THE global climate year moves from one climate summit to the other. All 29 annual Conferences of the Parties, or COPs, have traditionally been held at the end of each calendar year, allowing countries to begin their follow-up climate actions in January. Pakistan has always left COP participation and related decisions to just a few weeks before the COPs, relegating Pakistan’s global climate engagement to passivity and its decision-making to hurried afterthoughts. Thinking proactively, the climate ministry has now decided to set up a special cell to initiate year-long preparations for climate negotiations.

Would the establishment of a COP cell consign the federal ministry to spending all its time jockeying for participation in the COP? Or can this help align all national endeavours with the global discourse on building climate resilience and a low-carbon path to development? How can it help Pakistan map, track, and break its global climate isolation?

It is possible only if we realise that COPs have over the years become ever more complex. They have become the world’s largest knowledge marketplace, a grand assembly of a wide range of stakeholders and not just a lavish and boisterous jamboree. Actual negotiations under the convention on climate change are only a small part of the COPs. The gathering is used to strike side deals, join or negotiate voluntary coalitions and partnerships for specific actions, forge alliances to protect or promote sectoral interests, scout evolving portfolios and priorities of key institutions and countries, and identify opportunities for investments, joint ventures, pilot projects, and trends in international climate financial and technology flows.

All this........

© Dawn