The UNFCCC October Meeting.

Between Monday October 19th (19/10/15) and Friday October 23rd (23/10/15) parties to the United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held their quarterly meeting at their headquarters in Bonn, Germany.

This was the last such meeting before the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) opens on November 30th (30/11/15) in Paris, France. It is at COP21 that a new global climate change deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol (KP) is scheduled to be finalised and signed.

Unfortunately the more time I have to reflect on the October meeting the more convinced I am that it was an utterly wasted opportunity.

For example the work stream covering mitigation actions spent much of the week challenging the core principle that has stood for the last 25 years that any agreement would tackle climate change by curbing the emission of Green House Gases (GHG's).

Instead certain parties wished to discuss undefined "Climate Forcers." This seemed to be nothing more then a device by nations that had no mitigation obligations under KP to rail against what they see as the former Annex I parties to force them into taking mitigation actions.

I will be charitable and assume that this is a result of those nations failing to understand the fundamental difference between this new agreement and the KP rather then being a deliberate attempt to shirk their shared responsibility.

At the core of this new agreement there is the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). Although there is a shared responsibility to be as ambitious as possible this format allows nations to determine themselves what action they will be taking and set their own reduction targets.

As a result there is no element of coercion within this agreement and nobody is being forced to do anything.

Elsewhere the Arab states tried to hijack the meeting entirely by turning it into a discussion on the Israel/Palestine conflict by demanding to know what protections would be afforded to "peoples under occupation."

This is a completely irrelevant issue because the protections under this agreement would be the exactly the same as the protections under the Geneva Conventions which cover war and military occupation.

If the Palestinians feel that the Israelis are not fulfilling its obligations under the relevant conventions there's not really much an agreement on climate change can do about that.

In fact despite my experience of both issues I wouldn't even know where to begin adapting the agreement to combine both topics.

However the diversion into such a controversial and intractable area does serve to disrupt the negotiations and reduce the chances of any agreement which of course is the primary objection of the oil rich Gulf states.

And sadly that's all the Palestinian cause is at the moment. A pawn in someone else's wider game.

The meeting ended with a decision that there will be no new negotiating text and the existing text will be carried forward as the basis for negotiation at COP21.

This is extremely alarming because the non-paper introduced at the start of the meeting is so vague as to be completely insufficient to form the basis of any agreement. I

t merely identifies areas such as "Mitigation," "Adaptation," "Finance," "Technology" and "Capacity Building" that may have some relevance to tackling climate change.

However with the section of Loss & Damage running to just 22 words it contains absolutely none of the detail required to determine how nations will act individually and collectively to address these areas as part of a functioning agreement.

The July text which grew out of the 2014 non-paper is significantly better.

However it still needs to be significantly reduced by replacing numerous options with agreed, coherent text. At the same time it needs to be expanded to include a section enshrining the peer review process and the compliance process.

This insistence that there will be no new text seems to have been borne out of a frustration by the Secretariat at the way that many nations have handled the negotiating process.

Rather then having been prepared to debate and compromise over the core concepts of the agreement many nations have simply been demanding that the Secretariat takes on board all of their slightly mad and often contradictory positions before returning with a 'miracle' text that will solve all of the problems.

Ironically many of these nations are the same ones complaining about having an agreement forced upon them.

The hope seems to be then that by making clear that there will be no new text nations will be forced to work with what they've got by deciding on options within the July text and combining them with the procedural elements from the recent non-paper.

I am far from convinced that this approach will work though because although the Mitigation, Adaptation and Loss & Damage sections of the July text are salvageable as are the procedural elements from the October non-paper key sections like the peer review and compliance processes still need to be written.

I do not understand how this will happen during the course of COP21.

As such I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is time to think the unthinkable and delay the signing of any new agreement until COP22 when hopefully the required work will have been completed.

If we are delaying the new agreement then perhaps we also need to consider whether existing climate finance arrangements can continue without a new agreement being signed.

18:00 on 27/10/15 (UK date).