This is no detailed summary of the Durban Platform, nor a comprehensive policy response on behalf of the Youth Delegation.  There are detailed summaries elsewhere, written by many more informed, intelligent and eloquent people than I.  Mark Lynas provides one outstanding summary; Opinio Juris, a legal analysis or two; the  European Journal of International Law, another; and Alex Lenferna of Adopt a Negotiator, a detailed analysis posted on the day (!).   This is simply my personal reflection on the outcome of COP17 and subsequent coverage.  It is my attempt at articulating where I think we might have gone wrong – and how me might set it right.

The last days of the Conference were full of emotional highs and lows.  As the Conference stretched overtime, our experience within the ICC became ever more surreal.  On the Friday night, the DEC hall was disassembled around us.  As we left, evicted shortly after 2am on the Saturday morning, we found the very entranceway to COP being taken apart.  When we got back to our hostel and checked in online, we found that, first, several NGOs had pushed back and we were in fact not evicted from the Conference Centre, as meetings were ongoing, and, second, that a new set of texts had come out.  And those new texts looked good.

Saturday brought less optimism.  Another new round of texts emerged.  The youth still present occupied a corner of the ICC and planned and ran a very successful press conference.  But, generally, little seemed to be happening during the day on Saturday.  Negotiations seemed, at least from our limited perspective, to be stalled – and already a day overtime.  Sebastian Duyck of Adopt a Negotiator summed the mood up well in a piece entitled “Endless Conference Towards an Agreement on Never Ending Negotiations“:

The atmosphere in the corridors of the conference centre is now quite strange. At first, NGOs have spent many hours reading the proposed texts up and down. After a few hours, the situation is now relatively awkward, with hundreds of delegates waiting for a verdict.

The proposed texts are clearly unsatisfactory.

As the evening turned to night, however, the plenary sessions of each Ad-hoc Working Group reconvened, and the word went out that (sometime) overnight, a deal would be done.

That night was strange and surreal. By ten o’clock, negotiators were asleep in the plenary and every couch in the ICC had someone napping on it.  I visited a friend from the Canadian Youth Delegation at the Reuters desk in the International Press Centre downstairs.  The only people who looked more exhausted than the negotiators were the journalists.  I remember attempting to buy coffee at one am, behind a man who was implausibly enraged that he couldn’t buy a cheese platter to go with his wine (or wine to go with his cheese; I forget which) in the only cafeteria still open.

On the actual, substantive side, it became very clear that in both the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA), the draft texts were clearly unsatisfactory to many States.  Venezuela alleged that it had been threatened.  The Chairs declined several delegates’ pleas to speak.  Under the process of the UNFCCC, consensus is required. A draft text, once approved by the appropriate Ad-hoc Working Group, is passed onto the plenary session of the Conference of the Parties itself for final consideration.  Two things seemed clear: The Conference of the Parties’ plenary would start in the early hours of the Sunday morning, and it would be controversial and hard-fought.  Things seemed to be falling over – but didn’t.

We liveblogged developments here and on Twitter until 3:30am, as the COP plenary was getting into swing.  Then, with a laptop on my lap, I fell asleep.  I was woken by the Chair’s gavel falling at 6:30am, declaring the 17th Conference of the Parties closed.  Frantically, I scrolled back through other blogs and our friends’ Twitter feeds, trying to work out what I had missed.  It seemed that sheer exhaustion and frustration sealed the deal more than negotiation and diplomacy.  Negotiators admitted to not having read the full text – but passed it anyway.  From Adopt a Negotiator:

In the final plenary discussions on both the Kyoto Protocol and Long Term Cooperative Action, disagreements were gaveled past and disputed texts were forwarded to the main COP plenary despite objections. In the COP plenary decisions were pushed through at an incredibly quick rate, so much so that it was not clear that all parties understood what was going on and many objections from the earlier sessions were not dealt with. At one stage the Russian ambassador declared, that although he did not know what was going on, or what was being passed, he would nevertheless not block progress. Just how many other parties were similarly confused as decisions were gaveled through remains to be seen. So what did they actually decide on, and how is it going to affect our future?

