U.N. Climate Talks "Risk Losing Relevance": EU

Pete Harrison PlanetArk 30 Nov 10;

International climate talks risk "losing momentum and relevance" if they fail to achieve concrete progress in the next two weeks, the Europe Union's climate chief warned on Monday.

As the two-week talks kicked off in Cancun, Mexico, EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard also took a swipe at countries such as the United States that she said had failed to make progress this year in tackling climate change.

"The EU is ready to agree on an ambitious global climate framework in Cancun, but regrettably some other major economies are not," she said. "No new legislation unfortunately came out of the American Senate."

"Cancun can nevertheless take the world a significant step forward by agreeing on a balanced set of decisions covering many key issues," she added. "It is crucial that Cancun delivers this progress, otherwise the U.N. climate change process risks losing momentum and relevance."

Hedegaard stopped short of saying the EU would walk away from the talks in favor of other political forums such as the G20, instead telling reporters that she feared "other parties would start to lose patience".

And she stressed that no other forum appeared more promising than the United Nations meetings of almost 200 nations.

Nevertheless, the EU has scaled down its ambitions for Cancun and is now looking for small, concrete measures to protect rainforests, exchange green technology and monitor financial donations to poor countries in return for emissions cuts.

(Editing by Rex Merrifield)

Nations again try to bridge rich-poor climate gap
Arthur Max, Associated Press Yahoo News 29 Nov 10;

CANCUN, Mexico – World governments begin another attempt Monday to overcome the disconnect between rich and poor nations on fighting global warming, with evidence mounting that the Earth's climate already is changing in ways that will affect both sides of the wealth divide.

During two weeks of talks, the 193-nation U.N. conference hopes to conclude agreements that will clear the way to mobilize billions of dollars for developing countries and give them green technology to help them shift from fossil fuels affecting climate change.

After a disappointing summit last year in Copenhagen, no hope remains of reaching an overarching deal this year setting legal limits on how much major countries would be allowed to pollute. Such an accord was meant to describe a path toward slashing greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, when scientists say they should be half of today's levels.

Eighty-five countries have made specific pledges to reduce emissions or constrain their growth, but those promises amount to far less than required to keep temperatures from rising to potentially dangerous levels.

The recriminations that followed the Danish summit have raised questions over whether the unwieldy U.N. negotiations, which require at least tacit agreement from every nation, can ever work.

Adopting scaled back ambitions for Cancun, if successful, could restore confidence in the process.

"As is the case with any large puzzle with over 1,000 pieces and over 190 players, one needs to start with the edges and work inwards," Jennifer Morgan, of World Resources Institute, said on Monday.

Christiana Figueres, the top U.N. climate official, said world capitals are aware of both a growing environmental and political urgency. "Governments need to prove that the intergovernmental process can deliver," she said Sunday.

"They know that they can do it. They know that they need to compromise. I'm not saying it's a done deal. It's still going to be a heavy lift," she said.

About 15,000 negotiators, environmental activists, businessmen and journalists are convening at a resort complex under elaborate security precautions, including naval warships a few hundred yards (meters) offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

While delegates haggle over the wording, timing and dollar figures involved in any agreement, scientists and political activists at the conference will be offering the latest indications of the planet's warming. Some 250 presentations are planned on the sidelines of the negotiations.

Meteorologists are likely to report that 2010 will end up tied for the hottest year globally since records began 131 years ago.

The U.N. scientific body that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its climate change report, which called global warming "unequivocal" and almost certainly caused by human activity, is expected to tell the conference its findings and warnings of potential disasters are hopelessly out of date.

Agronomists are due to report on shifting weather patterns that are destabilizing the world's food supply and access to clean water, and that could lead to mass migrations as farmers flee drought or flood-prone regions.

As often during the three-year process, attention will focus on the United States and China, two often belligerent nations representing the industrialized and developing world.

President Barack Obama has drawn fire for his failure to win passage of domestic climate legislation and what is often described as the feeble U.S. pledge to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

The environmental group Greenpeace urged other governments to stop waiting for the Americans.

"It is time for the EU (European Union) to stop hiding behind the U.S.," said Wendell Trio, Greenpeace's climate policy director.

"Equally, China must stop responding to U.S. attempts to goad it into a public fight — a tactic that is clearly driven by the U.S. administration's need to distract attention from the fact it can bring very little to the table," he said.

The U.S. has insisted it will agree to binding pollution limits only if China also accepts legal limitations. China, now the world's biggest polluter but also the biggest investor in renewable energy, rejects international limits, saying it still needs to overcome widespread poverty and bears no historic responsibility for the problem.

U.S. negotiators may feel further constrained from showing flexibility toward the Chinese after the Republican swing in this month's congressional elections, which brought dozens of new legislators who doubt the seriousness of climate change.

But Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who became head of the U.N. climate secretariat in July, said the public argument may appear more bitter than it really is. At the most recent round of talks last October, "they were working very constructively with each other inside the negotiations," she said.

Time for compromise, troubled UN climate talks told
Richard Ingham Yahoo News 30 Nov 10;

CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – A new round of UN climate talks got under way on Monday to appeals for action and compromise after the squabbles that drove last year's global summit in Copenhagen close to disaster.

"A richer tapestry of efforts is needed," UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned, as she spelt out the tasks facing the 12-day conference in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.

"A tapestry of holes will not work -- and the holes can only be filled in through compromise."

President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, whose country is hosting the conference, also appealed for common purpose.

"Climate change is already a reality for us," he told delegates. "During the next two weeks, the whole world will be looking at you. It would be a tragedy not to overcome the hurdle of national interests."

