The stalemate in negotiations for a new global climate treaty remains little changed following a key UN climate convention meeting in Accra, Ghana this week. The meeting hosted delegates from 160 countries and is the third in a series of eight in the two-year “Bali roadmap” process to thrash out an accord to carry on from the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The deadline meeting is scheduled for Copenhagen at the end of 2009, now just 15 months away.
UNFCCC head Yvo de Boer talked up progress at the meeting saying the previously slow pace of negotiations had picked up. “We are still on track, the process has speeded up and governments are very serious about negotiating a result in Copenhagen,” de Boer said in a closing statement. Others were not so sanguine. Greenpeace said there was still not enough urgency in talks and accused Japan, Canada, Russia and Australia of stalling on a deal to achieve cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and curb global warming.
Clarity has emerged on the issue of ‘sectoral approaches’, or international programmes to target emissions in high-emitting sectors like cement, aluminium and steel. There will be no binding targets set for these sectors that would include developing countries. This had been pushed by some developed countries led by Japan as, among other objectives, a way of bringing the developing world to the party on emission reduction commitments without imposing national targets.
Developing countries have roundly rejected that move and it appears such sectoral emissions initiatives would only be voluntary, and possibly included via an upgraded Clean Development Mechanism (
CDM). Either way, they are not now likely to figure prominently in any breakthrough that needs to emerge to produce a new agreement as some had hoped. Targets and how the burden of emissions cuts should be shared between rich and poor countries is at the heart of the stalemate in treaty negotiations.
The big sticking point remains the US’s refusal to embrace binding emissions targets and many remain unchanged in their belief after Accra that no breakthrough is possible until a new US president takes office early in 2009. That will come too late for the next UN climate meeting in Poznan Poland in December.
Developing countries also stuck together in opposing a developed-word push to expand the number of countries subjected to Kyoto-style binding emissions cuts. The head EU negotiator, Brice Lalonde of France, said there was not enough differentiation between developing countries on climate commitments, given vast differences in levels of economic development between them. Singapore, South Korea, Argentina and some oil-rich Arab states are often cited as those that should, after 2012, be expected to join the 37 ‘
Annex 1’ group of developed countries with obligations to cut emissions.
Support for a new financial mechanism for avoided deforestation continues to grow and de Boer said the Accra meeting made it very clear that issue of forests needs to be part of a post-2012 agreement. The stark reality of deforestation’s 20 per cent contribution to global emissions appears to have generated a sense widely held feeling among climate negotiators that
REDD mechanism is now imperative. There is not yet been real progress on how such a mechanism might work but approaches were aired. Taxing airline and shipping emissions was one idea to fund forest protection, as was a levy on the logging industry.
Reuters, Associated Press, Euractiv 27-29/8/08
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