I will not forget how the UN Security officer finally asked us to leave, shortly before 7:00 am:

It’s over.  Please leave.  It’s finished.  It’s done.  Nothing is happening, look.  Just go.  I want to go home.  My plane leaves this afternoon. I want to see my family.  I need to go back to my hotel.  Please leave, so I can go home.  Please…

Friday, at COP17, lasted 54 hours.  It took its toll on everyone – even UN Security.  Most of the NGO community was drained, totally exhausted.  For the negotiators, it must have been worse.  By the Saturday, several negotiators had, they told us, slept for less than three hours in four days.

When I got home, I trawled through every source I could, trying to work out not just what had happened during the last three hours that I had slept at COP17, but what had happened at COP17 overall, and what the outcome would mean.

The initial coverage was positive.  For “the first time” (forgetting, perhaps, the Bali Roadmap) a global treaty on climate change was on the cards, said the Guardian.  Naturally, the UN Secretariat welcomed the deal:

In a statement issued by his spokesperson Mr. Ban said the new accord is “essential for stimulating greater action and for raising the level of ambition and the mobilization of resources to respond to the challenges of climate change.”

Perhaps uncharacteristically, the Herald’s coverage (from AFP) was more uncertain, quoting Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace at length:

“The grim news is that the blockers lead by the US have succeeded in inserting a vital get-out clause that could easily prevent the next big climate deal being legally binding. If that loophole is exploited it could be a disaster,” said Greenpeace director Kumi Naidoo.

“Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.”

I began to piece it together and distill it down. What did the Durban Platform mean?  In short:

• Negotiatons on a new track, to replace to AWG-LCA (though the AWG-LCA will have some final business left to finish), with a view to a new deal to be agreed by 2015 and in force by 2020.  This deal will be “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force”, but might not be legally binding.
• On the AWG-KP track. very weak second commitment period, of uncertain length, under the Kyoto Protocol, amounting to very little more than a voluntary regime, but keeping the Kyoto Protocol market mechanisms alive.
• A renewed commitment to the Green Climate Fund of $100bn for climate change adaptation and mitigation every year from 2020 on – but still no idea where the money would come from.
• There were real changes in the geopolitics of the talks, with shifting alliances.
• States recognise the “Gigatonne Gap” between what they have committed to doing in terms of emissions reductions and the reductions needed to achieve the UNFCCC’s stated goal of limiting warming to two degrees – but aren’t (seriously) acting to close it.

For more detail of those outcomes, I really do recommend the links set out above.  The deal was complex and almost Byzantine, and summarising it in five bullet points is definitely inaccurate – but you get the idea.

For me, though, the question was: Is this deal better than no deal?  I kept returning to it.

The deal preserves the credibility of the UNFCCC system.  It achieves progress in some areas.  It provides a platform for global efforts at mitigation.  It is definitely a step forward.  Allowing four years to negotiate a new treaty and another five for it to enter force is, in truth, realistic.  We don’t want another Roadmap that isn’t followed, or another Copenhagen, full of unrealistic expectations.  We also don’t want another Kyoto Protocol situation, where a deal done in 1997 only became workable in 2002 after the amendments made by the Marrakech Accords, and years were lost before it entered force.  Diplomatically, there’s no point rushing to a bad deal – or one that many States just won’t ratify.

On the other hand, more importantly, this deal almost certainly locks in at least two degrees climate change worldwide.  Under the Durban Platform, the decade 2010-2020 could become the “lost decade” for climate change.  And our situation is extraordinarily urgent.  If emissions peak in 2020, by many studies, it would be impossible to reach two degrees warming.  Others suggest that, worldwide, we’d need twice the emissions cuts of the fall of the Soviet Union (and the complete industrial and economic collapse it brought).  With the emissions reductions proposals on the table, we are looking at warming of 3.5 degrees or more.  According to the International Energy Agency, we have five years to achieve the two degree target.  From that, scientific, perspective, a deal by 2020 amounts to little more than a deal on who will shut the barn door after the horse has bolted.  To quote No Right Turn:

In other words, our governments at Durban have just decided to let the planet burn, so they can continue to live in artificial, unsustainable comfort for another decade. This isn’t just a matter of them ruining the world for their children and grandchildren; they’re also ruining it for you and me. I expect to live for another forty or fifty years, barring accidents. And these rich, polluting fucks have just decided that the world I’m going to be living in will be much worse than the one I live in now. As you might be able to tell, I’m pretty pissed about that.

