Frans Timmermans holds up a picture of his grandson, he is one year old. When the Paris Agreement expires in 2050 it will be 31. “If we fail, he will live in a world where food is fought for,” said the Vice President of the EU Commission responsible for climate issues in the plenary session of the World Climate Conference on Friday afternoon. The climate negotiations are personal, not political. He, Timmermans, does not live in Palau or Barbados, both islands that are already threatened with extinction, but in a few years there will be many other countries. “Our job today is to keep the 1.5 degree goal alive,” he says. Time is running out, says Timmermans, but it's not too late. And he means both: In order to actually still achieve the climate target and at this climate conference called COP26,in which the negotiations continue even after their official end on Friday evening.

Timo Steppat

Editor in politics.

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The admonition from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Thursday that it is not enough to just find the lowest common denominator was addressed to the British Presidency. Many informal negotiations were held overnight in the various negotiating threads. What came out on Friday morning caused a lot of criticism - from environmental organizations, but also from countries like the USA. The rules have been softened. It was still said that there should be a global phase-out of coal, but with the restriction that this does not apply to power plants that capture climate-damaging carbon dioxide. When the states were appealed to stop their subsidies for all fossil fuels, it was restricted that only “inefficient” subsidies were meant.

At noon the debate followed, which showed on the one hand the slowing down of certain countries such as Saudi Arabia, which demanded a “balanced decision”, but also more ambitious negotiators such as the EU or Switzerland spoke out in favor of higher goals.

The representative of Canada said that his country was certainly not always exemplary, but that has changed and that ambitious goals are being pursued.

That might be a role model for other countries.

The US government's climate commissioner, John Biden, also called for swift action.

He announced that the US wants to double its financial resources in the area of ​​climate adaptation.

Germany wants to double spending by 2025

Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) also said in a press conference in the afternoon that climate adaptation is more important than ever before. Germany wants to double its spending by 2025. The task now is to defend the afternoon's draft. It is a "paradigm shift" that the final document speaks for the first time of concrete measures such as the global coal phase-out. “Ultimately, the world will not be saved by conferences, but by converting energy systems,” said Schulze. She also emphasized that for the first time the clear 1.5 degree target is in the paper - that is, more extensive than in "Paris", where the talk was of global warming below two degrees, if possible up to 1.5 degrees.

Even more important than the framework declaration, which has an important symbolic character but is not binding, the negotiations on the rules of the Paris Agreement are likely to be. Article 6 of the 2015 agreement on international emissions trading was supposed to be defined in Madrid in 2019, but the climate conference failed because of this. In the meantime, most of the so-called brackets, i.e. open points of contention with a multitude of possible solutions, have disappeared, and decision-making channels are available for the ministers. The main concern of the EU is to prevent the double counting of certificates and to prevent certain countries from making their national contributions to reducing emissions small through loopholes. Brussels also assesses the problem that old certificates from the CDM mechanism,which began with the Kyoto Protocol at the end of the nineties, are to be partially adopted. Countries like China and India are hoping for advantages from this.

But the EU and the USA are also criticized. Although they want to make significantly more adaptation payments, they block themselves against a kind of transaction tax for climate certificates. If, for example, a climate protection project that saves CO2 is implemented in Brazil with German money, it should be ensured that the resulting certificates are only credited to the donor country, i.e. Germany; but the federal states would like a levy for the transaction. However, the EU and the USA reject this.

It can be assumed that the ministers' talks will last well into the night.

It is the time of horse trading, also between the lines of negotiations - this versus that.

Then there should be a new draft at a later hour, on which the countries must position themselves.

If approval emerges, the plenary would have to approve - if not, negotiations will continue.

Observers and negotiators, however, say that they rate the deliberations as promising and significantly more productive than in Madrid.

With reservations, there is optimism in Glasgow.