Rich-poor rifts stall progress at U.N. climate talks

Gerard Wynn, Reuters 31 May 10;

BONN Germany (Reuters) - U.N. climate talks opened on Monday, exposing familiar rifts between rich and poor countries which delegates said were likely to delay a re-start of formal negotiations.

The 185-nation Bonn conference, which will run until June 11, is the biggest international meeting on climate change since a summit last December in Copenhagen failed to agree a new pact.

Several countries said they could not give a green light to formal negotiations on a new text published in mid-May and which outlines a huge range of options for fighting climate change.

The Copenhagen summit last year struggled to overcome suspicion on how to share global effort to curb greenhouse gases under a new deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012.

On Monday differences re-emerged when a clutch of Latin American countries said they could not start negotiations on the new text.

The United States said it did not think the new text was intended as a basis for negotiations and South Africa said the document put too much burden on developing countries.

The Latin American group including Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba said on Monday that the new text placed too much emphasis on the Copenhagen accord, which they opposed in December.

"The chair has prioritized the Copenhagen Accord," said Rene Gonzalo Orellana Halkyer, a member of the Bolivian delegation, speaking on the sidelines of the talks in Bonn.

Bolivia also wanted tougher targets, for example to return atmospheric greenhouse gases to a level far below where they are already, he added.

The Copenhagen Accord seeks to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times but does not spell out how.

Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe of Zimbabwe chairs the U.N. talks on forging agreement on global action and is expected to release a revised version next weekend, delegates said.

FIRST STEP

The United States said it believed Mukahanana-Sangarwe's text was not intended to be the basis of negotiations.

"Our view is that the text is Margaret's effort to elicit views so she can develop a formal negotiating text," said Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation. "It's a constructive next step."

It remained to be seen whether countries can start negotiations on a revised text in the next two weeks, he told Reuters.

The head of the South African delegation, Alf Wills, said the new text focused too far on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developing countries.

"It's completely unbalanced in that respect," he said.

However Karsten Sach, head of Germany's delegation, said: "We think it is a basis for negotiation."

An additional, specific gap to be addressed at the Bonn talks was whether or not developed countries should be allowed to exclude from their national greenhouse gases carbon emissions from chopping trees to produce renewable energy.

That rule, allowed under the existing Kyoto Protocol, would represent "fraudulent accounting," said the head of Papua New Guinea's delegation, Kevin Conrad.

(Reporting by Gerard Wynn; editing by Peter Graff)

UN climate talks search for post-Copenhagen path
Yahoo News 31 May 10;

BONN (AFP) – The first full-bore UN climate talks since Copenhagen began Monday, with developing nations looking for bankable proof that promised aide is in the pipeline.

A 30-billion-dollar pledge for the period 2010-2012 to help poor countries green their economies and cope with climate change impacts was one of the few concrete measures to emerge from last year's nearly-failed summit.

But six months later there is little sign of the money.

"We need real implementation of the funding, real action on the ground," said Dessima Williams, chief negotiator of Grenada, representing the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS).

"There is absolute and continued urgency."

Nor are there any clues as to how financing will be ramped up to at least 100 billion dollars annually by 2020, another provision mandated by the Copenhagen Accord.

Ideas floated include a micro-tax on financial transactions, a carbon trading scheme for the aviation and shipping sectors, and "green bonds" issued against rich-country funds held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But so far none of these politically risky schemes have much traction.

"If the sense is that this is all a sham and countries are not following through on their commitments, it will really undermine the trust you need to get something done," said Alden Myer, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

Financing is only one of several thorny issues on the table as the 12-day talks under the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) get under way.

Negotiators must also work towards upholding the Accord's other core provision of preventing global temperatures from rising by more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Voluntary pledges from industrialised nations and emerging giants such as China -- even if met -- would yield an increase of 3.0 C to 4.0 C, putting the planet on a trajectory for catastrophe, say scientists.

There are also complex wrangles over technology transfer, how to monitor and verify national plans to cut greenhouse gases, and the mechanisms for disbursing aide.

But the UN talks remain bogged down by procedure, unable even to decide on whether or how to incorporate the Copenhagen deal -- cobbled together by a handful of nations at the 11th-hour -- into the formal UN process.

At the same time, political ambition has been dampened by the fallout from crushed expectations in the Danish capital, and concerns about the fragile state of the world economy.