Perhaps, I wondered, it would be better if no deal were done. A better outcome might be for the world’s governments and for civil society to fundamentally lose faith in the UNFCCC system, which, 20 years after the Framework Convention’s birth at Rio, has not halted or arrested climate change.  Perhaps a failure in Durban could galvanise a popular movement into action.

So where did Durban go so wrong?

The problem, it seems to me, is a clash between two fundamentally different senses of what is realistic.  I do not believe that the negotiators willingly sold out humanity.  With respect to No Right Turn, I don’t think a decision was made to let the world burn.  That’s understandable rage, expressing a fair sense of betrayal.  But, fundamentally, the problem is the different timescales.

Climate change, though to many still appearing distant, demands urgent action.  From a scientific perspective, only urgent action is realistic.  To a climate scientist, the diplomats’ talk is unrealistic.  It’s slow and ponderous and complicated and completely missing the point.

On the other side of the coin, to a diplomat, what is realistic is what is politically achievable.  By any stretch of the imagination, what the diplomats are trying to do under the UNFCCC is ambitious.  Drafting a text at the UNFCCC is drafting by committee, with 194 people with massively different worldviews and ideas and interests all fighting over the pen.  I get frustrated trying to draft a document in a committee of four people – let alone 194.  And each person – that is, each government – faces a barrage of interest groups firing salvoes of competing demands.  And often those demands aren’t good ones.

I don’t envy the negotiators.  Their job is extraordinarily hard. I might not always agree with many of them, but I can sympathise with them.

What is needed, I think, is a disruptive moment.  We need a quite radical paradigm shift.  We cannot go on relying upon the ponderous progress of international negotiations.  They are too slow – and we cannot expect them to be faster.  Their slowness is built into the structure of the system.

On balance, I think we are better off for the Durban Platform.  It’s not ideal.  If nothing more is done, it locks us in to two degrees of warming.  But, in truth, the alternative could be nothing.  Perhaps Durban is the difference between 3-4 degrees and 6-7 degrees.  And that’s not good enough.  It’s progress, but progress down a track that is simply too slow for what we need.  We cannot leave the problem of climate change to the negotiators.  The UNFCCC will not solve climate change.

It’s time for a massive popular movement.  That, I think, could be the paradigm shift.  George Monbiot declared in his book Heat that we in the industrialised world are climate change.  We may be, as people, also the solution.  After Durban, he concluded that governments acted for the elites, not the people: they bailed out the banks but won’t spend the same on the climate.  We, the people, can change that.  I’m told that the international climate movement, in raw numbers, is already the biggest movement in human history.  In raw numbers, this is already bigger the civil rights movement or the anti-slavery movement or any anti-war movement.  Our governments will act when we make it clear that action is what we demand.

For the first time, over the next five years, our governments must do more than they have promised to do under the UNFCCC rather than less.  It is up to us, as their citizens, to make them.

New Zealand’s record at COP17 is, frankly, embarrassing.  We came third overall in the “Colossal Fossil” stakes, beaten only by Canada and the United States.

CAN involves the youth NGOs in the daily Fossil of the Day ceremonies.  Each year, one youth delegation takes the role of ringmaster and presents the award.  This year, our friends in the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) had that dubious honour.  When a country receives a Fossil, generally, representatives from that country’s youth delegation are the ones on the podium.

We collected entirely too many Fossils this year.  Here’s a list.

First Place: Friday 9 December 2011

New Zealand won a golden Fossil on the last official day of COP17.  It was awarded for the Hon Tim Groser MP’s statement that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol would be “actually an insult to New Zealand“.  From CAN:

New Zealand wins the 1st place Fossil. The New Zealand government got a Fossil this week for severely mixed messages about its Kyoto Protocol 2nd Commitment Period stance. This time, it made it clear, describing Kyoto as ‘actually an insult to New Zealand’. The only insult is to the citizens of New Zealand and the rest of the world, who will have to suffer the costs of climate change.

Straight from the source:

I didn’t come here to negotiate with 10 young New Zealanders.  What they’ve unfortunately bought without realizing it is the whole drum beat on KP, KP, KP, as if somehow they don’t understand that a deal that locks in only 15% of emissions is actually an insult to New Zealand.

