Ninth meeting of the Second Session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP 2-9)

Opening statement by the Republic of Angola on behalf of the Least Developed Countries Group

Bonn, Germany

Mr Co-Chairs, I would like to associate my statement with the statements made by South Africa on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, Sudan on behalf of the Africa Group, and the Maldives on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

Mr Co-Chairs, let us also renew our deep solidarity with our colleagues and with all the people of Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Nepal, India, China and Bangladesh for the dramatic events that hit all these countries in the past recent weeks and months. The events in Nepal should remind us not only how vulnerable any country could be in the face of extreme events, but how much greater is the vulnerability of those that are the least developed among us.

Mr Co-Chairs, may you also accept our appreciation for your diligent efforts in leading the work of the ADP since the beginning of this year. Even if the achievement so far is highly estimable, the tasks at hand remain paramount.

We commend your efforts to reach before the beginning of this session an agreed modus operandi on the way Parties are going to conduct the process. The LDC Group would like to continue to give you its support and agree with your proposal to start substantive negotiations immediately after a short opening plenary.

However, we would like to highlight few points of the utmost importance.

The LDCs believe there is a need for a careful balance between the progress needed to achieve an Agreement in Paris and the treatment of the process that will be driving this ahead. Here, your role as co-chairs and the role of the current and incoming COP presidents are really fundamental.

We would like to thank the secretariat for the tool provided on areas of overlaps and duplication. We will continue to use it, to guide us in navigating throughout the negotiation text, identifying where our common views are and outlining more clearly where the real divergences are. Certainly, they will appear to us at least less numerous than they seem to be throughout the current text.

Mr Co-Chairs, as we all know, the final report of the 2013-2015 Review has arrived at the conclusion that “the ‘guardrail’ concept, in which up to 2°C of warming is considered safe, is not adequate”. The report clearly states that less warming would be preferable. What this means is clear: warming needs to be kept to below 1.5°C. The Structured Expert Dialogue thus directly lends stringent, scientific support to our position of 1.5°C as a scientifically defensible global goal. It is critical that these strong conclusions and insights be translated into decisions and fostered actions: all Parties to urgently raise ambition, to commit to an ambitious outcome in Paris under the ADP, an outcome that address adaptation, mitigation, finance, technology, capacity building, loss and damage and transparency at the scale required by the challenge at hand.

On work stream 2, our expectations in Paris are not limited to a renewed work program on enhancing mitigation ambition in the pre-2020 period and the continuation of the technical examination meetings and processes. We are looking forward to the adoption and the launching of initiatives that will effectively result in enhancing mitigation by 2020 with a view to closing the mitigation gap. During this session, opportunity should be given to Parties to indicate what further actions and initiatives they will be willing to launch and support from 2015, with a view to enhancing mitigation ambition and closing the gap by 2020.