Bangkok climate change talks close

Ed Cropley, Reuters 4 Apr 08;

BANGKOK (Reuters) - The first formal talks to draw up a replacement to the Kyoto climate change pact wound up in Thailand on Friday with plans for another seven rounds of negotiations in the next 18 months to tackle global warming.

As expected, no major advances were achieved at the meeting, which was mainly intended to flesh out a roadmap from a breakthrough agreement in Bali last year to kick off the talks through to a culmination in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

"The train to Copenhagen has left the station," said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"Not only do we have the certainty that critical issues will be addressed next year, we now have bit-sized chunks which will allow us to negotiate in an effective manner," he told a news conference at the conclusion of the week-long Bangkok talks.

The next meeting, to be held in Germany in June, will address the issue of funding and technology to mitigate climate change, a key demand of developing nations who argue that rich countries should foot much of the bill.

A suggestion pushed by Japan in Bangkok to take a sectoral, rather than purely national, approach to emissions cuts was deferred to the third round of talks.

United Nations climate experts want the new treaty that emerges from Copenhagen to go beyond Kyoto by getting all countries to agree to curbs on emissions of the greenhouse gases that are fuelling global warming.

Under Kyoto, only 37 rich nations are bound to cut emissions by an average of five percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

A U.N. climate panel agreed last year that the world needs to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in order to stave off potentially catastrophic changes to the weather system, that will bring more storms, droughts and higher sea levels.

Negotiators will also have to work out how to deal with the United States -- the only rich nation not to have signed up to Kyoto -- given that President George W. Bush will be leaving the White House after November's election.

Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, saying the pact would hurt the economy and was unfair since it excluded big developing nations from committing to emissions cuts.

The White House has since moderated its stance by saying it would accept emissions targets if all other big emitters do as well based on their individual circumstances.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

Negotiations between rich and poor countries tense at climate talks
Channel NewsAsia 4 Apr 08;

BANGKOK: The goodwill felt during the Bali Roadmap in December 2007 when nations uniformly agreed about the looming disaster of climate change, has given way to tough talk among 163 nations seeking consensus on how to move forward.

The UN sponsored meetings are tasked with putting together a new global warming deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires at the end of 2009.

But negotiations are proving to be tense between rich and poor countries.

Professor Ram Shrestha, Professor of Energy Economics, Asian Institute of Technology, said: "The countries will have a common but differentiated responsibility. That means everybody will share this responsibility, but the degree of sharing, to what extent different countries will share responsibility will not be uniform. It will be differentiated based on the different countries' own affordability and capability."

But continuing disagreement between developed nations and those seeking to catch up like China and India have dampened negotiators efforts to begin to draft a treaty that would fairly address concerns of all nations involved.

Professor Shrestha said: "The major thing now is how developing countries will be motivated through proper incentives. Their concern is that there should be a mechanism for effective technology transfers, that means transfer of climate friendly technologies to developing countries.

“Developing countries also need some kind of financial resources in order that they will be able to afford these more expensive climate friendly technologies."

The European Union has pushed for maritime and aviation fuels to be subject to emissions controls although neither currently falls under the Kyoto Protocol.

Countries with strong travel industries fear the proposal will make their costs skyrocket.

Other snags include a Japanese effort to implement sector based strategies which some poorer nations fear their growth industries will be subject to the same emissions targets as industrialised countries.

And the United States' offer of US$2 billion over the next three years as part of its Clean Technology Fund was rejected due to the US$30 billion that developing nations would have to pay after the initial grant to maintain green technology.

Experts said that unless major players like the United States join the global community in addressing this problem, no response will be very effective.

But the American economic downturn will certainly be a factor in its participation.

To that end, eyes are on the US presidential elections although all candidates have promised to be more proactive regarding climate change than current President George W. Bush. - CNA/vm

Nations agree on work plan for climate talks
Channel NewsAsia 5 Apr 08;

BANGKOK : More than 160 nations agreed late Friday on the first step to drafting an ambitious new treaty on global warming after hours of haggling between rich and poor countries.

The five-day conference in Bangkok also looked for the first time to consider regulating emissions from airplanes and ships, a rapidly growing source of the pollution blamed for heating up the planet.

But rich and poor countries are sharply divided on how to tackle global warming, despite growing fears that rising temperatures could put millions of people at risk by the end of the century.

The talks set a work plan of four meetings next year to complete a pact by the end of 2009 which would follow the landmark Kyoto Protocol, which requires rich nations to slash gas emissions blamed for warming.

The Bangkok conference ended past midnight on the final day, hours after the scheduled close, with bickering over a Japanese proposal to hold talks soon on the so-called "sectoral approach," in which each industry is judged separately on eco-friendliness.

"There were differences of opinion on different topics," UN climate chief Yvo de Boer told AFP.

"It takes time to find a way out and they did."

