Climate talks put top emitter China in hot seat

* Talks seek to generate progress towards treaty pact
* Negotiations focus on funding, technology, measurement
* Observers worry distrust will drag down progress
Chris Buckley Reuters AlertNet 3 Oct 10;

TIANJIN, China, Oct 3 (Reuters) - The world's top greenhouse polluter hosts week-long U.N. climate talks from Monday aimed at sealing a broader pact to fight global warming and helping poorer nations with money and clean-energy technology.

The meeting in the northern port city of Tianjin will be the first time China has hosted the tortuous U.N. talks over what succeeds the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the key treaty on climate change, which expires in late 2012.

The United Nations says rich and poor countries need to agree on a tougher pact that curbs fossil fuel emissions blamed for heating up the planet.

Scientists say the world is on track for temperatures to rise well beyond 2 degrees Celsius, risking greater weather extremes like this year's floods in Pakistan and drought in Russia.

"There is much at stake going into next week's Tianjin meeting and later in the year," wrote Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute, a U.S. environmental group.

"Many people are wondering how governments are going to overcome their differences and ensure that progress is made in 2010," Morgan wrote in a commentary on Tianjin.

Negotiators from nearly 200 governments failed to agree last year on a new legally binding treaty. A meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009 ended in rancour between rich and developing countries, especially China, and produced a non-binding political accord with many gaps.

Officials in Tianjin hope to foster stronger agreement on specifics. These include pledges to curb emissions and how to measure such actions internationally, transfers of adaptation funds and green technology to poorer countries, and over support for carbon-absorbing forests in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere.

More broadly, they hope to dispel some of the distrust that hobbled talks in 2009 and festered after Copenhagen.

TRUST

If governments fail to score even modest advances, that will cloud chances of solid progress at the next big U.N. climate meeting, in Cancun, Mexico, late this year, and that would make reaching a legally binding treaty in 2011 all the more difficult.

That would leave less time for the world to figure out how to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and would add to uncertainties weighing on companies unsure where climate policy and carbon markets are headed after 2012.

"The expectations going into Tianjin are to lay a foundation for Cancun, to create an atmosphere of trust," Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defence Council, a U.S.-based group, said in a conference call with reporters this week.

A key worry is the United States, which never ratified Kyoto, will not follow through on the Obama administration's emissions cut pledge after Congress failed to pass a climate bill.

"We hope that Tianjin will further advance some consensus on these issues so that the Cancun meeting can reach a preliminary summary that is settled on," said Yang Fuqiang, WWF director of Global Climate Solutions.

"If we have such long negotiations and can't advance even one small step, I fear that the gulf of distrust between developed and developing countries will be even bigger," Yang, a former energy official, told Reuters.

Although China will be hosting the conference, it does not set the agenda in Tianjin, where negotiators will be focused on a draft treaty put together by the U.N. climate change body.

But China is a crucial presence at the negotiating table, as both the biggest developing economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activity. Its emissions have more than doubled since 2000 and have outstripped the United States'.

China's emissions grew to 7.5 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2009, according to data from BP. [ID:nLDE65813J]

But China maintains that it and other poorer countries must be given more space to grow their economies and, inevitably, their total emissions for years to come.

Beijing has instead vowed to reduce "carbon intensity" -- the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each dollar of economic activity -- by 40-45 percent by 2020 compared to 2005.

The United States, European Union and other governments want China, India and other big emerging economies to take on firmer commitments to control and eventually cut emissions, and to subject them to more international monitoring.

China and like-minded governments say wealthy economies need to give firmer commitments for economic and technological help against global warming, and to commit to bigger emissions cuts. (Additional reporting by Maxim Duncan; Editing by David Fogarty and Benjamin Kang Lim)

Stalled UN climate talks to resume in China
Karl Malakunas Yahoo News 4 Oct 10;

TIANJIN, China (AFP) – Thousands of environment experts were set to gather in China on Monday in a bid to kick-start stalled UN talks on climate change, amid warnings that time was running out to broker a deal.

The six days of talks in the northern port city of Tianjin, due to begin at 10:00 am (0200 GMT), are part of long-running efforts through the United Nations to secure a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.

The talks are the first time China has hosted a major international climate change conference or a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting.

Little progress has been made since world leaders failed to broker a deal in Copenhagen last year and the talks are being seen as crucial in rebuilding trust ahead of another UN climate summit in Cancun, Mexico next month.

"Tianjin must be the moment when countries begin clearing the fog," Jennifer Morgan, climate and energy programme director for the World Resources Institute, said in a briefing paper on this week's conference.

"They need to demonstrate their deep willingness to find solutions and move forward in a productive manner. This will go a long way to providing clarity for people around the world that Cancun -- and the UN process itself -- can be a success."

The final goal of the process is a treaty aimed at curbing the greenhouse gases that scientists say cause global warming, which in turn could have catastrophic consequences on the world's climate system.

The treaty would then potentially be clinched late next year at a UN summit in South Africa, in time to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires at the end of 2012.

However, after the Copenhagen failure and the continuing battles between developed and developing countries over who should shoulder responsibilities for curbing greenhouse gases, expectations have been lowered.

The UN's climate change chief, Christiana Figueres, warned last week that progress in negotiations at Tianjin, Cancun and beyond were going to be very slow.

Speaking in the United States, Figueres said that no "big bang" deal on tackling climate change was possible, only slow, incremental steps.

"Now this progressive approach is probably a sane approach, but it is in stark contrast to the urgency of the matter," said Figueres, executive secretary of the 194-member UNFCCC.

"That's the problem -- that we can only go in incremental steps but the matter is really very urgent."

Devastating floods in Pakistan and China this year, as well as fires in Russia, are just a taste of the extreme weather that scientists say humans will suffer through if world leaders do not curb greenhouse gas emissions soon.

The phenomenal economic growth of China has seen it overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in recent years, and its efforts to limit emissions will be under the spotlight this week.

After being blamed by many in the developed world for derailing the Copenhagen talks, analysts say China is holding the event partly to demonstrate its commitment to the UN process and clean energy.

Nevertheless, China is expected to hold firm on many of the key disputes with the United States and other developed nations that have led to the current gridlock.

One is its insistence that developing nations should not have to commit to binding targets on cutting emissions.

In Tianjin, the roughly 3,000 delegates from governments, industry groups, non-government organisations and research institutions are expected to focus on preparing potential deals on specific issues so they can be signed in Cancun.

One key issue is whether negotiators can make progress on a promised fund that would eventually be worth 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries cope with climate change.