A. Cancun negotiating challenges

1. The first challenge is the unanimity rule. For any proposal to be approved, 194 countries (also known as Parties) must reach unanimous agreement. Every year there is talk of changing this rule. A well-known example of a potential solution is Papua New Guinea’s proposal, which goes as follows: if ¾ of the countries agree to a proposition, this proposition would apply to these countries, and only to these countries. But here is the conundrum: to get rid of the unanimity rule, you still need unanimity!

In practice, we know that there are ways around the unanimity rule: no country likes to be isolated from all the others. At the end of COP 11 – the Montreal Climate Conference which I chaired in 2005 – the US and Saudi Arabia decided to join the consensus when they found themselves to be the only countries at odds with the world community. Nonetheless, this unanimity rule is a difficult hurdle to surmount.

2. Closer deadline. What makes Cancun especially challenging is that Kyoto’s first phase ends in 2012. In Montreal, we had 7 years to go, which made it possible to achieve some progress while postponing the resolution of outstanding disagreements to future COPs. While after Cancun, the only opportunity for progress before the Kyoto deadline is Johannesburg, in 2011.

3. Copenhagen trauma. Last year in Copenhagen, the world leaders tried very hard to achieve a global treaty. President Obama rescued the conference at the very end by bravely negotiating directly with the BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China. But the result was clearly disappointing, and it provided no political gain to these world leaders. So it’s likely that they won’t