WITH JUST 70 days to the crucial UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, delegates from nearly 180 countries assembled in Bangkok yesterday for another round of talks aimed at hammering out a global agreement in December.
Opening the two-week session, Thailand’s prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said he hoped the “political will and vision” expressed by world leaders at the UN summit in New York last week would act as a spur to the negotiations.
“There is no plan B. If we do not realise plan A, we go straight to plan F, which stands for failure,” he warned the delegates, just as a tropical storm – Typhoon Ketsana – swept through Luzon, in the Philippines, dumping 334mm of rain in six hours.
The near-record rainfall swamped parts of metropolitan Manila, causing up to 100 deaths and displacing an estimated 340,000 people. Greenpeace volunteers, working with the local Red Cross, deployed inflatable boats to rescue stranded residents.
“It reminds us that southeast Asia is among the most vulnerable and least prepared areas to deal with the impacts of climate change, said Greenpeace International’s regional director, Von Hernandez, a former professor of literature in the Philippines.
“With only three negotiating weeks left until Copenhagen, we need to see governments ... taking bold action which puts flesh on the bones of the world leaders’ grand statements made at the UN in New York,” said Kaisa Kosonen, Greenpeace’s climate policy chief.
The Bangkok meeting, which has been convened under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is the fourth of five sets of negotiations this year before the Copenhagen summit. The next session is planned for Barcelona in November.
As usual, however, the negotiations are moving at a snail’s pace, with a negotiating text that has got longer as more elements are added to it. One of the main objectives in Bangkok is to whittle it down to manageble proportions for ministers to deal with in Copenhagen.
Both China and India have shown signs that they are willing to do their fair share in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while Japan has put forward a new target of cutting its emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, more than matching the EU’s opening offer.
Yet even with Japan’s new commitment, the combined target of all developed countries (including the US) amounts to cuts of only 10-17 per cent by 2020, well short of the 40 per cent needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees.
According to Oxfam International’s Antonio Hill, the new US climate change and energy Bill due to be introduced in the Senate this week would show a clearer picture of whether the US is willing to “provide the momentum desperately needed in the negotiations”.
A key focus for delegates representing 177 countries at the Bangkok talks will be to seek clarity on further emission reduction commitments from developed countries as well as the scale of international aid to help developing countries combat climate change.
At last week’s New York summit, many leaders called for a deal in December that would enhance action to assist the world’s most vulnerable countries, but the follow-up G20 summit in Pittsburgh failed to agree on the level of aid that would be made available.
It has been estimated that $140 billion (€96.5 billion) would be needed annually by developing countries both for new technology to cut their own emissions, adapt to the worst impacts of climate change and protect tropical rainforests that act as “carbon sinks”.
Yesterday, five Thai children presented Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official, with piggy banks containing “small change for the climate”. They are among 1.4 million young people worldwide supporting the Tcktcktck coalition’s campaign to “seal the deal” in Copenhagen.