On 17 October, TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute based in New Delhi, India) convened a virtual dialogue on Strengthening Multilateralism on the Road to COP30 and Beyond. After a short introduction by the organisers and R.R. Rashmi (Distinguished Fellow at TERI and former key climate negotiator), who chaired the Dialogue, Benito Müller (ecbi Director) was asked to open the round of presentations by the 10 panelists. He presented the work he and colleagues have done under the cover theme Quo Vadis COP? And in particular Quo Vadis COP31?

He was followed by Ovais Sarmad (former UNFCCC Deputy Executive Secretary), author of an OCP/ecbi Discussion Note on reimagining COPs and Climate Weeks, who, among other things, proposed an ‘Implementation Forum’ within the COP process.

Niclas Svenningsen (Manager, Mitigation, UNFCCC) observed that the majority of participants at recent mega-COPs “are actually not negotiating. [...] it's interesting to me to listening to Benito because I think we are thinking in the same lines, which is that the COPs cannot be everything for everybody, but what you can do is that you can lift out large part of what is called today, everything that is not negotiations and create a new space, a new platform, a conference of the climate actors if you like. And when you don't have negotiations, then where you have collaboration. [...] Such a conference of the climate actors could happen before the COP, so it feeds in to the negotiations.” He ended his intervention by emphasising that he does believe that “the UNFCCC is still the essential main mechanism for international negotiations.”

In the Chair’s Summary, Rashmi highlighted key takeaways, the first one being that “we need to focus more on implementation and separate the process of negotiations from the process of, you know, focusing on climate actions [...] We need to focus on implementation as distinct from negotiations.”