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December 16, 2007
BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, INDONESIA—In a dramatic ending to two weeks of often bitter negotiations, 189 countries gave final approval Saturday to a detailed agenda to guide further talks aimed at crafting a new climate change treaty by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012 .
The deal came after the United States, under enormous pressure, dropped its opposition to a last-minute proposal by the Indian delegation to ensure the talks would include the consideration of increased aid by industrialized countries to help developing countries adapt to the worst impacts of global warming.
The U.S. opposition prompted catcalls and angry denunciations from developing country delegates—virtually unprecedented in such a high-level diplomatic forum—culminating in an emotional appeal from Kevin Conrad, the senior delegate from Papua New Guinea.
“If you cannot lead, leave it to the rest of us,” said Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea’s ambassador for climate change. “Get out of the way."
Moments later, the U.S. negotiating team relented, declaring it would support the Indian proposal and clearing the way for final approval of the “Bali roadmap.”
An agreement seemed beyond reach even at the December 3 launch of the two-week summit, when the United States said it could not support a call for industrialized countries to take on tough, short-term emission-reduction targets.
An initial draft roadmap backed by the European Union was explicitly tied to influential reports issued this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations science panel. The reports warned that sharp, early emissions cuts by developed countries—followed by much deeper reductions by mid-century—are needed if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The early draft’s preamble language referred to “unequivocal scientific evidence” indicating the need for developed-country reductions “in a range of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020" and for "global emissions of greenhouse gases...to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels in 2000 by 2050.”
U.S. negotiators objected to the explicit numerical range of cuts in the preamble, saying the language would “prejudge outcomes” of the coming rounds of talks. The U.S. position called for including no discussion of specific cuts until the final stages of the planned talks.
In a political compromise that likely will bewilder many, the range of emissions reductions the countries agreed to consider over the next two years is linked to the IPCC report’s specific recommendations by means of a footnote in the final text.
The footnote refers to pages in a technical summary of the IPCC reports that references two separate ranges of cuts—each of which reflect the results of separate modeling scenarios gauging the impact on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of different ranges of reductions.
One of the ranges referenced in the footnote is identical to that in the initial draft document: 25-40 percent below 1990 levels in 10 to 15 years. The second range of cuts--10-40 percent below 1990 levels over the same time interval--was chosen to satisfy the Russian delegation.
After several attempts at compromise failed to budge the U.S. and EU delegations from their hard-line positions, the EU Thursday night took the risky move of threatening to boycott a U.S.-sponsored climate change meeting next month in Honolulu, where 17 of the world’s most powerful economies—and biggest greenhouse gas emitters—are scheduled to meet to ponder an alternative Bush administration approach to responding to global warming.
The high-stakes EU move was sparked in large part by escalating anger as the two weeks of talks advanced over what sources inside and outside the closed-door negotiating sessions described as attempts by the United States, Japan and Canada to sabotage the talks by making interventions thought to be intended to delay progress on the proposed roadmap and to fracture an alliance of 130 developing nations oddly known as the “Group of 77 and China.”
The EU boycott threat apparently spooked the Bush administration, which is loath to see its “major economies” process founder. According to sources, the EU play forced a senior U.S. negotiator to place numerous calls early Friday to French and German officials to find a way around the impasse.
By Friday afternoon, EU officials said the United States was being more “helpful” on some issues, but the stalemate on the emissions language continued.
Meanwhile, Muneer Akram, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations and the chairman of the developing-country alliance, complained to reporters of heavy-handed negotiating tactics by “a very small number of developed countries.”
Akram said the developed countries spoke of “threats” that would ensue if developing countries did not agree to take on emission caps in return for a developed-country pledge to commit to stiffer targets. The Kyoto Protocol requires 39 developed nations to cut their collective emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but imposes no emission-reduction mandates on developing nations.
Although Akram did not mention the United States by name, he referenced designations in the Kyoto Protocol that to knowledgeable reporters clearly identified the United States as one of the countries applying pressure.
“In the demands for greater commitments to mitigation efforts by developing countries, we were told of course we could come on board in a positive way if there is an agreement…but if we did not come on board, there could be other measures that could be utilized against the developing countries,” Akram said.
When asked whether the “other measures” involved cutting aid to Pakistan, a major U.S. ally in the Bush administration’s war on terror, Akram responded: “I didn’t hear aid mentioned, but I did hear trade sanctions mentioned.”
U.S. environmentalists said Saturday the agreement is far less than what they wanted to see emerge from the negotiations. Their disappointment notwithstanding, the greens said the deal contains all the major policy elements seen as necessary to craft a comprehensive treaty by the end of 2009.
"This marks the start of the world's last chance to stave off the worst impacts of global warming," said David Doniger, climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If we act now, we have the solutions to keep global temperatures from rising into the red zone."