"The mood is one of realism and accepting incremental changes rather than one 'Big Bang' agreement," said Saleemul Huq, senior researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London.

Outgoing UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told journalists that the chances of forging a legally-binding climate treaty -- the avowed aim of all parties -- before year's end are now vanishingly small.

Since January, many nations have opted for a "building block" approach, laying the bricks of a future climate deal outside the UN framework in smaller, multilateral meetings focusing on a single region or sector.

An initiative, for example, spearheaded by France and Norway produced an agreement last week to boost funds to protect forests to four billion dollars up to 2012.

Deforestation accounts for about 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

"We want to demonstrate that it's possible to start coordinated action [on forests] while we have formal negotiations under way at the UNFCCC. The world needs to see this," Brazilian Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira told journalists days before the deal was sealed.

But some negotiators worry about losing sight of the big picture.

"We have to be very careful that the piecemeal approach does not mean that the large overarching framework is not achieved, so that we wind up with a gap," Williams said.

Over the next week, talks will focus on a 42-page text unveiled in the run up to Bonn and intended as a rough draft of a future agreement.

Informal comments from negotiators show how hard it is going to be to bridge the gap, said Meyer.

Bolivia and several other developing nations "say it reflects much too much of the Copenhagen Accord, while the United States is complaining that there is almost nothing in it from the Accord," he said.

Prudence now the watchword as UN climate talks resume
Richard Ingham Yahoo News 30 May 10;

PARIS (AFP) – UN climate talks resume in Bonn on Monday with negotiators branded by caution after the near-fiasco of the Copenhagen summit six months ago.

Excess ambition is being blamed for the failure of Copenhagen, where world leaders were to have blessed a post-2012 pact to tame global warming.

Instead, the big show became a stage for finger-pointing and last-night wrangling as the planet's major carbon polluters grappled over a document to save face.

Negotiations get back in gear on Monday for the 12-day mid-year meeting under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

But political impetus seems to have drained away and the atmosphere is chastened.

"The mood is one of realism and accepting incremental changes rather than one 'Big Bang' agreement, which was what was attempted in Copenhagen and just fell flat," said Saleemul Huq, senior researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London.

Even the UNFCCC's chief, the perennially optimistic Yvo de Boer, who led the charge to Copenhagen and quit in the aftermath, is grim.

Any treaty is unlikely to be completed before the end of 2011, he told a press conference last week.

"It's extremely unlikely that we will see a legally-binding agreement in Cancun," de Boer admitted, referring to the end-of-year ministerial gathering in Mexico.

"I think that especially developing countries would want to see what an agreement would entail for them before they would be willing to turn it into a legally-binding treaty."

The Bonn talks have to start digging seriously through the morass of problems that bedevilled Copenhagen.

Who should make the deepest cuts in greenhouse gases? How can promises be policed? How should rich economies help poor countries -- the least to blame for climate change -- bolster defences against rising seas, drought and flood?

Adding a toxic ingredient to the mix is the fate of the so-called Copenhagen Accord.

The document sets a voluntary goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). It was brokered by a couple of dozen leaders in the summit's desperate final day but is viewed privately by many developing countries as worthless or a betrayal.

"The only country that thinks it (the Copenhagen Accord) has any life is the United States," said Huq. "Nobody else does. They are totally isolated on this."

To show that the accord has credibility -- and restore trust in the overall process -- developing countries are calling on the rich world to put its money where its mouth is.

In Copenhagen, the European Union (EU), the United States, Japan and other wealthy countries pledged 30 billion dollars in aid from 2010-2012, with a vaguer promise of mustering 100 billion dollars a year by the end of the decade.

"We need real implementation of the fundings, real action on the ground," said Dessima Williams, chief negotiator of Grenada, representing the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS).

"There is absolute and continued urgency."

Outside the UNFCCC arena, progress is being made in smaller, nimbler fora.

On Thursday, a Franco-Norwegian initiative on reducing carbon from deforestation rustled up four billion dollars for action up to 2012, as well as a promise by Indonesia to introduce a two-year freeze on forest clearance.

But progress within the UN temple, where consensus among 194 nations is required, is plodding.

The delay in fixing up a new climate treaty casts a pall over the Kyoto Protocol, the only international accord to impose legally binding limits on greenhouse gases.

Its current pledges expire at the end of 2012. Developed countries that ratified Kyoto -- everyone except the United States -- are hostile or lukewarm about renewing the deal so long as the successor treaty is not completed.