The Bali roadmap

The UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (CoP) in Bali, Indonesia, marked the culmination of a year of unprecedented high-level political and public debates on climate change science and policy. The conference has come out with an agreement called the “Bali roadmap.” The agreement, establishes a process to reach agreement by 2009 on commitments for green house gases emissions reductions in the post-2012 period, when the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period expires. Since, the conference never decided on specific targets the Bali roadmap was never categorically defined. Many view it as a compendium of decisions and processes adopted and launched by the COP and COP/MOP, which can be divided into three types:

Negotiating Tracks
The Bali roadmap builds on the negotiating tracks on long-term issues launched at the Montreal Climate Change Conference at the end of 2005. In addition to necessity to address the post-2012 period after the Protocol’s first commitment period expires, the Bali roadmap aims to mend some of the fractures that have evolved in the architecture of the climate change regime, most notably the refusal of the United States to ratify the Protocol.

Building Blocks
Termed as the building blocks of climate change negotiation mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance were considered under the roadmap negotiations. With evidence that the confidence-building phase of negotiations has begun to yield some results in terms of the re-engagement of the US and engagement of major developing country economies, the Bali Conference was regarded by some, notably the EU and major NGOs, as the moment to lock the process into evidence-based negotiations on mitigation and commitments.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
Agreements to open up options in future discussions on long- term cooperative action with references to reduced emissions from deforestation “and consideration of …the role of conservation, sustainable management of forest and enhancement of forest carbon stocks”, were discussed.