The final roadmap emerging from the Bali talks requires countries over the next two years to consider significantly boosting developed-country aid and technical assistance to the world’s poorest countries, and those seen as most at risk from global warming impacts, to help these countries adapt to rising sea levels, droughts, floods and other adverse impacts of global warming.
It also calls for creating a “strategic program” for accelerating the flow of aid to developing countries to help them build their capacity to catalogue their emission sources, monitor emissions and develop plans for eventually slowing emission rates.
Ethelstan Angus Friday, Grenada’s permanent representative to the U.N and chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States, a group of countries at severe risk of being overrun by rising sea levels, praised the U.S. team for putting forward “encouraging” proposals on these so-called “capacity-building” provisions.
In one of the deal’s more celebrated provisions, the delegates agreed that the future talks must flesh out a plan to establish a program to provide strong incentives to developing countries to slow or stop the destruction of tropical rainforests. The international community tried unsuccessfully to add a similar but more limited proposal to the Kyoto Protocol seven years ago in The Hague.
"This agreement presents a workable path to a global climate deal and a big step towards ending tropical deforestation,” said Peter Goldmark, director of the climate and air program at Environmental Defense.
The future talks also will examine ways to accelerate the deployment in developing countries of low-emitting energy projects and other climate-friendly technologies so that these countries can reduce their reliance on fossil fuels without threatening their efforts to raise to grow their economies.
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December 14, 2007
BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, Indonesia-—In findings with disturbing implications for international efforts to prevent dangerous global climate change, a report released at the United Nations Climate Change Conference here concludes that as much as 55 percent of the Amazon tropical rainforest could be cleared or seriously damaged by 2030 if logging and other destructive practices continue at current rates.
The report, a synthesis of recent research written for the World Wildlife Fund by Woods Hole Research Center senior scientist Daniel Nepstad, states that destruction of the Amazon tropical forest is occurring at a rate much faster than predicted by advanced computer models designed to gauge the impacts of logging, forest-clearing to create pasture and other practices that harm the rainforest.
“Many changes underway in the Amazon today could lead to extensive conversion and degradation of Amazon forests over the next 15-25 years, well ahead of the late-century forest die-back predicted by some models,” the report concluded. “Current trends in agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging could clear or severely damage 55 percent of the Amazon rainforest by the year 2030.”
The report states that destruction of the forests is accelerated “through the synergistic influence of several vicious feedback loops that exist within and among the ecosystems and climate of the Amazon region.” If these feedback loops are not broken, “the prospect of conserving the Amazon rainforest will be greatly diminished, while the loss of biodiversity and the emission of greenhouse gases from the region will increase,” it said.
As the report describes, growing global demand for beef and other livestock food products give farmers a strong incentive to clear forests to create pasture for herds, most often by setting fires that can burn more forest than the farmers intended.
In addition, selective logging by timber companies seeks out high-value “canopy” trees-—the dominant organism in tropical forests—-to sell in global timber markets. The loss of canopy trees allows sunlight to penetrate the forest interior, drying dead leaves and branches on the forest floor. The loss of trees from fires and logging also facilitates invasion by grasses, ferns and bamboo, all of which are more susceptible to burning than the trees they replace.
In addition, new research strongly suggests that the heavy smoke produced by the fires can further inhibit rainfall already seen as decreasing across the Amazon region—-especially in the forest’s eastern half-—due to El Niño events and climate change-induced droughts.
“In my 23 years of living and working in the Amazon, I’ve never seen so many powerful forces coming together,” Nepstad told reporters at a December 5 new conference.
As Nepstad explained, the Amazon rainforest acts as a giant air conditioner for the planet. In the same way the evaporation of perspiration helps lower body temperature, the rainforest cools the planet by capturing heat from sunlight and converting as much as half of that solar energy into water vapor. In turn, the water vapor rises high above the forest canopy, where it condenses and forms rain-producing cumulus clouds.
This energy conversion cycle is one of the major engines of global atmospheric circulation. Computer modeling suggests that disrupting the cycle could have far-flung impacts, reducing rainfall in India, Central America and the grain belts of Brazil and the United States.
Nepstad said such a dramatic loss in the Amazon rainforest will make it much more difficult to limit the increase of global average temperature since 1850 to 2 degrees Celsius. Warming in excess of that level may result in irreversible, dangerous climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body of scientists, has concluded.
“For this meeting in Bali, perhaps the most important message is: It’s going to be very difficult to keep global warming from exceeding 2 degrees unless we conserve the forests of the Amazon,” Nepstad said. “By the same token, unless we come to grips with climate change, it’s going to be very difficult to conserve this giant forest ecosystem.”