Poor nations fear the sectoral approach makes greenhouse gas cuts easier for rich countries because they have cleaner technology, and that it could be a backdoor way to legally require them for the first time to cut emissions.

"I think it needs to be explained better," de Boer said of the Japanese proposal.

"There was at one stage the perception that Japan was trying to replace national commitments by sectoral approaches and that freaked everyone out," he said.

"But that view has since been corrected, so I think things have simmered down," he added.

Japan's chief delegate, Kyoji Komachi, said that the talks "went very well on the whole."

"I think we have seen more understanding, but we need to do more," Komachi told AFP of the sectoral approach.

Japan, which is behind in meeting its Kyoto obligations as its economy recovers from a recession, wanted talks on the sectoral approach to come before it hosts a Group of Eight summit of rich nations in July.

But it is unlikely to get its way, with the sectoral talks expected to come in August, along with talks on deforestation, a key concern for developing economies.

Daniel Mittler, climate and energy adviser for Greenpeace International, said that the Japanese proposal had been "the main stumbling block."

"This meeting should be about saving the planet, not the G8 summit," Mittler said.

A separate statement approved here by countries in the Kyoto treaty said they would look at how to "limit or reduce emissions" in aviation and shipping.

The air and marine transport industries account for about three percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But the Kyoto treaty did not cover the two sectors, which are by nature hard to classify under individual nations.

Delegates and environmentalists said there was an effort to water down the text by countries that are transport hubs, such as Singapore, or remotely located, such as Australia.

The statement also gave a vote of confidence to carbon trading, in which rich countries and companies trade credits for slashing carbon output, raising the chances that such a system will be included in a post-Kyoto deal.

The United States shunned the Kyoto Protocol, saying it is unfair by imposing no requirements on fast-growing emitters such as China and India.

But the United States and developing nations all committed at a major conference in December in Bali, Indonesia, to be part of negotiations for another deal that covers the period after 2012 when Kyoto's obligations end.

De Boer has said that the toughest issue -- how much to slash gas emissions after 2012 -- will likely have to wait until after the United States has a new president in January.

All three major candidates seeking to succeed Bush have pledged tougher action on global warming.

"If we took all these hours to agree on a work plan, one can only imagine what will happen when the real negotiations take place," said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil.

"It is a worrisome indication of how these negotiations will develop."- AFP /ls

Air, sea travel targeted in climate talks
Negotiators from some 160 nations move towards post-Kyoto pact
Straits Times 5 Apr 08;

BANGKOK - MORE than 160 nations agreed yesterday to look at how to cut rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions from air and sea travel, in an early move towards a new global warming treaty.

Parties to the 1997 United Nations Kyoto Protocol approved by consensus a statement promising to explore ways of curbing the harmful gases that planes and ships spew into the atmosphere.

The global transport industry accounts for about 3 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but air and sea travel were excluded from emissions cuts promised by rich nations under the Kyoto pact.

Delegates and environmentalists said that some countries had sought to water down the wording by suggesting that the industry should regulate itself.

Countries that had been critical of the effort included transport hubs such as Panama and Singapore and remote countries including Australia, according to environmentalists following the talks in the Thai capital.

Although the final statement does not explicitly say that the transport sector will be included in Kyoto or any other agreement, green activists say that it is a step forward.

The accord was the first hurdle in succeeding the Kyoto agreement in the fight against climate change and followed last-minute haggling over a Japanese proposal that poorer states viewed with suspicion.

Hours after the five-day conference had been due to finish in Bangkok, negotiators were still huddled in closed sessions.

Leaders in the developing bloc oppose Japan's proposal to hold talks early in the process on the so-called 'sectoral approach' in which each industry is judged separately on eco-friendliness.

'The Japanese proposal is the main stumbling block. This meeting should be about saving the planet, not the G-8 summit,' said Mr Daniel Mittler, climate and energy adviser for Greenpeace International.

Japan, which is far behind in meeting its Kyoto obligations as its economy recovers from a recession, hopes to shape the next global climate treaty when it hosts a Group of Eight summit in July.

The country's chief negotiator, Mr Kyoji Komachi, said Tokyo was seeking only a discussion of the sectoral idea and was ready to commit major resources to help developing nations fight global warming.

Rich and poor countries are divided on how to tackle the issue despite growing fears that rising temperatures could put millions of people at risk by the end of the century.

Developing nations fear that the sectoral approach makes Kyoto easier to meet for rich countries, which already have cleaner technology, and that it could be a backdoor-way to require them for the first time to cut emissions.

Last night, delegates appeared to have reached a compromise, with a late-session draft text saying that the Japanese sectoral approach would be discussed at a later meeting.

The protocol required rich countries to slash emissions blamed for global warming by an average of 5 per cent by 2012 from 1990 levels.

The Bangkok meeting is the first since a major conference last December in Bali, Indonesia, which agreed to launch negotiations on what to do after rich countries' commitments under the Kyoto Protocol end in 2012.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE