Richard Ingham Yahoo News 26 May 09;
PARIS (AFP) – The world's biggest carbon polluters made headway in talks here Tuesday on how to beef up funding to help poor countries in the firing line of climate change, senior officials said.
The so-called Major Economies Forum (MEF) advanced on one of the key issues troubling negotiations for a new global treaty due to be crafted in Copenhagen in December, they said.
"We made progress on a major subject, which is finance and financial architecture. It's not final, but one feels that there is a real consensus," said French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo at the end of the two-day MEF meeting.
Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, agreed.
"We had quite constructive discussions, candid, frank," Stern told a press conference.
"We made particularly good progress on the area of financing, which I would say is one of the two biggest issues in the Copenhagen negotiations."
The Copenhagen accord would take effect from 2012, after the current commitments of the UN's Kyoto Protocol expire.
The marathon process resumes in Bonn next Monday with talks aimed at hammering out a negotiation blueprint.
But developing and industrialised economies are far apart about how much money should be raised to help poor countries most exposed to the impacts of changing weather patterns.
Another stumbling block is how far countries will vow to cut their emissions of heat-trapping carbon gases in the coming decades. Scientists say swingeing reductions are needed to stave off potential catastrophe.
Both Borloo and Stern said the MEF environment ministers showed interest in a so-called "Green Fund" proposed by Mexico last year.
Contributions to the fund would be based on a country's gross domestic product (GDP) and its share of the world's carbon pollution.
"I don't have any objections to it," said Stern.
"We have to go through the details of it and look at it carefully so I am not signing on to every jot and tittle, but (we thought it was) a general good idea and a highly constructive contribution."
The MEF, launched by US President Barack Obama last month on the back of an initiative by his predecessor, George W. Bush, aims at speeding the search for common ground among countries that together account for around 80 percent of annual greenhouse-gas emissions.
It then intends to hand this consensus for approval by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the sprawling 192-nation global arena.
The MEF's participants include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States, as well as the European Union.
The forum's next meeting will be in Mexico on June 22-23, ahead of likely summit-level talks at the Group of Eight gathering in Italy in July.
Stern defended Washington from criticism that Obama, despite scrapping most of Bush's climate policies, could do more.
China has demanded rich countries reduce their annual emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.
The European Union is unilaterally targeting a 20-percent cut by 2020 over 1990 and is offering to deepen this to 30 percent if other advanced economies follow suit.
By comparison, a bill making its way through Congress would reduce America's emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared with their 2005 level, which Stern said was equivalent to a reduction of four percent over 1990.
But, he argued, the United States was probably the only country to put forward "a hard mandatory policy" of targeted cuts all the way to 2050, when its greenhouse-gas levels would be 83 percent less than in 2005.
"We are actually quite close to being on the same page," he said of European countries.
And he suggested the way forward lay in a tailored agreement that abandoned a simple like-for-like comparison of national pledges of emissions cuts.
"The notion that the European Union might have a target of X and we might have a target of Y, as long as they are both quite strong targets, that can be accommodated in an agreement depending on how you structure the agreement," he said.
Top emitters advance on climate finance plan
Alister Doyle, Reuters 26 May 09;
PARIS, May 26 (Reuters) - The world's top greenhouse gas emitters made progress on Tuesday towards agreeing a Mexican plan that would raise billions of dollars to fund the fight against climate change, France said.
"It's without doubt the most important advance," French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said of the finance plan after two days of talks among 17 top emitters including China, the United States and the European Union in Paris.
The meeting did not define overall cash needs. Many studies say that tens of billion of dollars a year will be needed to combat climate change as part of a U.N. deal to fight global warming, due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
Borloo said the informal Paris talks also made advances on issues including sharing green technologies with developing nations. But delegates said there was little progress in sharing out the burden of cuts in greenhouse gases among rich and poor, at a time when many nations are struggling with recession.