Cattle ranching currently is responsible for about 70 to 80 percent of forest clearing, as ranchers use fire both to eradicate forests and to manage their pastures, but soybean agriculture is seen as an increasingly worrisome threat.
Brazil’s drive to plant more sugarcane to produce ethanol to meet global demand for non-petroleum motor vehicle fuels is displacing soybean production in the southern part of the country. In turn, the loss of soybean production in southern Brazil gives farmers in the Amazon region more incentive to clear rainforest to plant soybeans. Recent research suggests that as much as 20 percent of the eastern rainforest would be suitable for soybean production if the forest were cleared, Nepstad said.
“Cattle ranching really is the short-term culprit, while soy production is the medium-term threat,” he said.
As gloomy as these findings are, there is reason for optimism, Nepstad said. Rainforests can recover quickly from degradation if forest burning is tightly controlled, and abandoned croplands can convert to secondary, canopied forests naturally in as little as 10 years. One-fifth of the Amazon region has forests that are re-growing, he said.
In addition, as more farmers apply agricultural practices that are less dependent on fire as a management tool or turn to growing fruit trees that would be endangered by wildfires, they may exert political pressure to force other farmers to follow suit.
Most promising of all, the report said, is a proposal by tropical forest countries to include in a new climate change treaty provisions to allow these countries to earn credits for avoiding deforestation that they can sell in global carbon markets. Reaching a consensus that the proposal must be part of a new treaty is a key objective of the negotiations here in Bali.
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December 13, 2007
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BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, INDONESIA¬¬--In a high-stakes poker play aimed at salvaging the struggling Bali climate change summit, senior European Union ministers Thursday warned the U.S. delegation that the EU will not attend a White House-sponsored climate meeting next month in Hawaii unless the Bali talks produce a “substantial” agreement on an agenda to guide negotiations over the next two years on a new global warming accord.
In public speeches, private meetings with U.S. officials and statements to reporters, a variety of EU officials made it clear that a “substantial” Bali agreement must include consideration over the next two years of emission cuts by developed countries of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and even deeper cuts by mid-century.
The Bali “roadmap,” as the proposed negotiating agenda is called, is aimed at guiding international efforts to craft by 2009 a treaty to extend or succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 accord whose emission-reduction mandates for developed countries expire at the end of 2012.
The numerical targets demanded by the EU and other participants at the Bali summit reflect recommendations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. science review panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for focusing the world’s attention on the threat global warming poses to mankind. The IPCC said sharp emissions cuts are needed to quickly stabilize and reduce greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate sufficient to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
U.S. officials repeatedly have said here that including the IPCC emissions recommendations in the negotiating agenda would “prejudge outcomes” of the two-year climate talks.
Stavros Dimas, environment commissioner for the European Commission, told reporters that at a Thursday morning meeting he informed Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, the head of the U.S. delegation, that if the Bali meeting does not result in a “substantial” agreement it would be “meaningless” for the EU to attend the White House meeting of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters scheduled for January 30-31 in Honolulu.
“This morning, I was in a business meeting where representatives of the American government were,” Dimas said. “I acted at that moment because the discussions were such, and I said if we have an agreement here in Bali which is substantial, of course the major emitters meeting has some importance. Otherwise, it’s meaningless.”
Pressed by reporters, Dimas said he did not specify the range of emission cuts that would have to be part of the agreement, but EU officials throughout the 11 days of talks here have made it clear they consider short-term reductions by developed nations in the range recommended by the IPCC an essential component of the Bali roadmap.
In a speech to delegates Thursday, French environmental minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet explicitly linked EU participation in the Honolulu meeting with U.S. acceptance of a Bali roadmap agreement that included consideration of the IPCC emissions-cut recommendation.
"Now, allow me to say things in a clear, simple, solemn way to those among the industrialized countries, those among us who are still hesitating, who are hesitating to commit themselves,” Kosciusko-Morizet said, according to a translation of her remarks provided to The Energy Daily. “I’d like to tell them very clearly that they must commit themselves to 25-40 percent reduction by 2020, that we have to commit ourselves to, in terms of greenhouse gases."
Continuing, the French minister laid down her own clear marker: “The time has come for international commitments, and if the principle of the meeting of these great economies is possible, it has to go hand-in-hand with quantified commitments from developed countries."
Some 17 countries attended the first major economies/emitters meeting, held by the Bush administration in September in Washington. White House officials said then the gathering was meant to complement the ongoing U.N-sponsored climate negotiations by finding ways to trim emissions from these countries, which collectively are responsible for roughly 80 percent of global emissions.
Sources say that President Bush sees the major-emitters process as a way to regain the political and moral high ground on the issue of climate change. Bush has endured relentless criticism from abroad since 2001, when he withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol over concerns that the treaty’s emission-reduction mandates would damage the U.S. economy.
