The latest round of UN climate negotiations has made progress on technical issues but little headway on the major questions holding back a new global climate treaty. The talks in Bonn concluded on the weekend six months before a deadline to deliver a post-Kyoto treaty at the annual UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.
The key issues to be resolved are greenhouse emission reduction targets by developed countries, commitments to curb the growth in emissions by developing countries and financing commitments by the rich world to help the developing world’s effort.
A draft agreement text still leaves the options on developed country targets and developing country actions wide open. The document has now expanded to 200 pages from 53 leading into the talks. The head of UN climate work group overseeing that document, Malta’s Michael Zammit Cutajar, said no major breakthroughs were now likely to happen until the Copenhagen deadline meeting in December.
"This is like the evolutionary process in reverse - the Big Bang comes at the end," Zammit Cutajar said.
Developing countries led by China are sticking to their call for developed nations to commit to the upper end of the range of rich-country cuts recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. In 1990 terms, Europe has committed to 20 per cent cuts, Japan 8 per cent, Australia 5 per cent and the US only back to 1990 levels, or at most a few percentage points below.
Europe and Australia would lift their targets if matched by others and Japan’s target, announced last week, is seen by some observers as a first negotiating position. Developing nations led by China are holding out on any pledges of their own until rich nations firm up their commitments.
On the subject of developed country finance help for the developing world, talks are similarly stalemated. A call by China for developed-nation governments to commit funding equivalent to 0.5 to 1 per cent of their GDP to finance the emission reduction effort in developing countries has been largely rejected. Rich nations are supporting private sector investment, largely via carbon market mechanisms, to fund such action.
This would effectively mean an expansion of offsets markets like the UN Clean Development Mechanism to fund projects and programmes to boost renewable energy capacity, carbon capture, industrial gas destruction, reforestation and avoided deforestation in the developing world.
Yvo de Boer, the chief UN climate change official, said that despite progress on the major issues, he was still confident of settling the broad outline of an agreement in Copenhagen, with detail work that will have to follow. Governments "are committed to reaching an agreement, and this is a big achievement," de Boer said.
Delegates and observers were generally of the view that important progress was made in Bonn on the ‘nuts and bolts’ technical issues needed to round out a full treaty framework.
Two more rounds of UN talks are scheduled before Copenhagen while a G8 world leaders summit and further talks among a US-convened major emitters’ group will also search for global accord in coming months.
Reuters, Associated Press 12/6/09
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