From Bali to Marrakech: A decade of international climate negotiations

Since 1992, the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) has reported from the front lines of international environmental negotiations.

Governments, non-governmental organizations, the media, and academics have relied on the Bulletin as an indispensable record of many negotiating processes over the past 25 years, including, and most notably for this book, the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The ENB’s reporting on international climate change negotiations is the closest we have to an oral history of this process. The daily ENB reports provide an objective and balanced summary of each day’s negotiations during the course of a meeting. Forty-eight hours after its conclusion, the ENB publishes a summary and analysis of the negotiations. The analysis represents a snapshot in time, recording the impressions of diplomats, ministers, the Secretariat, observers and ENB writers at the end of the meeting.

This book builds on the ENB’s coverage of climate change negotiations during the decade from 2007-2016 and provides an overview of the journey from the meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Bali, Indonesia, that set the process in motion to negotiate a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an inflection point in global climate change governance. Public and political interest rose sharply at this point, and remained high throughout the peaks and valleys of global efforts to address climate change. The culmination of this process was the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, which established a common framework for all countries to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and promote efforts to boost resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Each chapter represents a year of climate negotiations based on the ENB’s analysis of each session of the COP. We have also included a summary of each intersessional period to add the necessary context and tie the analyses together. This is not meant to be a comprehensive history of the UNFCCC negotiations but rather an abridged version of ENB’s reporting during this period.