As Vernon Rive, the lawyer and journalist who reported Tim Groser’s words, later observed, the New Zealand government is not likely to be worried by its Fossil awards.  However, given that the Fossil reflects the perceptions of CAN’s 700+ member organisations, New Zealand’s third placing overall in the Colossal Fossil stakes may indicate that international NGOs will focus more attention on New Zealand in future negotiations.  In other countries, the Fossil has received significant news coverage.  Perhaps, at the least, continued pressure from NGOs may cause the New Zealand negotiators to be more careful with their wording.

Third Place: Thursday 8 December 2011

To quote CAN’s accompanying press release:

New Zealand takes 3rd place in today’s Fossil of the Day for hardening its stance on the Kyoto Protocol. In the last 24 hours, New Zealand’s previous conditional support of a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol appears to have become outright opposition. However, New Zealand has declined to answer questions or otherwise clarify its position on this issue, leading to ongoing uncertainty.

A few members of NZYD were at the CAN meeting where the Network nominated and selected New Zealand.  The final award was a composite of two nominations from different NGO members of CAN (NZYD gained observer status for CAN during COP17, but is not a member).  It seemed to reflect a general perception from CAN members who had been observing the Kyoto Protocol negotiations that New Zealand was becoming more obstructive, though the NGO observers who had been present were unwilling or unable to provide specific examples.

Joint First Place: Monday 5 December 2011

(Video via CAN International)

New Zealand tied with Russia after NGOs alleged that it had acted inconsistently in Kyoto Protocol negotiations.  To quote:

“New Zealand and Russia share the 1st place Fossil.

Russia earns the Fossil for opposing the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and for trying to carryover the hot air emissions credits into the same second commitment period, both at the same time, although it is hard to explain logically.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has been acting inconsistently in the KP negotiations. It has insisted that it could not constitutionally agree to provisional implementation of a second commitment period despite its internal policy stating that it can.

Further, the Government formally announced on 30 November that interim Environment Minister Hon. Nick Smith would be attending COP-17, only to change its mind on 1 December. New Zealand has also blocked discussions on carry over, wanting enough carry over to fully cover five years’ worth of LULUCF emissions.

Ultimately, this series of events has led to other negotiators describing New Zealand as ‘deliberately inconsistent’ and ‘problematic for a thousand reasons’, with its ‘extreme positions on a number of issues [making] it difficult to reach consensus on anything’.”

Third Place: Friday 2 December 2011

This one was for something different – not the Kyoto Protocol, but flexible mechanisms and forestry.  To quote:

The 2nd place Fossil goes to New Zealand for proposing the most Flexible Mechanism imaginable with no oversight or review. Bring on the wild west. They want to be able to use any market mechanisms they wish with absolutely no oversight or international review! There would be no way to ensure that the units from one mechanism have not been sold two or three times to another such mechanism. This would likely unleash a wild west carbon market with double or triple counting of offsets and a likely increase of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Latest is first.  If you don’t like what you read, email, tweet, or otherwise contact your MP.

0600, ICC: It’s over.  There is a deal.  It’s not a great one by any means, but it is.  The conference has ended – 30 hours late.

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0240, ICC, upstairs: COP-17 President has asked plenary to adjourn for ten minutes.  She’s recommended that the countries yet to be satisfied with the text ‘huddle’ to discuss it in greater depth.

Yes, ‘huddle’. Ten minutes of huddling.

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0225, ICC, upstairs: Time for a small mental health break, perhaps. It seems the NGO-types are into second phase sleeping. (That is to say that after their first round of naps and coffee and revitalisation, they’re back in the rut of being tired.)

Though, I’m pretty sure that a lot of the people sleeping out here are negotiators.

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0200: The Phillipines just said:

The youth in this conference have been instrumental in pushing us to do our work … with a lever long enough, you can move the world!

In the same speech, he referred to helping Africa and the “I <3 KP” t-shirts.  We can’t really hope to influence the talks, but at least we have influenced some of the delegates.  Also a reminder that “we are all one world” and a call for equity.

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0144, ICC, inside: President reminds delegates that this is informal plenary, with formal plenary to follow.  Debate developing between developing states.  Several suggestions here that G77+China are breaking up over climate policy.  Interesting times here on our third day of Friday.

