Green Times

A long round of talks on the trek towards a new global deal on climate change headed to a close on Friday, battered by criticism that progress was negligible.The 12-day haggle under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was the second since the accord in Bali, Indonesia, last December that set down a “roadmap” of negotiations for a new planetary treaty.

Officials said important ground had been cleared.

But they admitted to worries about how to meet the tightening schedule for wrapping up the most ambitious and complex environmental pact ever attempted in Copenhagen in December 2009.

“We now have a clear understanding among governments on what countries would ultimately like to see written into a long-term agreement to address climate change,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said.

“But with a little more than a year to go to Copenhagen, the challenge to come to that agreement remains daunting.”

The treaty would take effect from the end of 2012, when the current provisions of the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol expire.

It would be a template for reining in greenhouse gases in the next decade, encourage the transfer of clean technology and provide financial help to poor countries likely to bear the brunt of climate change.

Delegates said progress was being mainly stymied by a who-goes-first question on concessions.

Developing nations say the responsibility for global warming lies historically with rich countries, who are best placed for tackling it.

So they want the rich nations to first come up with detailed proposals as to how they intended to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions post-2012.

But many rich nations want to see how emerging giants such as China and India — set to be the biggest sources of greenhouse gases in the decades to come — intend to deal with their own fast-growing pollution.

Indian representative Chandrashekar Dasgupta deplored “the lack of any real progress” in Bonn and “a deafening silence” among industrialized countries, save the European Union.

The EU unilaterally plans to cut its carbon pollution by 20 percent by 2020 compared to a 1990 benchmark and has offered to deepen this to 30 percent if other major emitters follow suit.

“I do feel we need a completely new spirit of cooperation from here,” said Harald Dovland, a Norwegian chairing this part of the haggle.

“If we continue in this mode of work, I fear we will not succeed in achieving the goals set in the work program.”

The talks ranged over a sprawling array of issues, including caps on carbon gases, market incentives to help the cleanup, reforestation and help for vulnerable countries in the face of climate change.

Delegates said another brake was the US elections as countries awaited a successor to President George W. Bush, fiercely attacked for snubbing the Kyoto process.

Green groups fretted that real negotiations were being left to a meeting in Accra, Ghana, in August, to the year’s-end ministerial-level conference in Poznan, Poland, and to the final negotiations in Copenhagen next year.

“We’re under huge pressure now, there are only 18 months to go to Copenhagen, the agenda has never been bigger and the progress has never been slower,” said Bill Hare of Greenpeace International.

He accused Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States of methodological nitpicking and procedural roadblocks.

“This UN process is in trouble, but it’s in trouble because of the absence of the United States from the negotiation and because of the lack of leadership being shown by critical major emitting economies here from the rich world.”

Separately, the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency estimated China was now by far the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.

China’s emissions of CO2 rose eight percent last year, placing its pollution “about 14 percent” higher than that of the United States, the agency said.

By some experts’ yardsticks, worldwide emissions of carbon gases need to peak within the next seven to 10 years to have a chance of staving off massive climate damage, such as drought, floods, storms and rising sea levels that will affect millions of lives.
Source: ABS-CBN News, Phillipines