At a press conference with Dimas, Portuguese minister Humberto Rosa said EU officials “cherish” the prospect of attending the Honolulu meeting, saying the EU thinks the major-emitters process could make a significant contribution to the global effort to craft a new, comprehensive climate change accord. Rosa noted that the Honolulu meeting will focus on the agenda that emerges from Bali.
“So, we have no intention whatsoever of boycotting the major emitters meeting,” he said. “Having said this, it is true that if we have a failure in Bali, it would be meaningless to have the major economies meeting, which has been agreed is to look also at what happened to the Bali roadmap; so without a roadmap, and without a destination, it would be senseless.”
Pressed by reporters as to whether the EU is blackmailing the United States over the emissions dispute, Rosa responded bluntly: “To put it very shortly, we are not blackmailing [any]one. We just take it as logic: no Bali, no [major economies meeting], but that’s logic, not blackmail.”
The stunning EU play clearly energized international environmental groups, who throughout the conference have accused the United States of trying to sabotage the Bali talks by objecting to key provisions strongly supported by developing nations, who are eager to see an agreement that would accelerate the flow of investment and direct aid to help poorer countries adapt to climate change impacts and transform their economies with climate-friendly energy technologies.
But the EU move carries significant risk: If the U.S. stands firm in opposing the emissions-cut language, leaders gathered in Bali would have to return home empty-handed and face the outrage of voters who increasingly see reducing climate change as an issue of paramount importance.
“It’s definitely high-stakes poker,” a senior U.S. environmentalist told The Energy Daily Thursday. “The EU thinking is that if the U.S. blinks, it changes the tone of the negotiations. The two bits of leverage the EU has is that the U.S. team will have a very hard time being seen back home as a spoiler--and the administration’s desire to see the major economies process go forward.”
The EU move reinforces the perception that the EU-U.S. divide on the emissions issue is the main obstacle to a successful outcome of the Bali talks, the environmentalist said. But other issues remain key stumbling blocks, including questions about how to structure the two years of talks; how to administer the flow of aid from rich countries to poor nations; and how to bring to fruition a developing-country proposal to slow the destruction of tropical rainforests in exchange for additional clean development aid.
“I think the United States has been the biggest problem here, but not the only problem,” the senior green continued.
Another important uncertainty is how Russia, eager to re-assert itself as a global power, will navigate the negotiations endgame, the environmentalist said. While Russia has signaled it has no strong opinions on how to structure the talks going forward, Russia is adamantly opposed to language in the latest draft agenda that calls for all developed countries—-including Russia--to take on mandated emission cuts under a post-2012 treaty.
UN officials have set a deadline of noon Friday for a group of 40 countries charged by Indonesian environmental minister Rachmat Witoelar, the president of the conference, to finalize the draft agenda for debate by the full assembly of delegates from the nearly 190 nations participating in the Bali talks. Debate on the final document is expected to continue into the wee hours Saturday.
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December 12, 2007
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BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, INDONESIA--The United States came under heavy pressure Wednesday to end its opposition to key provisions of a draft agenda for international deliberations on a new climate change accord, as the leaders of Australia and Indonesia called for the United States to join other developed nations in agreeing to sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades.
In speeches opening the high-level segment of negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, newly elected Australian President Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urged the United States to accept binding limits on its emissions under a new climate change treaty.
President Bush in 2001 withdrew the United States from further participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the current international climate pact requiring 38 industrial nations to trim their emissions of carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases by a combined average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels during the protocol’s 2008-2012 commitment period.
In ending U.S. participation, Bush said the protocol would harm the U.S. economy while exempting China and other rapidly industrializing developing countries from its emission-reduction mandates.
The Bali talks, which began December 3 and are scheduled to conclude Friday, are aimed at crafting a diplomatic “roadmap” to guide further negotiations over the next two years on forming a new treaty to extend or succeed the protocol beginning in 2013.
In his first international address since his landslide victory over Bush ally John Howard in Australia’s parliamentary elections last month, Rudd called for the United States to join the rest of the developed world in taking on commitments to cut emissions to reduce the threat of catastrophic global warming.
“We expect all developed countries to embrace a further set of binding emissions targets—-and we need this meeting at Bali to map out the process and timeline for this to happen,” Rudd said. “We need all developed nations, those within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and those outside, to embrace comparable efforts."
Yudhoyono, the host of the Bali gathering, went even further than Rudd, singling out the United States by name in his call for developed-country action on climate change.
“And we must ensure that the United States of America—-as the world's biggest economy, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gas and the world leader in technology-—is part of [the] post-2012 arrangement, because otherwise we will not be able to effectively address the climate change issue," the Indonesian president said.
