Climate Change Treaty, to Go Beyond the Kyoto Protocol, Is Expected by the Year’s End

Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times 12 Jun 09;

The world is on track to produce a new global climate treaty by December, the top United Nations climate official said Friday as delegates from more than 100 nations concluded 12 days of talks in Bonn, Germany.

The delegates issued a 200-page document that they said would serve as the starting point for treaty negotiations that open in Copenhagen in December.

“Time is short, but we still have enough time,” the official, Yvo de Boer, who is the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a briefing. “I’m confident that governments can reach an agreement and want an agreement.”

The goal is a climate treaty that would go beyond the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a climate-change agreement that set emissions targets for industrialized nations. Many of those goals have not been met, and the United States never ratified the accord.

The document issued Friday outlines proposals for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by rich countries and limiting the growth of gases in the developing world. It also discusses ways of preventing deforestation, which is linked to global warming, and of providing financing for poorer nations to help them adapt to warmer temperatures.

But many environment advocates and politicians suggested that delegates had not made enough progress in winnowing down those options. “Of course we have to respect the way the United Nations works,” Denmark’s minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, said in a statement after the talks ended. “But to me, there is no doubt that things are moving too slow.”

Representatives of poor countries complained repeatedly in the talks that developed nations had not made an adequate commitment to reduce their emissions. They expressed particular dismay over Japan’s announcement this week to reduce emissions by only 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Shyam Saran, India’s envoy on climate change, called such targets “unsatisfactory.” China and other developing countries have demanded that richer nations reduce emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels in that period.

Experts described some of the back-and-forth as predictable jockeying in the months leading up to the make-or-break talks to negotiate a treaty in December.

Jonathan Pershing, who led the American delegation at the Bonn talks, said the discussions had unfolded about as fast as could be expected given the number of nations involved and the size of the task. He predicted a treaty would emerge in December.

He said that American negotiators acknowledged at the talks that “climate change is an urgent problem and it needs a global and immediate response.”

Despite the shortage of specific commitments, environmentalists took heart from the strong involvement of many nations, especially the United States and China, which jointly produce 40 percent of the world’s heat-trapping emissions. (In declining to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the United States cited China and India’s lack of participation.)

“There are a lot of options to work out, but we have come a long way,” said Alex Kaat, a spokesman for Wetlands International, which fights the destruction of rainforests and decaying bogs. “There is now text on paper, and that’s progress.”

UN climate talks advance, poor urge more CO2 cuts
Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn, Reuters 12 Jun 09;

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Climate talks made progress on Friday toward a new U.N. treaty to curb global warming but ended far short of calls by developing nations for the rich to make deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Four years of talks to widen the existing Kyoto Protocol have struggled to agree on how to share the cost of efforts to curb greenhouses gas mainly emitted by burning fossil fuels.

The United States and Europe warned in closing remarks on Friday that the private sector would finance the climate fight, not their governments.

"I look back on this as a significant session that has advanced our work in important ways," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference at the June 1-12 talks among 183 nations in Bonn.

He said governments staked out far clearer views after their first review of a draft legal text of the treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December to succeed Kyoto.

But developing countries called for more, despite the global recession.

"We finally managed to have a positive exchange on the numbers" for developed nations, China's climate ambassador Yu Qingtai told Reuters. "But still we hear repeated statements resisting calls for further meaningful cuts."

China and many developing nations want the rich to cut by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid the worst effects of global warming such as droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

Offers made by developed countries so far work out at cuts of between 8 and 14 percent below 1990, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

FUNDS

The United States and Europe poured cold water on hopes for major public funds, such as the 1 percent or more of national wealth demanded by many poor nations to help them avoid a model of high-carbon growth dominant since the Industrial Revolution.

"The key issue is not the number," said Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation, referring to "marginally" bigger investments to improve efficiency or to install low-carbon instead of polluting coal plants.

"We'd like to change that" view of developing countries that governments would bankroll the fight against climate change, he said, adding that carbon offset markets could play a big role.

The European Union also underscored that private finance would dominate in the climate change fight.

Pershing said progress in Bonn had been "slow," and the European Commission's Artur Runge-Metzger said "enormous effort" was required to get a deal in Copenhagen in December.

The United States expected China to undertake action, such as setting renewable energy targets, but not be legally bound to prove curbs. China and the United States are top emitters.

"We have advanced perhaps a couple of miles toward Copenhagen. We still have thousands to go," said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based E3G think-tank. The next meeting will be in Bonn in August.

Outside the talks in a Bonn hotel, protesters brought along two live camels and laid out some sand to illustrate fears of creeping desertification. "We spit on weak targets," one banner said, another said: "Shrinking targets, growing deserts."

The chair of a group looking at new actions to curb emissions by all countries said a draft text had swollen with new ideas from about 50 pages to 200. Big breakthroughs were likely to happen only in Copenhagen, he said.

"This is like the evolutionary process in reverse. The Big Bang comes at the end," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, of Malta.

(Editing by Richard Balmforth)