* China presses developed countries to improve targets
* China official says talks "losing trust"
* Rich economies say they need to work out legal fine print
Chris Buckley Reuters AlertNet 8 Oct 10;
TIANJIN, China, Oct 8 (Reuters) - China said rich nations must vow greater cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and warned of lost trust in talks over a climate change deal, while rich countries accused Beijing of under cutting progress.
Feuding on Friday over the future of a key U.N. treaty on fighting climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, has diluted hopes that negotiations in the Chinese city of Tianjin can lay a firm base for agreeing on a new, binding climate deal next year.
The week-long talks end on Saturday and are the last before a high-level meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in less than two months.
Kyoto's first phase ends in 2012 and what happens after that is in contention, with rich and poor countries disagreeing over whether Kyoto should be extended or replaced with a new treaty that covers all big greenhouse gas polluting nations.
In a sometimes combative meeting of hundreds of negotiators, Huang Huikang, China's Special Representative for Climate Change Negotiations, said negotiators were losing trust in each other.
"Today here in Tianjin we really need to rebuild trust and confidence. We are losing confidence and trust," Huang said.
"We are all concerned about the slow status of our negotiations."
The United Nations is worried the talks will stall and create a gap in application from 2013 which could halt Kyoto's $20.6 billion carbon market.
TARGETS
Beijing wants to keep Kyoto and its firm division between the duties of rich economies and poorer ones, including China.
Washington and other rich nations want a new pact to reflect the surge in emissions from the developing world, now accounting for more than half of annual global greenhouse gas pollution.
And China wants developed countries to offer far more ambitious carbon cuts before emerging economies also shift.
"Now the key issue is the lack of any substantive progress on the developed countries' side. If Annex 1 countries take the lead in the mitigation process, I suppose developing countries will do their part," Huang told reporters.
Kyoto binds 37 rich, or Annex 1, nations to meet quantified emissions reduction targets, also called mitigation goals. Under Kyoto, developing countries take voluntary steps to curb the growth of their emissions.
The European Union's climate chief, Connie Hedegaard, urged negotiators in Tianjin "to make compromises within the next 24 hours".
"We need a substantial package of decisions to be taken in Cancun in order to keep the momentum, to show that international negotiations can deliver," she told reporters in Helsinki.
China is the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, having passed the United States, but its emissions per-capita remain well below Western levels.
China's emissions are set to keep growing for years to come, and it wants rich nations to slash theirs so that it and other developing countries have the room to grow. [ID:nLDE68L23Z]
Huang, the Chinese climate envoy, said the developed nations under Kyoto "must reach the target of more than 40 percent emissions reduction based on the 1990 level (by 2020)."
That position is far beyond present targets from the developed world: the U.S. Senate is struggling to approve a vow to cut emissions by about 4 percent below 1990 levels.
The wrangling in Tianjin also underscored how vulnerable the tortuous negotiations are to procedural push and shove.
Several delegates said China, backed by Brazil, opposed opening up broader discussion of legal issues raised by inserting new numbers into an extended Kyoto after 2012.
"China and Brazil are very strongly of the opinion that it makes no sense to start discussing those legal issues as long as there is no clarity about the (emissions target) numbers", said Wendel Trio, a climate change expert with Greenpeace.
-- Additional reporting by Terhi Kinnunen in Helsinki (Editing by David Fogarty and Gerard Wynn)
China warns trust ebbing from climate talks
Yahoo News 8 Oct 10;
TIANJIN, China (AFP) – China on Friday warned trust and confidence are being sapped from long-running UN talks aimed at forging a global deal on climate change, amid a grinding standoff with the United States.
The latest round of negotiations in the Chinese city of Tianjin are aimed at laying the foundations for a UN summit on global warming in Mexico next month, after world leaders failed to broker a binding deal in Copenhagen last year.
But while delegates said some incremental progress has been made in Tianjin this week, others said much more action is needed while major players China and the United States gave no ground in their stand-off.
"I want to emphasise no compromise... on the interests of developing countries," the Chinese foreign ministry's special representative for climate change, Huang Huikang, told delegates ahead of Saturday's final session.
"We are losing trust and confidence."
Huang had earlier repeated China's long-held positions that the United States and other rich nations must commit to making bigger cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are blamed for climate change.
He said they must also give money and transfer technology to developing countries to help them cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.
"Now the key is there is a lack of substantive progress on the developed countries' side," Huang told reporters.
The United States, meanwhile, has insisted this week that it will not provide climate funds unless the big developing countries such as China allow their greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts to be monitored and verified.
The same issues were crucial factors in the failure by world leaders to broker a binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen.
