COP21: A Fate Worse Then Death.

As I feel I've explained numerous times over this past 10 days in the 1997 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) produced the Kyoto Protocol to tackle climate change. This actually expired in 2012 but was then extended until 2020 under what is known as the Doha Amendment.

Since 2011 the UNFCCC have been working to develop a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol. The hope was that this work would be completed at this year's COP21 Summit and the new agreement would enter into force in 2020.

Things seemed to be on schedule up until October 2015. Here the US decided to tear up the previous four years work and replace it with a draft agreement that frankly read like a bad joke.

Unfortunately work on this US joke draft continued throughout the first week of COP21. On Saturday (5/12/15) the governing body accepted it as the basis for an agreement and carried it forward for discussion during the High Level/Ministerial portion of the meeting.

At the halfway point of the High Level portion a revised version of the draft agreement has been released. If anything it is significantly worse now then it was on Saturday.

Throughout the four year negotiation period I've gradually built up a list of things that would simply be unacceptable within an agreement. For example a binary differentiation between nations and 5 year commitment periods.

What COP21 appears to have done is take this list of "Do Nots" and re-printed it as the text of the agreement.

With this new agreement being just 14 pages long - the pre-October draft was around 85 - I probably could go through and destroy it line-by-line in the 5 hours between it been published and meetings resuming.

However you only actually need to get to page 3 to see that the draft is critically and irredeemably flawed.

Page 3 contains Article 3 which deals with mitigation. This effectively refers to stopping climate change by reducing Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. The Kyoto Protocol dealt with this issue by mandating the reductions that listed nations needed to make and a legal mechanism to punish nations that failed to make the mandated reductions.

In developing this new agreement we have been trying to move away from this approach of mandated reductions. That's because it fosters a spirit of confrontation between nations with them all demanding each other make bigger reductions.

Instead what we've been trying to do is create a new spirit whereby nations identify where it is easiest to reduce their emissions. Nations then co-operate to ensure that those reductions occur bringing down the global total of emissions rather then fractionally reducing national emissions.

Obviously if you are allowing nations to choose what reductions to make it becomes much more important that there is a legal mechanism to make sure those reductions occur.

The draft currently on the table adopts the idea of nationally determined reductions by fails to adopt a mechanism to enforce them.

As a result it doesn't create an agreement to tackle climate change.

Instead it creates a forum for politicians to come along every 5 years and make promises that aren't going to be kept.

The other big cultural shift driving this new approach is the idea of using what are termed Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) plans to fully integrate action on climate change into nations economic development plans. Developing nations would then giving assistance to build capacity within their development plans.

That way rather then it being a constant battle between action on climate change and economic development action on climate change becomes the mechanism for economic development.

Article 3ter of the current draft is entitled "Mechanism to Support Sustainable Development." You won't get a clearer indication of the fact that the - particularly developing - nations have failed to understand that action on climate change and sustainable development are the same issue. Not two separate ones.

Although the draft does make reference to INDC's it completely lacks any definition of what form they will take. This means that while the acronym is being used all the opportunity for capacity building represented by that acronym is missing.

The most critical problem remains that the draft still does not include a sunset clause at which point it expires. This means that if this draft is adopted these 14 essentially blank pages will become the only thing the World will ever do to combat climate change.

So as I've been saying throughout summit it's time for COP21 to stop blundering along with this non-action.

Instead it should use the remaining time to agree a way forward so work can resume on a viable agreement to be adopted at 2016's COP22 at the latest.

16:45 on 9/12/15 (UK date).