Environment Editor FRANK MCDONALDreports on the latest round of climate change talks under way in Bonn
THE UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) website now features a digital clock counting down to the start of the crucial Copenhagen summit in December at which an agreement is expected to be reached on how to tackle global warming.
Yvo de Boer, the convention’s executive secretary, said last week he had no doubt that the world was on track towards negotiating a solid deal because the political moment was right: “If the world has learned anything from the financial crisis, it is that global issues require a global response.”
For the first time, delegates from 192 countries are discussing key negotiating texts drafted by the UNFCCC secretariat, which it hopes will serve as the basis for an ambitious and effective international climate change agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire at the end of 2012.
The current gathering at Bonn’s Hotel Maritim is being attended by more than 4,000 participants, including government delegates, representatives from business and industry, environmental organisations, research institutions and journalists. Some 14,000 are expected to flood into Copenhagen for the December summit.
Michael Zammit Cutajar, Maltese chairman of the ad-hoc working group on long-term co-operative action, noted that the negotiating text on the table did not prejudge or preclude any particular outcome. The 53-page text for this ad-hoc group, which comprises all 192 parties to the UNFCCC, covers a shared vision for long-term co-operative action on adaptation and mitigation as well as finance, technology and capacity-building. A parallel text is being considered by another ad-hoc group dealing with further commitments under Kyoto.
Other issues intended for discussion under the protocol, which sets targets for 37 developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, include how to improve emissions trading, Kyoto’s so-called “project-based mechanisms” and options for the treatment of land-use change and forestry.
“It is important that we complete some of the more solvable issues here in Bonn so that we can then focus on the more difficult ones later on in the negotiations,” said John Ashe, newly elected chairman of the ad-hoc working group on further commitments for annex I countries under the Kyoto Protocol, to give it its full title. These include Ireland.
In addition to the two working groups to pave the way for an agreed outcome in Copenhagen, the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice – which provides an “interface” between the UNFCCC political process and the scientific community – is also meeting in Bonn this week.
One positive straw in the wind was the backing by the Major Economies Forum meeting in Paris last month to a Mexican proposal on finance to help developing countries with climate change.
Oxfam International’s senior climate adviser, Antonio Hill, said it was “good news that the world’s richest countries are putting their weight behind a proposal for financing climate action in poor countries”, although the history of aid “shows that any proposal that depends solely on voluntary promises . . . is doomed to fail”.
He said there was a finite amount of time to secure a deal that would prevent a human catastrophe. “Officials must quickly weed out those proposals that will leave poor countries to cope alone with the devastating effects.”
Oxfam has estimated that, by 2015, the number of people affected by climate-related disasters could increase by more than 50 per cent to 375 million a year.
The UNFCCC meeting in Bonn, which runs until Friday, is the second in a series of five UN negotiating sessions this year leading up to the Copenhagen summit.
For more information, visit www.unfccc.int.