Hours after the United Nations Ocean Conference concluded in Nice, France, climate change negotiators arrived in Bonn, Germany, for their annual mid-year talks to lay the groundwork for the climate summit (COP30) in Belém, Brazil.

For 10 days starting today, government delegates and stakeholders are at the World Conference Centre in Bonn for the meeting formally known as the 62nd session of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), to build on the outcomes from COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The meeting will drive forward progress on key issues and prepare decisions for adoption in Brazil, focusing on a wide range of issues, including continuing work to finalise the indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).

This year has witnessed people around the world struggling to adapt to the increasing impacts of climate change.

Discussions will also seek to advance a just transition from fossil fuels, a pathway to mobilising US$1.3 trillion in climate finance through the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, and keeping mitigation efforts on track, among other issues.

In a Q-and-A interview in the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD) Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Jennifer Bansard, who is covering the talks, said the GGA will feature prominently on the meeting agenda of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The GGA was established in the Paris Agreement in 2015, but Bansard points out that it has a rather vague goal of “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerability”.   

“It has been difficult for many countries and stakeholders to know what to do to achieve progress in terms of adaptation, and tracking it is yet another challenge. So, in Dubai at COP28, parties adopted a framework on the GGA, which defines targets that should help guide the action,” she says.

Expert meetings

There are targets related to water, food and agriculture, health, biodiversity, infrastructure and cultural heritage.

The UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) also specifies targets for each of the steps in the adaptation cycle, such as risk assessments, plans to address those risks, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning mechanisms to assess how things are going.

Parties also launched work to define indicators to measure progress toward those targets.  

“Since COP28, there have been several rounds of expert meetings to build a list of potential indicators. At one point, we had a list of 9,000—too many to handle, obviously,” notes Bansard.

They identified criteria to guide the experts in narrowing down the list of potential indicators, looking at things like data availability, whether there are existing baselines, and whether the indicators can be aggregated across levels.

Parties also considered which indicators can be disaggregated by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, which would help gain a more nuanced perspective of who is adapting to climate change, she explains.

Negotiators in Bonn will discuss a “somewhat consolidated” list of 490 potential indicators. Still a lot, but the hope is that with another round of talks, they may be able to narrow it down further and reflect on potential interlinkages.

“Progress on adaptation has been slow to materialise. It’s been difficult to get everybody on the same page. We’re 10 years into the adoption of the Paris Agreement, and we’ve yet to define indicators for the GGA,” says Bansard.

She notes that this year, many governments are cutting budgets, and some are pulling back from multilateral approaches, with consequences for climate policy, environmental policy, and development cooperation more generally.

“We’ve noticed even developed countries tightening their wallets when it comes to their delegates going to international environmental meetings. It’s something we’ll watch for in Bonn—something that may contain the reactivity of those processes and might also change the way these negotiations are conducted.”

As well as taking up unfinished items from their last meeting in Baku, the climate change negotiators will look to advance technical items with the aim of ensuring COP30 in Brazil is set up for success.

Host Brazil is on a mission to secure, through diplomacy, agreements on two issues that were left unresolved at COP29.

The tense negotiations at the climate summit in Baku failed to agree on a just transition from fossil fuels and the global stocktake of government climate action.

Brazilian diplomats will be taking their mission to broker a deal on these two critical issues to the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn. Lead climate diplomat Lilian Chagas said last month she is seeking “real advances” in the Bonn sessions on the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) and recommendations from the 2023 Global Stocktake (GST), for decisions to adopt them to be approved at COP30 in Brazil.

Reviewing progress

The JTWP is a series of dialogues on how to make the transition to a greener world fair while the GST discussions focus on how the world’s governments should respond to being collectively off-track to meet their goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Negotiators at the UN Climate Week in Panama last month held discussions related to these two issues, such as the role of Indigenous people and communities, economic drivers and social protections.

At COP29 in Baku last year, governments were sharply divided on what aspects of fairness the JTWP should tackle and whether finance should be included, as well as on whether transitioning away from fossil fuels should be mentioned in texts on how to take the GST forward.

Chagas says these issues had not been settled at COP29 because separate talks there on a new finance goal had proven so “lengthy and difficult”, but indicated that she was now trying to bring a “sense of urgency” to officials.

“These decisions, at this point of the year, are something that will show that the COP process works and is resilient,” she said, adding that she wants to “early harvest some of the decisions in order not to leave everything for COP30 in November”.

The GST was a review of progress on climate change carried out in 2023, which found that while government action had reduced the amount of global warming expected, it was still insufficient to limit average temperature rise to 1.5 °C.

Governments agreed jointly at COP28 in Dubai to respond to this by calling on each other to take measures like tripling renewable energy capacity and transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.

But at COP29 last year, they failed to include the same language on renewables and fossil fuels in the outcomes of a planned “UAE dialogue” on how to implement the recommendations of the GST. Saudi Arabia opposed any mention of fossil fuels in formal texts at COP29.  

As the Baku summit ended without agreement on the GST, Chile’s lead negotiators expressed concern at attempts to backtrack on the “agreements made last year”.

COP30 President-designate André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said the GST is “our guide to Mission 1.5”, a collective roadmap to keep to the 1.5 °C warming limit – and responding to it should include accelerating the global energy transition and halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.