As the speeches by heads of state and senior officials continued through the day, a group of delegates from 40 countries met in closed-door meetings to try to salvage negotiations that by some accounts had come close to collapse over several thorny issues.
At a Wednesday press briefing, Paula Dobriansky, the State Department’s under secretary for democracy and global affairs and the head of the U.S. delegation, said the United States “is very committed to working toward a successful outcome.”
Dobriansky said the United States “want[s] to launch a process that is open and does not predetermine or preclude options. We have been listening to the perspectives of others and will continue to do so in the days ahead. We hope to identify a way forward that will bridge our differences and bring us together in common pursuit of our shared goal of addressing climate change.”
But a variety of sources, including environmentalists and delegates from developed and developing nations, accused the U.S. negotiating team of working to sabotage the talks in the closed-door sessions.
On Monday, U.N. officials released a draft agenda for the next two years of negotiations that said the future talks should include consideration of emission cuts by developed countries within a range of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and even deeper cuts by mid-century. It also called for consideration of more modest steps that developing countries could take to assist the global effort to stabilize and reduce emissions to prevent atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from exceeding 445-490 parts per million, a level beyond which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—-a UN panel of scientists-—said dangerous warming likely would be irreversible.
The draft negotiating agenda also would have required discussions on increasing financial flows from the developed world to help poorer countries adapt to climate change impacts and to speed the global deployment of climate-friendly technologies. Further, the draft agenda called for discussions on how to structure incentives to tropical-forest nations such as Indonesia and Brazil to spur those countries to slow and stop the destruction and degradation of rainforests.
By the end of Tuesday, sources said the U.S. delegation, joined by Canada and Japan, had formally objected to the emissions-cut language in the draft agenda. The U.S. team also objected to language calling for consideration of stronger financial support for climate change adaptation projects in the world’s least developed countries.
Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva said Wednesday that Brazilian and European delegates were determined to restore the emissions language.
“There is a problem with the negotiations in that some countries had those [emission] figures taken out, but together with the European Union we have begun to put them back,” Silva told reporters. EU delegates later confirmed Silva’s account.
Brazil is in the middle of a white-hot dispute over the form of incentives for developing country actions to slow and stop the destruction of rainforests. Most developing countries support a proposal to reward efforts to protect tropical forests with emission-reduction credits the countries then could sell in global carbon markets. Brazil, however, opposes linking forest-protection efforts to carbon trading.
Silva said Brazil wants developed countries to achieve their emission-reduction commitments by adopting measures such as national emission caps—-not by buying credits earned by tropical forest countries for avoiding deforestation.
On Wednesday, international environmentalists accused the U.S team of negotiating in bad faith, saying the delegation in one late-night Tuesday session had objected to the use of the word “facility” in a provision bearing on the proposed formation of a new institution to oversee the flow of funds for technology transfer, only to demand an hour later—-after delegates had agreed to use a different word-—that the new word be replaced with “facility.”
In a late afternoon press conference, Munir Akram, Pakistan’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations and the chairman of a coalition of developing nations known as the “Group of 77 and China” (G-77), declined to confirm the greens’ charges, saying the rules of diplomacy prevented his “naming names.” Akram acknowledged, however, that the Tuesday night exchange was “acrimonious” and caused the tech-transfer talks to collapse.
Akram said that in the view of the G-77, agreement on a final agenda for the next two years of negotiations is crucial to the success of the Bali talks.
However, when discussions by a group of 40 countries spearheading the negotiations adjourned Wednesday night, U.N. officials acknowledged that little progress had been made on key outstanding issues. A subset of the group was tasked with the unenviable job of working through the night to craft a new draft agenda to guide final negotiations over the 40-odd hours remaining in the conference.
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December 11, 2007
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BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, INDONESIA--U.S. officials Tuesday forced the removal of language in a draft “roadmap” for climate change talks that would have ensured consideration of calls to sharply increase the amount of money the poorest developing countries would receive under a new climate change treaty to cope with rising sea levels, flooding, droughts and other adverse impacts of global warming, advocacy groups said.
According to the groups, U.S. officials formally objected to language in an initial draft of the so-called Bali roadmap that would have opened the door for negotiators of a future climate treaty to include proposals to boost aid from industrialized nations to help poor countries already suffering harmful environmental and economic impacts from global warming.
The initial version of the roadmap document, presented to delegates Monday, contained language stipulating that negotiations planned to take place over the next two years would consider the provision of “sufficient, predictable, additional and sustainable” funding to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to the disruptive effects of climate change. Supporters of the “adaptation” funding want the money to begin flowing to these countries in 2013, the target date for the start of a new climate treaty to extend or succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the international pact that expires in 2012 after an initial five-year commitment period for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse emissions.
