Last night the COP President made an update on the status of the negotiations in the informal plenary at the Moon Palace. While a number of crunch issues still remain open, the overall message was very positive, noting the possibility of agreeing a package on Friday, as good progress has been made in several key areas. On shared vision there seemed to be consensus on limiting the temperature increase to maximum + 2ºC, and having a review process in place allowing for lowering the limit for such increase to +1.5ºC. Discussions continued into the night on the long term global goal.
On finance: Four options have been developed on the establishment of the fund under the Convention, and the co-facilitators of the informal group reported that convergence started to emerge around two of them.
On adaptation there seems to be agreement on many of the main points, including creation of an Adaptation Committee, improving access to new funds and regional centers. But the challenge remains to reconcile progress on adaptation with the discussions on the issues of technology and finance. Overall some progress on adaptation.
Mitigation: work was still on-going both under the Convention and under the Kyoto Protocol and more time was required before an assessment on the progress could be made. On the discussions of MRV cautious optimism was reported. A crucial issue according to the facilitators was striking a balance between transparency, efficiency/bureaucracy and protection of national sovereignty.
REDD+: very good progress was made, with the main outstanding points being the funding scope under the financing mechanism, coordination between national and subnational actions, and monitoring and safeguards for activities. The group is very close to reaching an agreement.
Technology issues needed more hours to work. Progress was reported in a number of key areas, including on the Technology Committee, technology network and on regional centres on technology.
Little progress made on new market mechanisms, in particular still divergence on sectoral approaches. As of last night no further consultations were taking place.
While some progress has been made on several technical issues under the Kyoto Protocol, there was no movement on the key political issues. The need for political guidance was identified, with no further progress possible on technical issues without such guidance.
The new text was being issued in the morning while the ministerial consultations continued through the night.