Participants wait to enter the “just transition” negotiation room at the June UN climate meetings in Bonn, Germany (Image: Yao Zhe)
Each June, international climate negotiators descend on Bonn in west Germany for a two-week conference at the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Bonn is a mid-year checkpoint for the UN climate governance process. It precedes the much larger Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC, which this year is due to take place in the Brazilian Amazon’s city of Belém, in November. The Bonn conference features only a few side events and media activities alongside the negotiations, which tend to focus more on technical details and do not involve major political decisions. Its main objective is to lay the textual groundwork for the decisions to be made at the COP.
Dialogue Earth attended this year’s conference, which marked the first gathering of all the UNFCCC parties since the US announced its second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The 16-26 June meeting took on further symbolic weight due to an unusually intense heatwave. Temperatures had already soared to 35C in Bonn by late June – extremely unusual for northern Europe.
The first two days of the conference were spent bogged down in debate over which items should be on the negotiation agenda. Climate finance and trade measures proved to be the biggest sticking points. Ultimately, progress was made across multiple negotiation themes. However, observers and participants left Bonn hoping the Brazilian presidency will do more to encourage nations to submit genuinely ambitious climate action plans ahead of the Belém COP.
Negotiations move forward without US
Despite pulling out of Paris, the US remains a party to the UNFCCC. During Donald Trump’s previous term, the US delegation continued to take part in the climate talks. This time, however, the Trump administration chose not to send any representatives. This marked the country’s first absence since the UNFCCC launched over 30 years ago.
At Bonn, the multilateral climate action process continued anyway, with no sets of talks dropped or suspended.
In a departure from the previous two years, June’s negotiations did not centre around a single high-profile agenda item, such as a new global finance goal, or the Global Stocktake, which evaluates the action taken by parties to the Paris Agreement every eight years. Such a single-issue focus has the power to define the perceived success or failure of a COP. Instead, at Bonn, progress was made across multiple tracks in parallel.
What is the Global Stocktake?
The Global Stocktake is a key element of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Undertaken by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, it evaluates the progress made towards the agreement’s goals by every party. This evaluation takes place every eight years.
The first Global Stocktake was published in September 2023. Its chapters covered context, mitigation, adaptation, means of implementation, and finance flows. It found countries to be falling woefully short on the amount of action necessary to satisfy the Paris Agreement – and thereby mitigate global heating.
Ahead of Bonn, the Brazilian presidency highlighted three priority areas for progress following stalemates at last year’s COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan: “just transition”, or managing the shift to a low-carbon economy in a fair way; working out how to implement the findings of last year’s Global Stocktake; and reaching agreement on the Global Goal on Adaptation. Having been highlighted by the presidency, these issues attracted particular attention in Bonn, just as they will at COP30 in Belém.
On top of the presidency’s priorities, two emerging topics have attracted considerable attention.
Firstly, given that COP30 is set to take place in an Amazonian city, discussions around forest protection intensified. Can forest conservation secure a meaningful place in the eventual negotiation outcomes? In the end, the Bonn talks did not bring clarity here.
Secondly, the compromise on climate finance achieved at COP29 included a commitment to a so-called “Baku-to-Belém Roadmap”. This year, countries are expected to continue negotiations on concrete mechanisms to scale up climate finance and meet the USD 1.3 trillion target agreed in Baku. The outcomes on both fronts will ultimately be decided in Belém, but the Bonn meeting was expected to lay the groundwork for those negotiations to move forward.
If the above already feels complex and perhaps even a little tedious, then you’ve caught a glimpse of the atmosphere in Bonn: a setting steeped in technical jargon and protracted speeches by negotiators, where even the smallest step forward demands significant time and effort.
The unavoidable battle over the agenda
Of course, the absence of the US was not the only challenge facing the UNFCCC. As international climate governance continues to inch forward, the global political and economic landscape has undergone significant shifts, while the impacts of climate change have become increasingly pronounced. A tangle of old and emerging issues is now testing the effectiveness and adaptability of multilateral mechanisms.
The opening days in Bonn offered a vivid illustration of this tension, as negotiations became bogged down in a two-day standoff over the agenda.
Just before the talks began, Bolivia formally requested the addition of two new topics for negotiation. It did so on behalf of the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) group, a key coalition that includes China, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and 18 others.
Bolivia’s first proposal concerned the implementation of Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, which reaffirms the obligation of developed countries to provide climate finance to those still developing. This contentious issue, centred around what many see as a persistent shortfall in support from wealthier nations, has repeatedly resurfaced in recent climate-finance negotiations. Although a new finance target (USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035) was agreed last year through compromise, it failed to clearly define the scale or legal nature of developed countries’ contributions, leaving many developing countries dissatisfied.
The second issue focused on unilateral trade measures related to climate change, with specific attention on the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). While such measures claim to advance climate goals, the LMDC argues they will “increase the cost of global climate action” and run counter to the spirit of multilateralism. Similar concerns were raised last year by China on behalf of the Basic countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China). It reflects broader anxieties over the growing intersection between trade and climate policy.
Both highly charged issues are increasingly apparent in international climate governance. It is eroding trust between developing and developed countries and intensifying divisions in negotiations. Officially adding such topics to the agenda would open the door to structured discussions and the potential for binding outcomes. Not surprisingly, the LMDC proposals drew wide support from developing nations, while striking a nerve among major developed countries. The European Union, for example, opposed a “unilateral measures” agenda item.
Clearly, even a mid-year technical meeting such as Bonn is steeped in politics. The compromise reached by delegates after two full days held that the presidency would facilitate informal consultations on Article 9.1, while discussions on unilateral measures would be housed under the existing “just transition” agenda. Consultations were held in Bonn, but no clear conclusion was reached. The debate is likely to resurface in Belém.
The main negotiations could not begin until the agenda dispute had been ironed out. Critics argued that valuable time had been lost and suspected some countries of deliberately stalling the talks. Others defended the LMDC’s stance, stressing the importance of discussing these matters openly and systematically, even if doing so takes time.
Battles over the agenda are sure to recur in future meetings. Every move in the negotiating arena is underpinned by multiple strategic and political calculations. While such disputes may indeed be used as leverage and prolong the negotiations, it could be argued that they also reveal deeper concerns about equity and justice in global climate action. With or without the US, these are the deeper issues that the multilateral process must grapple with if it is to retain legitimacy and public support.
The road to Belém
Looking ahead to COP30, the Brazilian presidency has high expectations but also faces significant pressure. The team held numerous events in Bonn, both to present its vision for the conference and to listen to the expectations of various stakeholders.
A core presidency message emerged: the climate negotiation process has already produced a multitude of political declarations and commitments, and what is urgently needed now is the implementation of action to address climate change. The presidency hopes to steer COP30 into what it calls a “post-negotiation phase” under the UNFCCC. This concept has been broadly welcomed in principle, yet in Bonn the presidency did not offer a clear roadmap for translating this into concrete action.
Another key task in this year’s climate-governance process is the submission of a new round of climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The delivery by all parties of a new, more ambitious NDCs every five years is a fundamental obligation under the Paris Agreement. But as the name suggests, they are not the product of multilateral negotiation. They are determined by each country individually.
The UNFCC secretariat will conduct a global stocktake of the new NDCs, analysing the gaps between countries’ pledges and the overarching Paris goals, publishing a report before COP30. NDC diplomacy is an unavoidable and delicate task for the presidency. Beyond the formal negotiation agenda, how can the Brazilian team encourage a wide range of countries to submit ambitious NDCs on time?
The Belém team has already taken some initiative. In late April, Brazil’s President Lula co-hosted a virtual summit with the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, to elevate the political importance of the next round of NDCs. It was attended by 17 heads of government, including leaders from China and the European Union.
However, only about 20 countries have so far submitted their updated NDCs, and the quality of these submissions varies. Many government representatives and observers therefore expect the presidency to invest more energy and political capital into NDC diplomacy.
In addition to advancing the negotiations and climate diplomacy, the presidency must deal with more practical issues: Belém’s capacity to host a major UN conference, and the price of accommodation. The presidency organised a special briefing in response to many complaints. A total of 29,000 rooms and 55,000 beds had been arranged so far, it was announced, including nearly 4,000 rooms on board two cruise ships dispatched by the government.
So far, these numbers are more aspirational than concrete. Many people have not been able to secure rooms, or are discouraged by high prices. At several internal meetings of observer organisations, people repeatedly lobbied the presidency via Brazilian agencies. “Please make sure the presidency team knows that we are really, really worried about accommodation,” said one.
Currently, the road to Belém is not smooth.
Author: Yao Zhe
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence. Read the original article.
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