"There is a feeling that we should be able to reach an agreement" on financing, Borloo said, referring to talks among the Major Economies Forum (MEF) whose members account for 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions.
The Mexican proposal would oblige all countries to provide cash to fight climate change based on their past and current emissions of greenhouse gases -- mainly from burning fossil fuels -- and the size of their gross domestic product.
That would mean that biggest emitters since the Industrial Revolution, such as the United States and Europe, would pay most. By contrast, the poorest nations in Africa, whose emissions are near zero, would receive large net funds.
"This is the breakthrough for the Mexican plan," French climate ambassador Brice Lalonde told Reuters.
The cash would be part of a wider plan to help avert the projected impact of droughts, heatwaves, extinctions of species, disease and rising sea levels.
MEXICAN MEETING
A third and final preparatory round of the MEF is due to be held in Mexico on June 22-23 before a summit in Italy in July. U.S. President Barack Obama called the talks to try to contribute to a new U.N. deal.
African nations, in a submission to the United Nations last month, said developing nations as a group would need $267 billion a year by 2020 to fight global warming.
A European Commission document in January quoted experts' estimates of a need for net global incremental investments of 175 billion euros ($245 billion) by 2020 to help curb world emissions.
It also noted that a U.N. report estimated that separate costs of helping developing nations adapt to the impact of climate change -- ranging from drought-resistant crops to flood barriers -- would be 23 to 54 billion euros a year by 2030.
Earlier, Germany had said there was scant progress at the talks. "Everybody is coming here wanting progress but in the discussions we heard the old statements," Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told Reuters. "There was not enough progress."
(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Help for poor countries at Paris climate talks
Angela Charlton Google news 27 May 09;
PARIS (AP) — The world's biggest polluters made progress on a global deal to finance efforts to fight global warming and help poor countries cope with it, the French hosts of climate talks said Tuesday.
However, the environment ministers and top climate officials from 17 nations gathered in Paris appeared to make little headway toward agreement on how deeply to cut their emissions of gases that contribute to climate change.
The top U.S. negotiator on climate change, Todd Stern, defended the Obama administration's commitment to what he called a "seismic change" in the country's carbon emissions and attitude toward fighting global warming. Earlier Tuesday, France and Germany had said the United States wasn't going far enough in its emissions targets.
Despite such differences, French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said glimmers of progress emerged at the end of two days of closed-door talks.
The countries present moved forward "in an extremely significant way" in talks on how to pay for technology and new energy sources to help poor countries limit pollution and adapt to climate change, Borloo said. He said everyone came together behind a Mexican financing proposal that includes a formula to calculate who pays and how much.
Borloo said details were still being worked out. Negotiators have estimated helping poor countries cope with rising sea levels, harsher storms droughts and other global warming-related shifts would cost about $100 billion a year.
Getting poor countries on board is crucial to efforts toward a global climate pact meant to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. The talks of the Major Economies Forum on Monday and Tuesday were among several this year ahead of a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen in December on the climate pact.
Stern said the United States doesn't "have any objections" to the Mexican proposal and welcomed ideas emerging at this week's talks.
"We advanced the ball, though we have a long way to go to get to Copenhagen," Stern said.
The United States never signed on to Kyoto, citing the costs to the economy and the lack of participation by developing countries such as China. Developing countries, meanwhile, have said rich countries are not being aggressive enough in cutting their own emissions even as they ask poor countries to make costly commitments.
The Obama administration had suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, and legislation before Congress would reduce such emissions by 17 percent by 2020.
Stern said the overall U.S. targets were on a par with what Europe is proposing though are calculated differently.
"I don't think they are going to match. I don't think they need to match," he said.
The EU has promised to cut emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.
Borloo said the next meeting of the Major Economies Forum is in Mexico June 22-23.
___
Associated Press writer Tobias Schmidt contributed to this report.
(This version corrects US target to 17 percent, not 20 percent)
Read more!
Posts
visitors since Nov 07