A NEW, much shorter, draft agreement aimed at tackling climate change was tabled here yesterday by UN officials in an effort to make it easier for world leaders to “seal the deal” when they enter the negotiations next week.
The six-page document, drafted by Michael Zammit Cutajar, a veteran of UN climate talks, is a distillation of ideas in the much longer 180-page text delegates had been considering in three rounds of negotiations over the past six months in Bonn, Bangkok and Barcelona.
A separate draft was being produced by John Ashe, the Antigua and Barbuda ambassador who chairs the parallel ad hoc working group dealing with the Kyoto Protocol, under which 37 developed countries – including Ireland – are bound to reduce their emissions.
Yvo de Boer, the UN’s climate chief, has said the Kyoto Protocol should continue in operation at least until another treaty is brought into force – by extending it beyond the 2012 end of its “first commitment period”, to sustain international carbon trading.
The latest drafts were seen as a response by the UN to the stand taken over the previous two days by Tuvalu, a small island state in the South Pacific, which insisted that delegates from all 192 countries represented here discuss the terms of a new treaty.
“We should have seen this text long ago,” Swedish envoy Anders Turesson, speaking on behalf of the EU, said of the new negotiating text. He conceded, however, “hard work will be needed” to turn it into a legally binding agreement.
There was also the issue of whether there would be one outcome or two – one a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol and the other involving the US. “In an ideal world, we would have a single legally binding one – not a twin track, with one legally binding and the other not,” he said.
The most contentious issues remaining to be resolved all appear in Mr Zammit Cutajar’s document in square brackets – mainly reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries and how much international aid would be provided for developing nations.
News of the latest drafts came as the EU leaders agreed in Brussels to commit €2.4 billion a year until 2012 in “fast-start financing” to help poor countries cope with climate change – an offer immediately dismissed as inadequate by aid and environment groups.
Tim Gore, Oxfam’s EU policy adviser, said EU leaders had only offered “small sums of short-term cash”. “Worst of all, this money is not even new – it’s made up of a recycling of past promises, and payments that have already been made.” Trócaire’s Niamh Garvey complained that the EU had so far “refused to specify what it will commit for long-term needs – one of the key issues for developing countries in the negotiations”. Any short-term finance “should not divert attention from long-term needs”, she said.
But Tove Ryding, of Greenpeace Denmark, said it was clear a legally binding outcome of the Copenhagen conference was “back on the table” and she urged environment ministers to start “crunching” the numbers as soon as they arrive here this weekend.
She also noted several heads of state would be flying in ahead of the “high-level segment” that starts on Wednesday, and urged them to “cancel the speeches, the fancy dinners, the photo opportunities – and get to work” on securing an agreement. Otherwise, she warned, it would look as if they were “dining on the Titanic”.