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0118, ICC, inside: EU calls for a binding agreement by 2018, to a resounding response: “International problems require international legislation.”   Columbia too demands a stronger text.  Switzerland too: “We can reach an agreement in line with our abilities and our responsibilities … we would like to see something tangible.” India echoes Venezuela’s refusal to be intimidated. Further:

The centrepiece of the climate change debate is and has to be equity. And the equity of burden sharing cannot be shifted cannot be shifted.

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1259, Sunday, ICC, upstairs: The informal plenary session of the COP and CMP started at 1259.  Opening remarks underway now.  Around me, observers and reporters have fallen asleep, dropping their heads onto their laptops.  Behind me, Greenpeace has just finished a tactical meeting over (non-vegan, non-shared) curry.  I’m tired and hungry and just downed a double-espresso.

Around the water-cooler, the word seems to be that a failure is better than a deal at this point.  The texts on the table are in a bad state.  We have a five or eight year second commitment period under Kyoto, with a gap thrown in, and nice shiny new loopholes.  Paired with it is a new mandate for the LCA track, which aims for a legal framework to be implemented by 2020.  The 2015 deal sought by CAN is out the window.  The 2012 deal proposed by AOSIS is a memory.  Even a legally binding agreement by 2020 is blocked by some developed states – despite recognition that we must drastically and quickly cut emissions to reach our mitigation goal of only two degrees of warming.

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1145, ICC, upstairs: Small victories, but huge losses. Yes, Venezuela spoke. And inspired us all with her courage. She was standing on her chair. And banging the desk with her country’s nameplate.

The Chair was speechless, for all of a moment. But the LCA has gone through to the COP.

This is hardly right.

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1139, ICC, upstairs: Venezuela has taken everyone’s attention. The Chair had tried to close the session and move on to the COP, but Venezuela spoke over him and wouldn’t let him finish without her final word.

I asked for the floor…a long time ago. I will ask you to please ignore me after I have finished my statement.

She insists her delegation had received threats in the corridors from other negotiators if they refused to accept this weak text – threats that they wouldn’t allow a CP2 through if Venezuela blocked the LCA.

There are giggles from the NGOs watching the Chair’s face on the LCD screens behind me. Giggles because he’s utterly speechless.

Oh! And there have been more announcements about South African Airways’ extra scheduled flights. Because, you know, that’s super important.

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1132, ICC, upstairs: Kiwi Hot Topic blogger Cindy Baxter has just saved me by giving me pizza. Many, many thanks from my stomach to you, Cindy.

Tweets are getting less relevant and less frequent. NGO people are clearly falling asleep.

Japan wants the text to go through.

The Chair has admitted there’s “a great deal of disappointment in this text“, and yet has forwarded it to the COP. They’re already at the stage where they’re starting to make logistical announcements. They’re letting delegates know when their planes will be going tomorrow.

Who needs ambition when you have South African Airways?

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2309, ICC, upstairs: Malawi will support the text, simply to see it go through. Malaysia and Thailand declare the text unfair. Malaysia: “We cannot accept the notion that this is a balanced text!” They both refuse to support it.

The USA is speaking now.  Todd Stern (lead negotiator) is congratulating the negotiators on their success, and suggesting that the text go through.  He acknowledges that it’s been “a difficult negotiation“, but considers the United States as making just as much of a compromise in agreeing to this text as the other Parties involved.

…I’d dispute that.

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2303, ICC, upstairs: It seems that the EU is willing to let the LCA text go through to the COP for approval, despite its absolute disappointment in the weakness of the text.  If only they’d had such high standards for the KP negotiations and could have supported a five- instead of an eight-year second commitment period.

In the meantime, developing countries feel their voices simply haven’t been heard.  Some are calling for the talks to be suspended until next year, when they feel more work could result in a better outcome.

Papua New Guinea feels the text should be adopted – but only so long as it’s noted that the text is ‘unbalanced and incomplete‘.

It’s a sad reality that such important things are decided on behalf of the world with such compromise, simply because people are tired and want to go home. Someone in YOUNGO has even noticed that one of the Malaysian delegates is sitting with his suitcase, clearly itching to get to the airport.

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2250, ICC, upstairs: Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela have all claimed they are ‘not being represented appropriately’. Each has explained why they cannot support the LCA text in its current form. Nicaragua is frustrated that funding sources aren’t outlined, and has stated that if this was a student’s assignment, they’d receive a poor mark for such terrible oversight:

We have to highlight that this is a fund with… no funds. There are no sources of financing.

