Negotiating a big breakfast can help at talks

Getting up early for a large breakfast was often part of the daily routine for Wang Tian, a Chinese negotiator at the COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

A substantial breakfast was a key preparation for the long days at COP28 that could see her have to skip lunch and dinner as fierce and sometimes tedious negotiations took place on the content and wording of statements on transparency issues.

Negotiations at the conference, which was held in Dubai from Nov 30 to Dec 13, would often go long into the night, and with agreements requiring the signatures of all parties, a consensus was difficult to achieve.

Negotiations on a transparency framework at COP28 were aimed at tracking how each country is progressing toward its climate commitments. The key task at COP28 was how to help developing countries fulfill their implementation of the enhanced transparency framework under the Paris Agreement, with a biennial transparency report to be submitted by the end of this year.

Having participated in climate negotiations since 2014, Wang is used to being engaged in tense discussions.

"Quite often, discussions over just a few words of draft text can last for an hour," she said.

Sometimes, negotiators were only able to reach consensus on several sentences after a sleepless night, she added.

Wang compared climate negotiations to playing Go, a strategy board game in which a player tries to surround their opponent's territory. Some negotiators might insist on something only because they wanted to make gains on other issues, she said.

"On many occasions, nobody knows what will happen until the last moment," Wang said. "It's possible that negotiations are at a stalemate 99 percent of the time, but consensus is reached all of a sudden in the last 1 percent of time."

The stickiest time for negotiations is usually in the last few days before the final decisions on the text are reached. "Then, it's normal that negotiations continue nonstop during the night," she said.

Many negotiators fall asleep at the venue while waiting for the text to come out. "You can sleep, but you may have to get up at any time to read the latest version of the draft text," Wang said.

In such situations, having dinner is something of a luxury. "Quite often, we eat a lot at the hotel in the morning and then go without food for the rest of the day," she said.

At UN climate change conferences, it is quite common for Chinese negotiators to bring a small pot along with them so that they can cook noodles when they go back to their hotels late at night. "At least it's better than instant noodles," Wang said.

She said climate negotiators also have to take part in many discussions before each COP while performing their duties in their posts in various government bodies and institutions.

In years when parties had key issues to negotiate over the modalities, procedures and guidelines of the transparency framework, which needed to be adopted by the end of 2018, she took part in overseas meetings once a month and participated in at least one virtual conference a week.

She has been confronted with even more challenges since she started to work as a co-facilitator in the negotiations in 2022, but is determined to continue to forge ahead with climate negotiation.

"You have to consistently look for common ground among different parties, and you often need to reach out to different negotiators through 'corridor talk' to understand their true concerns," she said.

Negotiators from different parties have quite diverse cultural backgrounds and different communication styles, she said. While some delegates talk in a bold and unrestrained manner, some express themselves very conservatively.

But they always recognize those who can really facilitate something. "Sometimes the recognition is not for me as an individual, but because they think China has played a major role in the process," Wang said.