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC), warned of the penalties if the world dragged its feet.

The more man-made carbon gases that enter the atmosphere, the greater the warming of Earth's atmosphere and the worse the consequences for the planet's climate system, he said.

"Global emissions should peak no later than in 2015 and decline thereafter," he said, referring to the least costly scenario for averting drought, flood, rising seas and storms.

"Delays in action would only lead to impacts of climate change which would be much larger and in all likelihood more severe than we have experienced so far. These impacts are likely to be most severe for some of the poorest regions and communities in the world."

The talks, held under the 194-party UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are being attended by around 15,000 delegates, grass-roots campaigners and journalists.

Mexican police and troops, supported by three warships, threw a security cordon around the Moon Palace hotel, a luxury beachfront complex.

The conference is part of an arduous process to craft a post-2012 treaty for curbing carbon emissions and channelling hundreds of billions of dollars in aid for badly-exposed poor countries.

In some quarters, the November 29-December 10 parlays are seen as the last chance to restore faith in a process battered by finger-pointing and nit-picking.

It comes almost a year to the day since a stormy summit in Copenhagen, where a last-minute, face-saving compromise was lacerated by critics as a betrayal.

That trauma, coupled to economic crisis, caused climate change to almost disappear off the political radar screen, with the only prompts for action coming from the record heatwaves in Russia and floods in Pakistan.

In the UNFCCC, meanwhile, negotiations have switched from a big vision to securing visible progress in small, practical steps.

Work in Cancun will focus on securing agreements, at least in principle, for setting up a "Green Fund" to help poor countries, preventing carbon emissions from deforestation and encouraging the transfer of clean technology from advanced economies.

Decisions could be made singly or in a package, Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa told a press conference.

"Cancun is the litmus test. We will see if governments are willing to protect their citizens through international cooperation," said Gordon Shepherd of green group WWF.

"This year has seen massive suffering and loss due to extreme weather disasters. This is likely to get worse as climate change tightens its grip," said Tim Gore of the British NGO Oxfam.

In Geneva, the UN's special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schuetter, urged the Cancun conference to launch a "Green Marshall Plan" to combat the rising threat of hunger from climate change.

The IPCC estimates that yields from rain-fed agriculture could be cut by up to half between 2000 and 2020, while arid and semi-arid areas could grow by 60 million to 90 million hectares.

That could put 600 million more people at risk of hunger, De Schuetter said.

UN climate talks low on expectation
Richard Black BBC News 30 Nov 10;

This year's UN climate summit has opened in Mexico, with expectations of significant progress generally low.

In contrast to last year's summit in Copenhagen, there is a general belief that no new global deal will emerge.

The basic divisions are as stark as ever, and some nations and observers are arguing that smaller, less formal pacts are the way forward.

However, countries appear to want the UN process to survive, so major public disputes are unlikely.

Another contrast to Copenhagen is that very few heads of state or government are expected to attend.

The summit takes place against the backdrop of forecasts that carbon emissions are set to start rising again after a brief interlude from the recession, and analyses showing that countries' current pledges are not big enough to keep the global average temperature rise within bounds that most nations say they want.

On Friday, former UK deputy prime minister Lord Prescott - who led the UK delegation to the 1997 climate summit that agreed the Kyoto Protocol, and played a key role in negotiations there - called for governments to acknowledge that the UN process is failing.

"The legal framework is falling apart. Let us be practical, recognise that it has happened, and go for an alternative," he said.
Continue reading the main story

"Each country is still trying to cut carbon emissions in its own way - the US has a programme, the EU has a programme, China has a programme.

"Let each of them go ahead voluntarily... but let's at least agree on a few basics of fairness and transparency."

However, this approach is diametrically opposed to the stance taken by some developing countries, which insist that Western nations must live up to promises they have made at key points along the UN route that began in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.

This stance is echoed by most environmental organisations, which see the UN framework as the only way of providing a comprehensive raft of solutions to the issues posed by climate change.

"Only an equitable, comprehensive and legally binding agreement will bring the much needed international commitment to manage the climate crisis," said Stewart Maginnis, director of environment and development with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"What governments should focus on in Cancun is ensuring that confidence in the UNFCCC (climate convention) process is rebuilt, which will bring us a step closer to that final deal."
Compromise call

For some governments, Cancun will be a success if it generates a constructive atmosphere of constructive dialogue, rather than descending into the rancour that characterised the Copenhagen gathering.

Others, however, are looking for concrete progress on issues such as transfer of clean technologies from the industrialised world to developing countries, the provision of funds from the west to help poorer nations adapt to climate impacts, and reducing deforestation.

But even these matters are unlikely to prove straightforward.

Developed countries have put forward "fast start" finance, as they pledged to do in Copenhagen.

But not all of it is transparently new money, as it is supposed to be.

Movement towards an agreement on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) has aroused the ire of some indigenous peoples, who regard it as an excuse for not cutting carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning.

"REDD and other false solutions like agrofuels and carbon sink plantations are ways to grab productive land in the South so that more cheap resources and food can be accessed by industrialised countries," said Blessing Karumbidza from the South African group Timberwatch.

They are also calling on any REDD deal to respect fully the rights of indigenous peoples who live in and off forests.

The main issues, though, are economic and geopolitical in nature.

Many governments are worried about losing their economic competitiveness through curbing emissions, particularly against key global or regional rivals.

Main players in the summit itself are optimistic that something worthwhile can emerge, despite these obstacles.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN climate convention, recently said: "At this point, everything I see tells me that there is a deal to be done.

"Cancun will be a success, if parties compromise."

The lesson of Copenhagen, though, is that this is likely to prove a very big "if".