Venezuela spoke, impassioned, about the flooding its nation is experiencing as a result of climate change. It noted, furious, that any reference to the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that define Parties’ work under the (FCCC) Convention has been removed.

Bolivia’s insistence that it would rather postpone an agreement than agree to the text in its current form is noble and commendable in the fight for climate justice. But one can’t disagree that after Cancun, this feels a lot like Groundhog Day.

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2155, ICC, upstairs: KP was not a happy experience. Parties eventually gave up and allowed the text to be gaveled through.

LCA plenary now well underway. The LCA text is a mess: the Chair admits that entire parts are missing. One paragraph has even been repeated. The reference to 1.5 degrees C somehow disappeared. Parties unhappy with the content of the text, saying it’s lacking anything substantial at all.

The Chair is suggesting that Parties compromise, insisting that it’s better to agree on a weak text than it is to agree on none, and that there’s no time left to strive for anything stronger.

It’s depressing how disorganised this conference is: Saudi Arabia is insisting that they’re finding it difficult to take a position as they only saw the full LCA text for the first time this morning. Bangladesh is so desperate for a deal that they’ve thanked the Chair for his ‘gift‘, even though they note many areas where they have ‘reservations‘…

It’s the Chair’s 22nd year of involvement with this process, and he won’t be returning to the negotiations. Thanking him and acknowledging his efforts is justified, perhaps, but it seems to be taking up more time and more of the delegates’ focus than the actual text at hand.

It’s started pouring with rain. It’s loud and cold enough to be distracting people from their work up here at the computers.

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2022, ICC, upstairs: Another ten minute break.  The EU appears to be struggling to find a common position on the Kyoto Protocol.  I haven’t seen the current text yet, but the biggest issue left seems to be the length of the second commitment period – five years or eight?  We, like AOSIS and most of YOUNGO, support five.  However, Russia just made an implicit threat that the text was “a delicate balance”, perhaps suggesting that moving back to a five year commitment period would unbalance things, causing Russia to withdraw its support.

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1951, ICC, upstairs: Adrian Macey now allowing a short break for parties to lobby on length of second commitment period and LULUCF issues.  Resuming in 15 minutes.

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1945, ICC, upstairs: The plenary session of the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) is underway downstairs now.  Four of us remain in the building: Two in the plenary, two upstairs running Twitter and the blog, while uploading Youtube videos and photos.  There appears to a be a lot of uncertainty even still.  Several parties are proposing changes to the document.  When the plenary started, other parties appeared not to have a copy of the latest text.

You can watch the plenary live here.

Some notes pulled from our Twitter feed:

• Bolivia says “no clarity on QELROS.” Calls for “mandates” not “invites” parties. Objects that some parties not presented QELROS.
• Bolivia: “We have read the text, and we have some observations and proposals.” At least 24-40% too big a range. No clear answer.
• Macey: “Clearly, we can’t enter a drafting exercise.” Only edits capable of full consensus to be proposed orally. Looks like a way to go.
• Papua New Guinea: “We’re still struggling to keep up.” The text is definitely still changing fast. Doesn’t look final – nor close.
• New Zealand speaking in support of European Union proposal in AWG-KP seeking “similar treatment” for fast-growing forests.
• Sudden move in AWG-KP from five year period to eight year period? Grenada: “We’d rather like to leave it as it is.” [5 year]

1855, ICC: Stocktaking now over.  Plenaries for the two working groups soon to commence downstairs.  All the NGOs around are searching for copies of the “Durban outcome” discussed.  Once again, the atmosphere is confused and uncertain.

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1852, ICC: Informal stocktaking plenary underway.  President urges negotiators to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.  Seeks a “compromise package for a very strong Durban outcome“.

We must, here in Durban, let the world know, that we here are the generation that adopted the Kyoto Protocol.  We adopted the Bali Roadmap.  … This multilateral system is fragile, and it will not survive another shock.

