It is a bit like waking up after a big party and trying to find someone to help wash the dirty dishes.
After the excitement of sealing the Paris climate change agreement last December, no country has come forward with an offer to host next year’s UN negotiations, which will focus on the less glamorous task of putting the new accord into action.
The dearth of volunteers means that the UN is looking at hosting the 2017 meeting itself at its climate change secretariat in Bonn, says the body’s executive secretary, Patricia Espinosa.
“The truth is that this conference has really become a major project for any country that wants to host it,” Ms Espinosa told the FT.
“It’s not evident that many countries can do it,” she added.
Two-week UN climate negotiations are normally held in a different part of the world at the end of each year. Past hosts have included the Indonesian island of Bali, Kyoto and Copenhagen.
The job of putting on the sprawling events is vast. Virtually every country sends a delegation, sometimes led by a head of state, and the meetings draw thousands of people from companies, environmental groups and news organisations.
At least 15,000 people went to the 2014 conference in Lima, organisers said, while Paris attracted more than twice that number.
That means the host country has to have substantial financial resources plus the capacity to provide the transport and security needed to make such events a success, according to Ms Espinosa.
The meetings had been held in Bonn before, in the 1990s, when they were “not so high on the political agenda”, she said.
Each meeting is known as a “COP”, short for the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992 treaty that kicked off international action to tackle global warming.
The COPs are the treaty’s main decision-making bodies. Last year’s Paris meeting was the 21st, so it was known as COP21.
A host country is normally chosen well ahead of time. France offered to hold the COP21 meeting in September 2012, three years before it began, a move deemed brave after the dismal failure of the last effort to strike a global climate deal, in Copenhagen in 2009.
This year’s conference, COP22, started yesterday in Marrakesh and is due to run until November 18.
Morocco, a country that has enthusiastically embraced green energy, was keen to be the first nation to host a COP after the success of the Paris agreement’s adoption.
But this year’s meeting poses a challenge for its hosts, not least if Donald Trump wins today’s US presidential election: the Republican candidate has said he wants to “cancel” the Paris agreement.
In addition, because the new accord entered into force last week, much earlier than expected, delegates are not going to be able to finalise the “rule book” governing the pact in Marrakesh, because doing so would exclude dozens of countries that have yet to formally ratify the deal.
Instead, countries are expected to kick final decisions down the track to at least 2018.
