Whet Your Appetite Post

I'm sitting at the computer pool outside the last scheduled closed session of negotiations on accounting rules for land use, land-use change and forestry.

The time is ticking for these negotiators who have worked on and on for 3 and a half years to produce a draft decision that may still not be ready for Ministers as they begin to arrive. The idea is that Ministers must be given clear, simple choices to negotiate. They would quickly be lost and bogged down in the details and complexities of LULUCF.

As of yesterday there was no option that looked politically acceptable to all. And the only decent option for the environment had been roundly rejected by developed countries (Tuvalu's proposal from earlier this year to account for any change in logging emissions from the recent past - called 'net-net' accounting).

We learned yesterday that the facilitators of the negotiations were producing a new draft decision today that would include a 'compromise' being proposed by the African Group (of countries). I suspect they are in there discussing it right now.

This post is to whet your appetite for the news when they emerge...what has Africa put on the table? Is it really grounds for compromise? Is it an acceptable environmental outcome?