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1800, ICC, downstairs: David and Rachel bumped into Renee and Roger from the New Zealand delegation. It turns out they’ve been following us on Twitter. Had some productive discussion about the role of NZYD and of the other NGOs here at COP. We focused particularly on how hard it is for us to respond to the negotiations when we can’t be inside the closed rooms where the ‘real‘ things happen. They really stressed how hard they’ve been working, and how much effort the delegation has made to engage with us. Renee noted that the Minister has been facilitating debates, not participating in them, and told us that they’d been trying to push for a more ambitious text.  We appreciate the time they took to speak with us.

We shared a common desire with the negotiators for a decent outcome from Durban, but with so many negotiators already heading home for the night, it’s hard to know how much faith there is (especially from the non-governmental side) that we’ll actually come out of here with a good deal. Or, for that matter, with any deal at all.

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1530, ICC, downstairs / the streets of Durban: No informal stocktaking plenary is actually taking place, that we know of. David and Rachel picked up copies of the latest LCA text, and have gone with Vernon Rive (NZ journalist) and Katie from Sierra Student Coalition to escape from the conference centre for a very late lunch of typical Durban curry.

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1445, Yellow Wood Room, ICC: YOUNGO is holding a press conference calling for greater and more urgent action from the Parties. Our delegate Tom Williams is facilitating. Interesting questions and discussion from the floor.  Video coming soon.

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1412, ICC, upstairs, inside: Word is that the President is holding an informal stocktaking plenary at 1500.  Things may become clearer then.

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1405, ICC, upstairs, inside: YOUNGO is holding a press conference at 1430.  NZYD delegate Tom Williams will be facilitating.

In other news, the LCA draft text on capacity building mentions youth…once:

1249, ICC, upstairs: Apparently the Indaba could extend to 5pm. The conference centre is booked out until Wednesday – some of us could be in for the long haul. There are delegates, though, who have already had to leave.

Reports have come out from last night. The BBC spotted David, Rachel and Jonathan working late.

Nothing much going on. Delegates wandering without much sense of purpose – just waiting for some progress, or some news.

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1234, ICC, upstairs: We’ve been back at the ICC for a couple of hours now. We slept late, but the conference didn’t resume until 10am or so anyway. No one is really sure when the plenary will resume. Ministers have been meeting for the past few hours to discuss the state of play and to try to come to agreement, but they may go on for hours yet.

We’re sitting with Grapetiser and coffee, and with highlighters and the latest KP and LCA texts. There’s little happening that’s riveting. Many of us are wearing shirts that AVAAZ handed out last night, boldly pleading ‘Don’t Kill Africa – Climate Deal Now’.

Whispers around the conference centre tell us that New Zealand played a significant role last night in shaping the text to a point of ridicule. Apparently pushing Antipodean interests, our negotiators have helped to produce a text which is weak and lacks ambition – and it’s no secret.

There’s talk of organising a youth press conference, and some of our team are involved.

• Hot Topic
• Guardian Eco | Live (see also: Stalemate, EU Plan)
• Adopt a Negotiator
• Oxfam
• Speak Your Mind News

With the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period scheduled to end in 2012, many countries are looking inward and asking, do we really love Kyoto? As the NZ delegation often tell us “it only accounts for 15% of global emissions” – what’s the point in having it at all when the US wont sign on and others, such as the Canadians are also on their way out?

Well, the rhetoric is KP is the only legally binding treaty we have. We lose KP and we lose framework, rules and structure. The Kyoto Protocol exists to hold countries accountable for the emissions and embodies the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities. New Zealand has some of the highest carbon emissions per capita of anywhere in the world. We must take responsibility for our role in the creation of this problem.

Earlier in the week, ex-New Zealand head negotiator and current Chair of Kyoto Protocol negotiating track, Adrian Macey expressed his vision for the negotiations to NZYD, lamenting that the Protocol should have been formulated better in the first place. I am inclined to agree, however we cannot wait to address climate change. The loss of the only global agreement for action on climate change will have literally devastating effects in the years to come.

Countries such as the US are pushing for negotiations on a global binding successor agreement to be delayed to 2020. Not even a second commitment period to Kyoto would be enough to fill the 9 year transition. We shouldn’t just keep KP but commit to a new treaty by 2015. We’re are running out of time.

So, do I heart KP? I believe we need to keep Kyoto or we risk further irreversible damage to our planet. We cannot lose the vision for common but differentiated responsibility. I urge the New Zealand Government to show some much needed leadership by signing on to a second commitment period.

Joint Gold Prize – 5 December