing over next year to Ethiopia they have taken up the challenge of chairing the group and even though in the UNFCC the group has one agenda item which is the 1.5 degree long term goal they also have quite a few other activities planned in a three-year rolling plan that was agreed in Manila a few weeks ago and so once we go back from Paris there will be a lot of South-South exchange support for each other amongst the vulnerable countries group so that instead of just being known for their vulnerability they will be known for proactively tackling the issue of climate change.