CLIMATE CHANGE: Forward, Hopefully Past the Hurdles

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Dec 16 2007 (IPS) - Despite scepticism about the ‘Bali roadmap’, the international community has come a long way in hammering out a truly global response to the serious threat posed by climate change.

But the global climate diplomacy is faced with several hurdles that must be overcome in the next two years. These involve changing the hearts and minds of the ruling elite in both the developed and developing countries.

As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, while the developed countries need to “continue to take the lead on curbing emissions,” the Earth’s atmosphere “can’t tell the difference between emissions from an Asian factory, the exhaust from a North American SUV, or deforestation in South America or Africa.”

It was after a lot of sweating and at times heated exchanges that senior officials and government ministers from 187 countries – gathered in Nusa Dua on the tropical island of Bali for the 13th UN conference of parties to the climate change convention (COP13) – agreed Saturday (Dec. 15) to launch “negotiations towards a crucial and strengthened international climate change deal.”

Several events organised by non-governmental organisations, and a powerful speech by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore on the sidelines exerted “moral” pressure on the participants not to go home without an accord.

Al Gore shares this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Bali roadmap includes an agenda for the key issues to be negotiated up to 2009. These are: action for adapting to the negative consequences of climate change, such as droughts and floods; ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; ways to widely deploy climate-friendly technologies, and financing both adaptation and mitigation measures.

The secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn says that the concluding negotiations in 2009 will ensure that a new deal can enter into force by 2013 following expiry of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

“This is a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer. “Parties have recognised the urgency of action on climate change and have now provided the political response to what scientists have been telling us is needed.”

Earlier this year, the IPCC issued a finding in its fourth assessment report that if left unchecked, the world’s average temperature could rise as much as 6 degrees centigrade by the end of the century, causing serious harm to economies, societies and ecosystems worldwide. The IPCC was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The fact that the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Prize helped lend overwhelming acceptance to the report, despite continued criticism by doubting Thomases in a section of the scientific community about the veracity of the impact of global warming as spelt out by the IPCC.

That the road ahead is not going to be smooth was underlined by Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesian environment minister and president of COP13 in Bali. “We now have a Bali roadmap, we have an agenda and we have a deadline. But we also have a huge task ahead of us, and time to reach agreement is extremely short, so we need to move quickly.”

A significant aspect of the Bali conference is that it marked yet another milestone in political leadership in industrialised and developing countries in responding to scientific findings.

Warnings of global warming by the IPCC spurred 192 governments to adapt the Convention on Climate Change in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. But as greenhouse gas emission levels continued to rise around the world, it became increasingly evident that a firm and binding commitment by industrialised countries was necessary.

These have historically contributed more to the problem than developing countries by emitting larger amounts per capita of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.

Governments therefore initiated negotiations at the first conference of parties to the convention (COP1) in 1995 in Berlin that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol – an international agreement linked to the existing treaty but standing on its own – at COP3 in 1997 in Japan.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, to which 176 governments are a party, 36 industrialised countries and the European Community have committed to reducing their emissions by an average of 5 percent by 2012 against 1990 levels.

While a new global deal is envisioned for 2013, countries also agreed in Bali on a number of steps that need to be taken immediately to further implement the existing commitments.

Governments decided that funding for adaptation projects (to cleaner technology) in developing countries, financed by the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM), would begin under the management of the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

This ensures that the Adaptation Fund will become operational at an early stage of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012). The fund is filled by a 2 percent levy on CDM projects. Under the CDM, companies in the industrialised world can earn credit for emission limits and trading by investing with clean technology in a developing country.

The fund is worth about 37 million euros (53 million dollars). Considering the number of CDM projects in the pipeline, this figure is expected to increase to an estimated 80-300 million dollars in 2008-2012.

The Bali conference made significant progress on the issue of technology, one of the key concerns of developing countries. Governments agreed to scale up investment in transfer of both mitigation and adaptation technologies for developing countries.

The programme aims to give an additional push to demonstration projects, to create a more attractive environment for investment and to provide incentives to the private sector for technology transfer.

The GEF will start setting up this programme together with international financial institutions and representatives of the private financial sector.

A key issue at Bali was “reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries (REDD).” An agreement on this affirms the urgent need to take further meaningful action to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

A work programme for further methodological work has been adopted. It will focus, for example, on assessment of changes in forest cover and associated greenhouse gas emissions, and methods to demonstrate reduction of emissions from deforestation.

The decision furthermore encourages parties to the agreement to support capacity building and to undertake efforts, including demonstration activities, to address deforestation.

This is important for local and indigenous communities who depend on forests for their livelihood. Deforestation is expected to be an important component of a climate change regime beyond 2012 – in both mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Governments could not agree some practical measures, such as integrating adaptation into national policy. This issue will be on the agenda at the next meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice in Bonn in June 2008.