ExMOP opening statement by the

President of the Bureau of the 27th MOP to the Montreal Protocol,

Vienna, 22 July 2016

Honourable Andrä Rupprechter, Federal Minister for Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management of Austria,

Mr. LI Yong, Director General of UNIDO,

Mr. Ibrahim Thiaw, Deputy Executive Director of UNEP,

Ms. Tina Birmpili, Executive Secretary of the Ozone Secretariat,

Distinguished members of the Bureau of the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol and the Third Extraordinary Meeting of the Parties,

Honourable Ministers and heads of delegations,

Distinguished participants,

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the Third Extraordinary Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol in Vienna. It is over eight months since we held our last ordinary meeting of the Parties which took place in Dubai where you elected me to preside over the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol. I thank you for the trust you showed to my country to lead this important body.

Our meeting is taking place as a direct response to the decision that we took in Dubai last November, to hold an extraordinary meeting of the Parties as part of the implementation of decision XXVII/I on Dubai Pathway on hydrofluorocarbons. It is a decision which called on parties to work towards an HFC amendment in 2016 by first resolving challenges by generating solutions.

The Extraordinary Meeting will focus exclusively on the implementation of the Dubai Pathway on HFCs. We cannot change the agenda of the meeting by adding any unrelated matters to this single issue as it is suggested by the rules of procedure for the extraordinary meetings. In your statements, it is my hope that you will be highlighting how we can implement the Dubai pathway in order to have an agreement within this year. Later this morning, we will be having a ministerial round table and I hope that all discussants can send to this body a convergent and strong message.

Honourable ministers and distinguished participants,

Considerable progress has already been made at the technical expert level by the three meetings that have preceded this meeting. In Geneva in April, the thirty-seventh meeting of the open-ended Working Group was able to address some challenges to HFC management and the same meeting resumed its discussion on those challenges here in Vienna a few days ago. There has been a positive outcome from the resumed meeting of the 37 Open-ended Working Group in Vienna where all parties with the same commitment worked hard to address the challenges, to negotiate, to compromise and finally to generate solutions. The outstanding issues that form part of these solutions should be addressed during the discussions of the amendment but they will need to be resolved prior to its adoption. The thirty-eighth meeting of the Open-ended Working Group made also considerable progress with parties discussing the difficult issues of any amendment proposal basically the baselines, the baseline years and the control measures.

As Ministers and high level representatives of your Governments, we should all have a sense of obligation and urgency to ensure that we seize this moment by reviewing all actions that need to be taken to address all outstanding issues, to try and bridge the different perspectives between the Article 5 and the non-Article 5 parties and provide clear guidance on the way forward. At the same time, we should draw a road map of how our discussions may conclude during the 28th Meeting of the Parties in October. Our next meeting is only over two months away.

I would like to thank the co-chairs but most importantly all parties who took part in the discussions during the preceding meetings and congratulate them for the progress made thus far. It is now time to appeal to all of you to ensure that we keep the momentum and use the provisions of the Montreal Protocol that have been crafted so carefully to find a way forward acceptable to all parties that will lead us to include HFCs under the Protocol.

I know how sometimes difficult it is for individual party positions or regional positions or like-minded positions to be compromised but you have proved once more that you are able to bridge differences of opinion and forge consensus. This is the nature of almost all negotiations whereby give and take usually leads to a solution.

Let us work together in order to achieve the objectives of this meeting.

I thank you all for your attention

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