Following the U.S. objection, negotiators drafted a revised version of the roadmap that omitted the key language on adaptation funding.
The revised version, obtained by The Energy Daily, calls for consideration in the coming months of talks on “access to and scaling-up of predictable and sustainable financial resources, and redirection of investment,” a phrasing seen as less precise and thus weaker than the wording in the original draft roadmap.
A statement condemning the U.S. move was issued Tuesday by Oxfam International, an international coalition of advocacy groups that lobby governments to boost assistance to poor countries.
“This U.S. position is shocking and shows a dramatic disregard for the world’s vulnerable and poor who are bearing the brunt of climate change,” the groups said. “The U.S. approach is to undermine progress on funding for developing countries in the Bali roadmap.”
Developing country officials were less than enthusiastic about the adaptation language even before the U.S. move to water it down. In remarks at a Tuesday side event sponsored by a group lobbying for increased adaptation assistance, a senior Pakistani delegate said the original adaptation provisions reinforced suspicions held by many developing countries that the world’s richest countries ultimately do not care about the needs of their poorer neighbors.
“There is a deficit of trust in the South regarding the hidden agendas of the North, barriers to trade, and other subterranean objectives,” said Munir Akram, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations and the chairman of the Group of 77, a coalition of developing countries. “The [draft proposal] text focuses largely on mitigation [of climate change]. The adaptation section is weak.”
The Kyoto Protocol establishes an adaptation fund for developing countries financed by a 2 percent levy on the sale of emission-reduction credits earned by developed countries that undertake climate-friendly energy projects in developing nations. However, disputes over administrative details have prevented a final sign-off on the fund, raising fears that when the protocol’s 2008-2012 commitment period begins in January, money may not immediately begin flowing to the poorest developing countries for adaptation measures such as the purchase of stocks of drought-resistant crop seeds and tree saplings that could be planted in flood-prone regions to slow the loss of topsoil when flooding occurs.
Developing countries have been highly critical of the Global Environment Fund (GEF), a U.N. organization founded in 1991 to provide grants to developing countries for projects related to climate change and other environmental threats and originally designated to administer the protocol’s adaptation fund. GEF critics say the organization’s cumbersome bureaucracy is unwieldy and has prevented speedy approval of grant-worthy projects.
Late Monday night, a team of negotiators reached a deal on the fund’s administrative details that calls for the GEF to administer the fund and the World Bank to serve as the fund’s trustee. In recognition of the concerns of GEF critics, the deal also would create a new board composed of representatives of U.N. regional groups, developed countries and developing countries. Proposed adaptation projects seeking funding would be able to apply directly to the board provided they meet key criteria, a provision that GEF critics say could speed the flow of funding to worthwhile projects.
The U.S. move on the adaptation funding language in the roadmap is particularly galling to developing countries and their advocacy group allies because the United States, the world’s richest country and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has contributed no money to a separate adaptation fund—-the Least Developed Country (LDC) Fund—-for the world’s 49 poorest nations.
Oxfam estimates that, across all developing countries, adaptation will cost at least $50 billion per year and far more if global emissions are not cut rapidly enough to slow or prevent global warming’s worst impacts. The United Nations recently projected that by 2030, developing country adaptation will cost in the range of $28-67 billion each year.
According to a recent Oxfam report, as of September 30, the world’s developed nations have pledged a total of $163 million to the LDC Fund-—an amount Oxfam said is less than what the population of Canada spent on hair conditioner in 2006. Oxfam said developed nations have actually delivered only $67 million, less than what U.S. citizens spend on sunscreen per month.
“The great injustice is that those countries that are not really responsible for causing climate change are first and worst hit, and are least equipped to deal with its impacts, Oxfam senior researcher Kate Raworth said Tuesday. “Just as rich countries are deliberating binding targets to cut their carbon emissions, they should commit to binding targets to provide the finance that poor countries urgently need to adapt to climate change.”
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December 10, 2007
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BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, Indonesia—The United States will oppose preamble language in a draft “roadmap” document for negotiating a new international climate change agreement that implies that mandatory emissions reductions for developed countries in the range of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 must be included in the agenda for the future talks, a senior U.S. official said Monday.
Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator and the alternate head of the U.S. delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference underway in Bali, said including a range of reductions for industrial countries in the roadmap would “prejudge” the results of further negotiations over the next two years aimed at producing a final agreement by the end of 2009 on a new climate change treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
“Our principal difficulty with having any numbers in the text to begin with is that it might prejudge outcomes,” Watson said at a press briefing. “We are looking for text, I think, that is going to be short, that is to the point, that is going to take into consideration the needs of all parties. Also, text that, again, that will not prejudge outcomes that might occur at the end of the two-year negotiating process.”
