The Global Stock Take (GST) is the process called for in the 2015 Paris Agreement in which each party assesses the progress it has made toward its emissions reduction and adaptation goals. The first GST is happening this year at COP28. The preliminary report of the GST was released online in October (see posts from this blog on the preliminary report’s findings on mitigation and adaptation) and now that the parties are gathered at COP28 in Dubai, UAE, they are negotiating about the language and conclusions that will go into the final report.
The structure of the GST negotiations is different from the kinds of debates I am most familiar with at the Texas Legislature. Our legislature operates on a bicameral system, where bills are introduced by an author or group of authors, then debated in committees and on the floor of the House or Senate before a vote to pass the bill out of the chamber. An individual bill is identified closely with its author(s).
The negotiations for the GST report at COP are multilateral. The parties gather in a room and each person who would like to comment on the document has a chance to do so. A moderator guides the discussion by calling on individual parties when it is their turn to speak. The negotiations take place over multiple sessions on multiple days, in small groups which focus on particular sections and larger groups which take a broader view. At the conclusion of the negotiations a new draft of the report is created which incorporates the feedback offered by the parties. This process continues with multiple drafts of the report until the parties feel that consensus has been reached.
I have been to three sessions of these multilateral negotiations for the GST here at COP28. The first was a full session focused on large-scale comments on the first draft, or zero order draft. The second session focused on the language in the preamble. The third session focused on the main sections of the draft.
Two distinct perspectives emerged when the parties negotiated the content of the Preamble section of the GST. Some, including the United States negotiator, thought that the Preamble was best left as short and simple as possible. Others, including the European Union, felt that language addressing equity and human rights in the zero order draft should remain in the document as written:
“Reaffirming that climate change is a common concern of humankind and that Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, the right to health, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity…”
The function of the Preamble in the GST is to set the terms under which the remainder of the GST is written. Other similar leveling statements are included in the Preamble including a summary of the Paris Agreement’s call for conducting a stocktake, an expression of gratitude to those who worked to create the report, and a call for international cooperation against climate change. Keeping the equity and human rights language in the preamble elevates those ideals to primary importance and serves as a gesture of good faith, that the cooperative international effort to combat climate change will be conducted with justice and human rights as a priority.
The multilateral negotiation process allows each party’s voice to be heard in a way that is not possible in other forms of debate. All parties, from the smallest to the largest, the least developed to the most powerful, have the same opportunity to speak. Just as I observed at the Talanoa dialogue earlier this week, negotiation structured this way promotes listening and understanding to a broad array of perspectives. The tone in the room was strikingly different than the rowdy Texas House floor this past special session. For most of the negotiators, this arrangement led to a collegial environment where contributions were reasoned and constructive.
For an American (and Texan) weary of the way debate over legislation is often hostile, competitive, and focused on sound bites instead of substance, watching the multilateral negotiation process at COP28 was inspiring.
