South Africa would take a long-term strategic approach to the nineteenth climate change Conference of the Parties (COP19) to be held in Warsaw, Poland, this month, Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) chief director of international climate change Maesela Kekana said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a climate change briefing in Centurion, he said it was essential that the gains made, at a significant cost to developing countries, in South Africa and Qatar, during COP17 and COP18 respectively, should be translated into action at COP19.

“Warsaw must make progress in the implementation of decisions already taken under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, including the operationalisation of the various institutions and mechanisms created under the convention,” he said.

Kekana stated that to ensure the effective implementation of decisions that had already been taken, it was important for COP19 to provide clarity on how the adaption committee, the technology executive committee, the climate technology centre and network, and the financial mechanism would function in a coherent manner.

DEA acting director-general Alf Wills said COP19 was likely to be a challenging meeting as, in addition to the progress required with regard to the implementation of decisions already taken, work also had to be advanced under the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) to ensure the conclusion of a new legal agreement by 2015. 

“COP19 will be critical in setting the stage for achieving a global agreement in Paris at the end of 2015,” he noted.  

To ensure the successful conclusion of the 2015 agreement, decisions relating to the ADP had to be taken by the end of COP19, Kekana said.

“One of the decisions should be on the mutilateral agreed criteria according to which parties will domestically determine their commitment, while the other decision should be a COP decision similar to that taken in Doha, Qatar, which captures the progress and sets out a plan of work for 2014,” he said.

Other priorities for COP19 from a South African perspective included the capitalisation of the Green Climate Fund, ensuring that adaption was at the heart of the 2015 agreement, resolving issues of loss and damage, and ensuring that the ADP moved into a formal mode to produce a negotiation text.

Meanwhile, also speaking at the briefing, Department of International Relations and Cooperation chief state law adviser for international law Sandea de Wet stated that, going into COP19, it was important to note that the current climate change negotiations were not solely focused on the environment.

“The negotiations are all about the economy and self-driven interests. The more larger countries [come] on board, the higher the stakes of the negotiations become, as countries [are driven by] their own interests [in terms of] the 2015 agreement,” she said.

De Wet stated that this, however, was not necessarily negative, but added that going forward South Africa had to “be awake”.

“We have to understand what will be asked from us as a country and what it will take to deliver [this]. We have to ask ourselves, most importantly, whether this will be worth it without the necessary support. These are national interests that have to be looked after,” she said.

Responding to climate change was a cross-generational challenge, Wills said, adding that while the effects of action or inaction would not be felt immediately, they would have significant consequences for future generations.

“South Africa is [working] to reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts through interventions that build and sustain South Africa’s social, economic and environmental resilience, and [its] emergency response capacity. We are at work to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions and we are engaging intensively in the international climate change negotiations to secure a fair, effective and multilateral rules-based global climate-change regime,” he concluded.