Greenpeace international climate policy director Wendel Trio on Friday hit out at the continuing hardline stance from the major players in the talks, saying it was a major roadblock to substantive progress.
"We need to get out of this culture of confrontation," Trio told reporters.
"The culture where governments say: 'We will only move forward if the others move first.' That's not what we want. We want all countries to move forward because of the planet, not because of what others are doing."
Nevertheless, there were signs of progress in some areas that could form the basis for specific agreements at the summit in Cancun, Mexico.
Delegates said one area of potential progress was developing a framework for a fund that would distribute money to poor nations to mitigate and cope with climate change.
Rich nations 'failing to deliver climate cash'
Roger Harrabin BBC News 8 Oct 10;
Rich nations are failing to live up to their promise of giving US$30bn to poor countries to help them cope with climate change, according to a report.
The money was pledged at last year's Copenhagen summit in order to build trust between rich and poor nations.
The scheme - championed by former UK PM Gordon Brown - is supposed to deliver the funds by the end of 2012.
But a report to the German government says much of the money has been taken from other aid budgets.
If the findings are correct, it confirms allegations by pressure groups that rich countries are repackaging existing funds and presenting them as special climate finance.
Campaigners claim programmes to tackle poverty will suffer if this is allowed to happen.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
If we are not careful a big chunk of the money will go in paying wealthy consultants from rich countries to find out how much money is new”
End Quote John Drexage IISD, Canada
Cash transfer from rich to poor is a major theme at the Tianjin climate conference, the last major gathering before this year's UN climate summit in Mexico.
Delegates also heard an update about potential sources for the agreed $100bn long-term climate finance.
The report on the $30bn short-term cash is by the consultancy Climate Analytics. It says a total of $31.2bn has been pledged so far - more than the amount promised at the global gathering in the Danish capital last December.
Devil in detail
But the question is what counts as "new and additional finance". The term was used in the controversial Copenhagen Climate Accord, but has no agreed definition.
The paper concludes that if the only funds counted are new climate funds additional to official aid budgets since Copenhagen, then the sum raised so far is just $8.2bn.
A more generous definition of additional finance might see the allowable funds swelled to $17bn - but even this is far from the $30bn figure.
The report says there is very little transparency in rich countries' pledges.
The claim comes as rich nations are demanding transparency in developing nations' actions to tackle climate change.
"There must be much better verification of developed countries' finance proposals," Xie Zhenhua, China's chief climate negotiator, told BBC News.
Bill Hare from Climate Analytics said: "This is a really important issue because so much trust has been lost in the climate negotiations with so many rich nations failing to live up to their legally binding targets to cut emissions, then asking the developing nations to do more to tackle climate change.
"This fund will look like a scam if it's not improved. If you can't have trust - and this process has been severely damaged by lack of trust - it's going to be very bad news indeed."
John Drexage from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in Canada told BBC News: "We mustn't get too obsessed about this - if we are not careful a big chunk of the money will go in paying wealthy consultants from rich countries to find out how much money is new."
A former diplomat was more cynical about the "smoke and mirrors" of international finance: "Treasuries don't allow ministers to make spending pledges - they go into a side room and warn there is no new money available - then they get creative as to how to present a package that will look good on paper.
"There's a huge amount of grey area here - it's impossible to be precise on these figures."
Meanwhile, the meeting heard about progress from the high-level advisory panel tasked with finding the annual $100bn to be given by rich nations to poor nations from 2020.
This also formed part of the Copenhagen Accord from 2020, and the US$100bn was again first mooted by Gordon Brown, as a way to help poor countries cope with the projected consequences of climate change.
The panel's spokesman, Daniele Violetti, said the report would be finalised next week.
"The group is not proposing a 'silver bullet' for every problem - it's more a question of assessing what various revenues could generate over time," he said.
There could be eight sources of finance, most of them coming from the public sector.
It is reported that the panel has been considering bunker fuel taxes for aviation and shipping, but that a proposed Tobin tax (levy on currency traded across national borders) on financial transactions has been quashed by the US.
The panel's conclusions will be examined closely because the US and the UK both insist that public sector money will be used to leverage private sector investment - much of it from the carbon markets.
Henry Derwent, CEO of the International Emissions Trading Association, said governments might be over-estimating the cash that could be generated from markets.
"The current maximum primary market investment under the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism - the official international carbon trading market) is $2-3bn a year," he told BBC News.
"With the current trend in carbon prices, it doesn't seem to be going in the right direction to me - so it's hard to see how this could contribute a large proportion of $100bn."
The carbon market will burgeon if a comprehensive global deal on emissions is agreed - but observers in Tianjin are not optimistic that will happen in the next few years, if at all.
