Climate Change, Environment, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

CLIMATE CHANGE: Cancun May Deliver Little

Julio Godoy

BONN, Aug 6 2010 (IPS) - Little hope has emerged from a meeting here of any binding international regulations to reduce greenhouse gases at the next UN conference on climate change scheduled for November and December in Cancun, Mexico.

Delegates from around the world met in Bonn Aug. 2-6 within the framework of the UN convention on climate change (UNFCCC), the international body coordinating negotiations ahead of the Cancun meeting.

The Bonn meeting was the last but one major international meeting before the UN conference in Cancun. Another round of negotiations will take place in Taijin, China, in October. After the Bonn meeting, that will mean only five days of official negotiations before the Cancun conference.

“We have to be realistic and not expect too much either from these debates or from the conference in Cancun,” Jo Leinen, chairperson of the environmental committee at the European Parliament, told IPS.

“Cancun will only be another step towards yet another UN conference, in South Africa, in 2011,” Leinen pointed out.

The crucial point on the agenda at the UNFCCC meeting was a workshop “on the scale of (greenhouse gases) emission reductions to be achieved by Annex I Parties in aggregate and the contribution of Annex I Parties, individually or jointly, to this scale.”

Annex I parties refer to the Kyoto protocol description of the 35 most industrialised countries of the world, that should ratify the agreement and commit to reduce their emission levels of greenhouse gasses to targets set mostly below1990 levels.

Strong industrialising developing countries with growing emissions of greenhouse gases, such as China and India, are not part of Annex 1, and therefore not required to reduce their emissions. The biggest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita included in Annex I, the U.S., did not ratify the protocol.

The Kyoto protocol’s present regime on reducing emissions ends in 2012. The UN conference in Cancun is supposed to deliver the new regulatory regime after 2012.

But instead of advancing towards an agreement on reducing emissions, “the mitigation discussion (in Bonn) even went backwards and became more polarised,” says Gordon Shepherd from World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The Alliance of Small Island States, which are at risk of getting submerged by a rise in ocean level due to climate change, accused industrialised countries of backing away from their emissions cut pledges.

“We cannot anticipate any major shift from what we had in Copenhagen, which was a 12 to 18 percent reduction when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for 25 percent,” said Dessima Williams, the group’s chairperson.

Ottmar Edenhofer, leading German environmental economist and co-author of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the present state of international negotiations and policy debates does not allow for optimism.

“The very fact that the summit of the Group of 20 last June in Toronto did not mention climate change at all says everything on the present state of the global environmental policy debates,” Edenhofer told IPS.

Edenhofer pointed out that China and the U.S., the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, are not ready to ratify any international binding agreement on reductions. “But also Europe has not shown so far that it can decouple economic growth from greenhouse gases emissions,” Edenhofer said.

But he said the Chinese government, despite its reluctance to commit to a binding agreement, “has launched a very ambitious programme to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy, by up to 50 percent by 2020, compared to 2005.

“If China is serious about this target, it would boost future international negotiations,” Edenhofer said. By fulfilling this target, China would enhance its own future chances to ratify an international agreement.

Most experts agree that the failure of the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen last December to reach a consensus marked a watershed in international negotiations on the issue.

“One of the major failures of Copenhagen was its incapacity to provide a signal to the industry that the global dumping space for greenhouse gases is getting smaller by the day,” Edenhofer said. “The signal that Copenhagen sent was that the largest emitters either are not willing or do not know how to face this challenge.”

The Copenhagen failure and the likely fiasco at Cancun are leading environmental experts to reconsider the strategy to fight climate change pursued so far.

Oliver Geden, energy expert at the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs, says pressure to progress in climate change negotiations is growing, because “the greenhouse gases already emitted are very likely to provoke a rise of the average global temperature of 1.5 Celsius degrees compared to the pre-industrialised era.”

There is broad consensus that rise in the average global temperatures should remain under two degrees Celsius, in order to avoid the worst of environmental catastrophes.

“According to the UN Environmental Programme, the peak in emissions shall be reached as late as 2021,” says Geden. “But as of today, there is no evidence whatsoever that a reversal in the trend of emissions can be possible in the near future.”

That would mean that the two degrees target won’t be met. “But we cannot afford to appear arbitrary or accommodating in the face of our failures. So instead of raising the temperature target, maybe we should change the parameter — it is not the average rise of temperatures, but the global emissions that we should limit. Maybe we should concentrate on keeping emissions under 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Jo Leinen believes a new failure in the coming conference in Cancun, Mexico, and in South Africa next year, should lead to “a Plan B, to get out of the UN framework, and consider a coalition of the willing to formulate and ratify an agreement on reducing the emissions.”

Leinen said such a “coalition of the willing would only make sense if it encompasses the emitters of at least 80 percent of the greenhouse gases. As of today, with only a few negotiation days before Cancun, very few are ready to talk openly about such an alternative,” he said.

The new chairperson of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, suggested prolonging the validity of the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

 
Republish | | Print |

Related Tags



dorian larkin