View of the dais during the SBI closing plenary at the Bonn Climate Change Conference - May 2018

The Bangkok Climate Change Conference will meet from 4-9 September 2018 at the UN Conference Centre in Bangkok, Thailand.

Convening in resumed sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI), and the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA), the meeting’s main objective is to progress on the Paris Agreement Work Programme (PAWP): the details required to operationalize the 2015 Paris Agreement.

With the deadline for completing this work drawing near — the PAWP is slated for adoption by the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December 2018 (COP 24) — parties at the Bonn Climate Change Conference from 30 April - 10 May 2018 agreed to an additional negotiating session in Bangkok to ensure the PAWP’s “timely completion” at COP 24.

Some of the key issues that require further negotiation in Bangkok pertain to the Paris Agreement’s iterative and cyclical nature, including operationalization of requirements for parties to:

• update their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at five-year intervals
• regularly report on progress under a common transparency and accountability framework
• convene a global stocktake every five years to assess collective progress towards the Paris Agreement’s goals.

Other important PAWP themes under negotiation relate to:

• climate change adaptation
• delivering sufficient support for developing countries, including on finance, technology, and capacity building
• mechanisms to ensure implementation of, and compliance with, the Paris Agreement.

Discussions in Bangkok will also focus on cooperative approaches under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, including both market and non-market based approaches, and on the forum on the implementation of response measures.

As discussed in our analysis of the Bonn Climate Conference, ensuring coherent and balanced progress across various PAWP items remains a key challenge. The Co-Chairs of the APA, SBI, and SBSTA have therefore been mandated to issue a joint reflections note on progress and ways forward. An APA roundtable on substantive linkages will additionally convene in advance of the Bangkok meeting, on Monday, 3 September.

Parties at the Bonn meeting also agreed that the APA Co-Chairs will prepare “tools” to help them move towards an “agreed basis for negotiations.”

For a recap of what happened at the Bonn Climate Change Conference, and what this means for the Bangkok meeting, please read the Earth Negotiations Bulletin summary of the previous meeting.