Watson added that the proposed range of developed-country emission cuts is “totally unrealistic for many countries.” Japan and Canada also oppose the emissions language, according to sources who asked not to be identified.
“I think we will not be alone in having a problem in defining the number up front,” Watson said.
The draft text, crafted by a team of negotiators late last week and obtained by The Energy Daily and other news outlets Saturday, was presented to the conference Monday morning. Indonesian environmental minister Rachmat Witoelar, the conference’s presiding officer, asked a core group of 40 countries, including the United States, to immediately begin negotiations on the document with the aim of hammering out a final agreement by the end of the week.
The document is intended to serve as a template that lays out negotiating parameters on a host of complicated issues, including the level and timing of emission cuts; steps that developing nations can make to reduce the threat of catastrophic warming; and speeding financial and technical assistance to the world’s poorest nations to help them adapt to climate change impacts.
The proposed range of emissions reductions corresponds with recommendations in a report issued this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body formed more than a decade ago by the U.N. and World Meteorological Organization to review ongoing scientific climate change research.
The IPPC, which is sharing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for its work in calling attention to the threat of climate change, said the emission cuts are needed to put global emissions on a downward path sufficient to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
The preamble in the draft roadmap document also specifies that global greenhouse gas emissions “need to peak in the next 10-15 years and be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels in 2000 by 2050”—a range also in line with IPCC recommendations.
The placement of the emissions-reduction language in the preamble of the draft text gives it less weight than if it were in the operative section of the document. However, a key provision in the operative section states that negotiations should result in “quantified national emission objectives for anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases by all developed countries” that have signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1992 treaty that the Kyoto Protocol amends.
President Bush withdrew the United States from the protocol in 2001, but the United States remains a party to the UNFCCC. Thus, the provision in the operative text refers not only to developed countries that are bound by the Kyoto Protocol mandate, but also the United States. Many observers here think this provision, rather than the preamble language, poses the biggest threat to the U.S. policy stance here and that the U.S. delegation will fight very hard to remove it.
“This is a clear attempt to box in the United States,” a U.S. environmentalist said Sunday.
The operative section of the draft text also includes a provision aimed at ensuring that large developing countries such as China and India also commit to actions that will contribute to the future treaty’s overall goal of reducing emissions well below 2000 levels by 2050.
It says a final accord should provide a “[m]eans to recognize, in a measurable and verifiable manner, national mitigation actions by developing-country [UNFCCC] parties that limit the growth of, or reduce, emissions by sources and/or enhance removals by sinks of greenhouse gases while promoting sustainable development and cleaner economic growth.”
On Saturday, Canada became the target of environmentalists’ scorn when the Canadian government’s official instructions to its delegation were leaked to greens and Canadian reporters.
The instructions direct the delegation to ensure that the final Bali agreement “include binding emission reduction targets for all major emitters. Developed countries should be required to take action more quickly but major industrialized developing countries should also have binding targets.”
The instructions are seen as being aimed at dividing a coalition of developing countries, known here as the “Group of 77 and China,” by appealing to the desire of the world’s poorest countries to ensure swift, deep emission cuts both by developed countries and developing countries with fast-growing economies.
China, while still refusing to accept hard caps on its rapidly rising emissions, has signaled a new willingness to take steps to slow the growth of its emissions by pledging specific targets for renewable energy generation, improved energy efficiency or emission-reduction targets for one or more industrial sectors.
“The directive sets Canada up to be the ultimate spoiler of the negotiations,” said Angela Anderson, vice president of climate programs for National Environmental Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based green group. “Canada's proposal is an overt attempt to split the developing country bloc into two groups: ‘the major industrialized developing countries’ and everyone else.”
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, said Monday that Canada’s insistence that China and other rapidly developing countries must take on firm emission caps is ironic given Canada’s dismal emissions-reduction performance.
“I personally find it interesting to hear Canada just a little while ago indicating it would not meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and is now calling on the developing countries to take binding reduction targets,” de Boer said drily. “I don’t know how that’s going to be perceived.”
Senior ministers are scheduled to arrive Wednesday to tackle the thorniest issues that lower-ranking diplomats have been unable to resolve.
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December 7, 2007
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BY CHRIS HOLLY
NUSA DUA, Indonesia—In a development that has pleased United Nations officials overseeing two weeks of negotiations aimed at crafting a new climate change treaty, China has emerged as an energetic leader in the talks, offering “constructive” proposals on a range of issues while exerting pressure on developed countries to agree to make aggressive, near-term cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions, U.N officials and environmentalists said Friday.
China, which in previous international meetings on climate change has refused even to discuss slowing the dizzying growth of its own emissions, has surprised many here by expressing a new willingness to contribute to global emission-reduction efforts if developed nations also agree to significant cuts, the U.N. officials and greens said.
