Information on 20 years of the UN Climate Change negotiations from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin of the IISD. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) produced by the IISD provides the richest and most neutral reporting system on the United Nations negotiations on the environment. The ENB volume 12, in particular, have been covering for more than 20 years the discussions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
## User Stories
Who wants to use this information and to do what?
A. I am a negotiator from the Bangladesh delegation. I am attending a meeting of the SBI (subsidiary body for implementation) and I am trying to get passed a more stringent rule for the accounting of greenhouse gases emission, but I am encountering a staunch opposition from the delegate of Saudi Arabia. I’d like to see what this country has said on the same matter in the previous discussions in the SBI.
B. I am a journalist and I have just seen the delegation of the AOSIS group (Alliance of Small Islands) leaving the room because of a disagreement over Loss and Damage. I’d like to know more about this topic and see which other positions have been taken earlier by the same delegations.
The ENB is a great tool for following day-by-day the evolution of the negotiations, but it does not easily allow to retrieve all the interventions by one actor and/or about one topic and/or in a specific negotiation table. This difficulty comes from two main shortcomings of the ENB:
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Spurious aggregation. Covering the negotiations in a strict chronological organisation - event-by-event and day-by-day - each ENB report aggregates in the same document:
- different negotiation tracks (if they took place in parallel during the same day);
- and different reporting formats (history of the previous meetings, analysis, official negotiations, in the corridors...).
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Inconsistent structuration. Though each reports is divided into ‘sections’ separated by titles and referring to different negotiation tracks and reporting formats, such structure is difficult exploit because:
- title and sections are nested in complex way;
- the headings wording, formatting and nesting is not consistent through the different bulletins.