OUTGOING UN climate chief Yvo de Boer has scotched the prospects of effective action being taken by both developed and major developing countries to combat global warming for at least 10 years.
“I don’t see the process delivering adequate mitigation targets [to reduce greenhouse gas emissions] in the next decade,” he told a press briefing yesterday during the latest round of climate talks here.
At last December’s Copenhagen summit, world leaders pledged to limit the rise in average global surface temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius. However, if this is to be achieved, global emissions would have to peak in 2015.
While conceding that this would not now happen, Mr de Boer was more confident that a target of making emissions cuts of 60 per cent or more by 2050 was attainable – although this would be a “longer journey”.
He based his assessment on the final round of talks that led to the Copenhagen Accord when he found that all developed country leaders favoured the mid-century goal, with those from the developing world prepared to play their part.
However, everything that’s now on the table as part of pledges from developed countries and others would only reduce emissions by 13 to 14 per cent below 1990 levels. “We need to move beyond it, and I’m confident we will get there in the longer run,” he said.
Asked whether next December’s summit in the Mexican resort of Cancún should be postponed until the US adopts new climate change legislation, Mr de Boer suggested that this could mean “waiting until 2999 – and we won’t be around then”.
He said last December’s “pretty horrible conference” in Copenhagen “did a lot of damage to confidence in the negotiating process”, and this needed to be rebuilt – primarily by reaching agreement on a package of aid for developing countries. The Copenhagen Accord specified a figure of $30 billion (€25 billion) between now and 2012 in aid to help them adapt to the effects of climate change. But they insist this must be “new and additional” money – not “recycled” from existing aid budgets.
“There’s a lot of discussion on that in Bonn,” said Mr de Boer, who steps down next month as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But he felt there was a “very constructive atmosphere” at the talks.
Although noting that pledges made by the EU, Japan, the US and others came “very close” to $30 billion, despite the economic downtown, he said: “Unfortunately in life, there is a distinction between making a promise and keeping a promise.”
He said greater clarity on what the Cancún summit was meant to achieve was needed. “Are we working towards a new treaty [to replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to run out in 2012] or a set of decisions, or both?” he asked.
In his view, Cancún needed to produce a “developed architecture” for dealing with all the key issues, including mitigation, adaptation, finance and capacity-building, and this would require clear leadership and greater ambition from developed countries.
Belgian physicist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said it has no view on what is necessary to mitigate global warming. All it had done was to produce different scenarios.
Following the controversies of recent months that called its most recent assessment (2007) into question, he said the IPCC would work very hard to restore public confidence and trust in climate science – and in its own objectivity.
Keya Chatterjee, of the US Climate Action Network, said the economic and social cost of addiction to fossil fuels was illustrated by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.