Now the real negotiations begin at UN climate conference

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP):

The princes, presidents and prime ministers have left, and now the real mask-to-mask climate negotiations start.

For the next 10 days, maybe more, the professional diplomats at the crowded United Nations (UN) climate conference must convert marching orders left by their heads of government into compromises and agreements. The talks happen in a limited number of meeting rooms in Glasgow, with a Friday, November 12 deadline and a record-long agenda listing 104 items that must be settled.

The negotiations are restricted by the pandemic but aided by a year and a half of virtual meetings, instant soup brought from Norway, and chocolates from Swiss and Australian diplomats.

By next week, the deadline pressure is sure to intensify. Meetings will go round the clock. Food and sleep will be put aside, except when someone dozes off in a seat or on a colleague’s shoulder.

“We have meals together and spend hours cooped up in conference centres, with little sleep and bad food. It is a bit of a mad bonding experience, but it builds trust. And trust is key to compromise,” said Environmental Defense Fund Vice-President Kelley Kizzier, who spent 15 years as a European Union negotiator.

At least 120 meetings were scheduled for Wednesday, with more likely to be added. But only 25 meeting rooms are available in the sprawling conference complex where half of the structures are temporary, with makeshift roofs and rows of spotless but chilly portable toilets. And those rooms permit a limited number of people inside because of social-distancing rules designed to keep everyone 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) apart.

Between meetings, everyone has to get out for 15 minutes of cleaning, something the Scottish government insists on, said Laura Lopez, the conference administrator for the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, which runs the negotiations on a site that is technically UN property.

“The problem is, our people aren’t that disciplined,” Lopez said. “They keep talking and won’t leave the room.”

The rooms where it happens are often the rooms next to where it happens.

“The deals are made, very often, outside of the room,” said long-time negotiator Yamide Dagnet, now head of negotiations for the World Resources Institute. Countries give their positions at the table, but it is in the hallways, during coffee breaks, snatches of meals and other away time that compromises emerge, she said.

That’s why in-person meetings can’t be replaced by virtual ones, said veteran negotiator Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, who chairs one of the two main negotiating groups for the UN.

“In the hallway, you meet someone, and that’s where you agree on that comma versus that semicolon, and that’s what’s missing” in virtual meetings, he said.