Yahoo News 2 Dec 08;
POZNAN, Poland (AFP) – Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Poznan got down to work on Tuesday as South Africa headed demands for rich nations to agree to tough targets in a new pact for defeating global warming.
"We're out of the starting gate," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), organising the 12-day conference that began here on Monday.
"We're off, and the work is progressing... my sense is that governments are keen to move things forward."
The meeting's key task is to whittle down a document, the size of a small phonebook, for action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions and step up financial help beyond 2012.
The hope is that the document can be sculpted into a blueprint leading to a deal in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The serious haggling will be left to a string of meetings throughout 2009 but already the Poznan talks have outlined the likely areas of battle.
On the table are widely varying proposals as to who should do what to cut their carbon pollution and by what year, and how to deliver financial aid and clean technology to poor, vulnerable countries.
Delegates on Monday set up a roster of working groups, grouped according to theme, to try to cut through the negotiation undergrowth.
Among rich countries, the European Union (EU) has set down the most ambitious plan, saying developed economies should cut their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels.
It has already promised to unilaterally reduce its own contribution of greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020, but this plan has been darkened by objections within its own ranks, with Poland and Italy fearing it will inflict too high an economic price.
The EU also says global emissions should peak within 10-15 years and be reduced to "well below half" of 2000 levels by mid-century.
Other rich countries, though, have been vague or silent about their positions and have looked to developing giants -- the big polluters of tomorrow -- to show their own hand first.
South Africa on Tuesday led the charge for rich nations to bear the burden of concessions in the post-2012 treaty.
Environment and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said "all developed countries" should commit to domestic emission cuts of 80-95 percent by 2050 compared to 1990 levels.
They should also make an "unambiguous commitment" to cut their emissions by 25-40 percent below the 1990 benchmark by 2020, he said in a press statement released by the South African delegation.
In exchange, developing countries could pledge to make a "substantial deviation" below the expected upward trend of their pollution, said van Schalkwyk.
Van Schalkwyk did not spell out in figures as to what this concession on so-called baseline emissions would be. The United States, under President George W. Bush, has demanded that emerging giant economies, such as China and India, commit to targeted emissions curbs of the kind that bind rich countries in the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol.
The minister said "some regions" could agree to below-trend curbs by 2020 and all regions would follow by 2050, although developed countries would also have to help transfer clean technology and provide financial support to help them meet these goals.
Separately, Greenpeace activists scaled a 150-metre (487-feet) -high smokestack at a power plant in Konin, central Poland to urge the Polish government to back the EU's climate package.
The package comes up for debate at a summit in Brussels on December 11-12 that coincides with the climax at ministerial level of the Poznan conference.
Developing Nations Seek Cash In UN Warming Fight
Alister Doyle and Gabriela Baczynska, PlanetArk 3 Dec 08;
POZNAN - Developing nations urged rich nations at UN climate talks on Tuesday to raise aid despite the financial crisis to help the poor cope with global warming and safeguard tropical forests.
The UN's top climate official said the Dec. 1-12 meeting of 10,700 delegates had started well as the half-way point in negotiations to agree a new climate treaty by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen.
"I'm happy with where we are," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said of the meeting which will test governments' willingness to work on climate change amid a global economic slowdown.
"I think it's really important, especially in the context of the financial crisis, to see how we can craft a Copenhagen agreement that makes it clear how financial resources will be generated."
Developing nations say they will need billions of dollars to help them combat warming and adapt to changes such as droughts, floods, more powerful cyclones and rising seas. Rich nations say they will help, but have made few pledges.
"It's imperative that the level of financing is up to the challenge, that's the basic starting point," Andre Odenbreit Carvalho, a Brazilian Foreign Ministry official, told delegates.
Several nations, including Democratic Republic of Congo, Suriname and Papua New Guinea, said rich nations had to help them safeguard tropical forests.
Trees soak up greenhouse gases as they grow, and burning forests to clear land for farming accounts for about 20 percent of warming from human activities. Governments want measures to slow deforestation as part of the 2009 deal.
DEFORESTATION
"We must understand how to develop predictable, sufficient and sustainable financial flows" to protect forests, said Kevin Conrad, head of the Papua New Guinea delegation.
De Boer said that rich nations had to take a lead with deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. "There was a strong sentiment expressed that governments need to speed up the work and need to really shift gear," he said.
Aid group Oxfam proposed rich countries pay about $50 billion annually from 2013 for rights to emit greenhouse gases, raising cash to help the least developed nations.
"This is a way to get it done," said Heather Coleman, senior climate policy advisor at Oxfam America, adding Norway and the Netherlands supported the concept.
Early on Tuesday, 11 Greenpeace activists scaled a 150-metre (490-foot) smokestack at the Patnow power plant in Poland to hang a banner reading "Quit coal, save the climate".
De Boer said that he was not targeting agreement on a complete deal next year, but rather on principles and targets. He denied that he was toning down ambitions.
"I don't think I'm managing expectations, I'm dealing with realities," he said.
The existing Kyoto Protocol, binding rich nations to curb emissions, was agreed in 1997 but only entered into force eight years later after ratification by sufficient countries.
That process would now have to be squeezed into just three years, from agreement on the outlines of a deal in Copenhagen next year, to ratification of a final treaty by up to 190 nations before the end of the present round of Kyoto in 2012.
Environmentalists gave a "Fossil of the Day" -- a dinosaur statuette -- to the European Union, accusing it of failing to lead in cutting emissions. The EU is split on designing measures to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
