Miliband Suggests UNFCCC Reforms: Smaller Groups, More Expertise

Reporting from London

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be far more effective if it relied more on smaller, representative groups of countries meeting year-round to hammer out the details of a future climate agreement, Britain’s climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, told Parliament.

He also suggested that the leadership of the UNFCCC’s annual Conference of Parties meetings needs an overhaul — instead of career politicians leading the way toward an international agreement, the COP needs diplomatic and climate change experts at the helm.

Miliband outlined several ideas for institutional reforms of the UNFCCC during a hearing last week before the UK’s Environmental Audit Committee.

The most likely of those reforms to be embraced at the international level are the creation and utilization of smaller groupings of countries to inform discussions in the larger body and a transformation of the COP presidency, experts say.

Fewer Voices, Focused on Progress

Usually known as "friends of the chair," smaller groups were utilized in Copenhagen, but only at the end of the process. Miliband remarked that he would like to see a smaller representative group of countries “that can take forward and inform negotiations” and liaise with the larger group of 192 countries.

The only reason a Copenhagen Accord was reached at all was “because we ended up with a small group with negotiations with a text that had been tabled. That only happened at Copenhagen at 3 o'clock in the morning" on Friday, the final day, he explained.

The secretary said he was “quite struck” that negotiators met so often without making progress, and that therefore, it is worth considering having national environment ministers involved in more frequent negotiations, which should improve political ownership of the process.

Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at IIED’s Climate Change Group, explained after the hearing that in the perceptions of many countries, that 3 a.m. negotiating session in Copenhagen was unrelated to what was happening in the UNFCCC.

“It became a parallel process of it’s own that was making substantive decisions and negotiations and horse trading that was unrelated to what was being discussed in the UNFCCC plenary, and that, I think, is very dangerous and that’s one of the reasons why the accord was not adopted in the end — it was foisted on the negotiators.”

Huq thinks small groups are a good idea, but the key will be to make the smaller groupings more transparent and legitimate.

Miliband and members of the committee also suggested that, at some point in the future, a UN security council for climate change or a WTO-like body could be created.

Huq says this is not outside the realm of possible, as smaller bodies have already been created for CDM management and adaptation and mitigation funding.

Expert Leadership

The other most likely reform stems from the crack up of the Danish COP15 leadership, which acutely exposed a central structural weakness in the negotiating process: such nuanced and technically specific negotiations cannot be done by a career politician and is indeed anathema to the process.

“I can’t overestimate the complexity of these negotiations," Miliband remarked. "Often these negotiations are conducted with reverence to what seem like biblical texts — which is the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and different clauses of those documents. Part of what the new person that does this job as the head of the UNFCCC needs to be, I think, it’s better it’s someone who is steeped in that and can get through this.”

Huq agrees with that assessment.