Negotiators to climate talks in Poland urged to play active roles

Ghanaian negotiators who will be attending the United Nations climate talks slated for December 2 to 14, 2018 (COP24) in Poland have been urged to play active roles during the negotiation period and make relevant contributions.

Dr Seth Osafo, a retired Legal Advisor to the climate change secretariat said this at a day’s pre-Conference of Parties to the United Nations framework Convention on Climate Change organised by the Environmental Protection Agency for stakeholders to take stock of what had been done since their return from the last conference in Bonn, Germany in 2017 and what was needed to be looked at during the upcoming conference.

Dr Osafo asked participants to be on the alert for any new document from the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to guide them as they prepared to attend the conference with their counterparts from other African and developed countries and make sure they were present at the African group meetings.

He said there would be five to six days for negotiation which will not be enough, so negotiations would stretch into the night, therefore negotiators needed to also prepare themselves against the hazards of the weather to be able to stay through to work.

He said Presidents from the various countries would be attending a summit where declarations would be made and urged that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo be informed about the key issues since whatever came out of the declaration would serve as a guide to the negotiators.

He said this was the time ‘we’ are going to develop new Intended Nationally Determined Contributions since what was provided previously was done hurriedly and were not tied down to any specific guidelines and were also beyond ‘our’ abilities.

Dr Osafo however complained that the Ministry of Finance was not visible at the Green Climate Fund meetings and urged officials to make themselves visible and appealed to the officials to make follow ups on projects that were sent to the GCF

He said the GCF was there and ‘we’ can have access so there should be continuity of participation at meetings and the GCF officials should be talked about projects that were available and ‘we’ will make a headway.

He mentioned issues of transparency, mitigation and finance as important issues to be touched on during the conference saying that finance had been a major issue that developed countries saw as something that developing countries wanted to hear about but noted that developed countries also wanted to know what was being done to the finance provided them.

Mr Foster Gyemsi of the Ministry of Finance said Finance was in constant touch with the GCF as they were at both the regional and global meetings adding that during the last COP23, officials of the Authority had discussions on various proposals.

He said the last meeting with GCF was in October this year in Korea where issues of projects, proposals among others were highlighted and noted that what may be making finance invisible was an issue of communication.

Abibiman Foundation, an NGO will organise site events on adaptation and Green Impact International will showcase its activities at the conference.