The change in China’s stance, these sources said, reflects a realization by the county’s leaders that severe global warming could have catastrophic impacts on China’s environment and endanger the government’s efforts to raise living standards for China’s 1.3 billion citizens, many of whom live in abject poverty.
Last month, in what some China-watchers viewed as a clear signal of the government’s growing alarm about climate change, a mid-level official acknowledged publicly that unabated global warming could threaten China’s food supply.
Luo Yong, vice director of the National Climate Center, was quoted in the November 23 edition of the English-language China Daily as saying: “If we took no measures against global warming, China's planting industry would face a 5-10 percent drop in output by 2030, with production of wheat, rice and corn on the decline."
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told The Energy Daily Friday that China recognizes that climate change poses a “big problem” for China’s people, environment and economy.
“First and foremost, I think there is a recognition that climate change is a problem today for China, and a realization that climate change potentially is a big problem for China tomorrow,” de Boer said. “Just imagine if the Himalayan glaciers disappear--what that’s going to mean for water supplies on both sides of those Himalayas, including China. So there’s a real realization that this is a problem that’s coming for China head-on.
“China, I think like every other country, is concerned about high energy prices. China is burning a lot of coal to fuel its economy, and that is causing a lot of emissions, which has a high public health bill attached. And, I would say that with an energy-intensive industry, energy costs being an important part of production costs, it makes real economic sense for China to make its industry more efficient. So, climate change aside, I think there are important economic concerns driving this.”
Hans Verolme, director of the climate change program for World Wildlife Fund International, said China made up its mind a year ago to get “really, really serious” about climate change and that it came to Bali “to show the world that it understands and it wants to do what is necessary to stop dangerous climate change.
“I think what China has been doing—while I do not agree with everything they are proposing—has been really positive,” Verolme said. “ They have put the emphasis where the emphasis needs to be placed—the need for deep cuts in emissions…and a willingness to do their fair share, “
In a display of diplomatic muscle-flexing early last week, Chinese delegates forced a three-hour halt in a procedural meeting when the presiding officer proposed placing the issue of technology-transfer—an issue vital to China and other developing nations—on a slower negotiating timetable than the Chinese wanted. The presiding officer ultimately relented.
China also proposed—to the consternation of some developed nations—to head an informal “working group” to flesh out a proposal approved at a September U.N. meeting in Vienna that calls for developed nations to commit to reducing their emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020—a level recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. scientific review panel.
Some observers saw China’s offer as a cynical return to the country’s prior posture of insisting that the developed world must act first to cut emissions before developing nations would discuss slowing their own emissions growth.
But a veteran U.S. environmentalist, who asked not to be identified, said the move instead reflects China’s understanding that U.S climate change policy is likely to change dramatically in little more than a year after U.S. voters elect a new leader to succeed President Bush, who since taking office in 2001 has staunchly opposed regulating U.S. emissions.
“China has been hiding behind Bush for seven years, and they now realize that that fig leaf is shrinking and will soon fade away,” the environmentalist said.
The negotiations here, which began December 3 and will run through Friday, are aimed at developing a negotiating framework that will allow the adoption by the end of 2009 of a new agreement to replace or extend the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty that requires 38 developed countries to reduce their emissions of six greenhouse gases by a combined average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
While the developed countries have agreed in principle on the range of reductions recommended by the IPCC, leaders also acknowledge that rapidly developing countries such as China and India also must commit to slowing the growth of their emissions by improving the efficiency of their economies or by targeting one or more industrial sectors for sharp emissions reductions, for example.
A coalition of tropical-forest countries, led by Indonesia and Brazil, have proposed that countries that demonstrate clear progress in slowing or stopping the destruction of tropical forests be compensated by developed countries. Forest clear-cutting for agriculture or cattle-ranching is estimated to be responsible for 20 percent of global emissions.
The proposal, while embraced in concept by developed countries, has been stalled by debates over the level and form of compensation, among other issues. Indonesia prefers direct cash payments, while other countries want compensation in the form of emission-reduction credits that can be sold in global carbon markets.
Another hot topic is how to assist the world’s poorest countries in adapting to climate change impacts such as flooding, the loss of arable land and sea level rise. A recent U.N review of adaptation needs estimated that developing nations will require “several billions” of dollars annually through 2030 for adapting to climate change impacts. The review acknowledged that more analysis is needed to produce a more precise estimate, and that the cost of adaptation assistance could be much higher.
On Friday, de Boer said that finding a way to finance adaptation, emission reductions and the deployment of clean energy technologies to meet huge projected increases in global energy demand over the next 25 years will be the key to forging a new climate change treaty by 2009.
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