Pacific Voices @ COP 15: SPREP's climate change adviser Espen Ronneberg on the eve of the final negotiations

Geoffrey Smith, Fiji TV, Climate Pasifika

Espen Ronneberg, SPREP's Climate Change Adviser




Transcript:
Well, I have been, as I mentioned in earlier days I have been working with the adaptation group. We just completed a reading of the adaptation text that we have been working on since we came here, we managed to sort out a lot of issues that the other partners raised, we've managed to get a lot of agreement in the text but we have still got to resolve a bunch of really important issues like the financing, the support that should be provided to developing countries, how it should be provided and what sort of functions we should assign to an international committee at the level of the COP to look into adaptation into the future so the paper that we've been working on, thats now going to be forwarded to the ministerial level.

We dont quite know what the process will be for handling what weve been able to achieve, we dont know how they are going to resolve the outstanding issues where we couldnt agree so I'm really as much in the dark as everybody else as to how this will all end, but I have to say the pacific worked really hard in the adaptation working group and I think we managed to get a lot of good things in the final paper, the problem is that we now have just so many brackets remaining especially those relating to finance.

Well, the paper will be presented to the ministers and they will have to make some sort of decision on it whether they have a decision to continue work, that could be one option or perhaps they could resolve at the political level some of these issues that we at a technical level couldnt resolve.

So it remains to be seen how the evening progresses, we are not even sure if we at the techincal level will be allowed into the room, this process has been really difficult in the last few days trying to understand how the work that we have been doing will fit in the final product, its been really difficult.

We stayed up all night, some of our colleagues had to sleep on the floor last night, its been really hard with the small team that we have to be able to cover the whole range of negotiations, its been really frustrating but we tried our best and I think we achieved some success but its the final product that will be the proof of our success.