Small climate deals forged outside international talks

Arthur Max, Associated Press Yahoo News 12 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico – Walmart is going green in its Chinese factories. George Soros is exploring investments in the restoration of drained peatlands in Indonesia. Denmark is joining South Korea in a new fund to transform developing economies.

As delegates to the latest U.N. climate talks struggled to come up with a modest pair of global warming accords, governments, businesses and individuals working behind the scenes forged ahead with their own projects to cut emissions.

"Regardless of what happens in these negotiations, we shouldn't be waiting. We should be doing practical things on the ground," World Bank President Robert Zoellick said in an interview before the talks wound up Saturday.

Nearly 200 governments have been working for 20 years toward an all-encompassing treaty to constrain human influence on the climate through industrial pollution, vehicles and agriculture.

The Cancun Agreements, adopted to cheers and ovations early Saturday after two tortuous weeks of talks, created a Green Climate Fund to manage and disburse tens of billions of dollars a year, starting in 2020, for green development in poor countries.

The fund also will help developing nations adapt to climate change that already has occurred, through such methods as shifting to drought-resistant crops or building sea walls against rising ocean levels and storm surges.

The accords also create a new mechanism for giving green technology to developing states and set guidelines to compensate countries that are preserving their forests.

The ideal global treaty — the one on which governments have not been able to agree during two decades of talks — would set targets and create incentives for countries and industries to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and invest in green economic growth.

Officials in both the public and private arena have decided not to wait for such a global agreement, instead taking the initiative on their own.

The sidelines of the Cancun conference provided a convenient platform to discuss old projects they were already working on as well as to unveil new ones, most of them valued at just a few million dollars.

There were actually "two summits" in Cancun, said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, referring to both the official negotiations and project discussions outside the main conference.

"Individually, they may not sound like a lot ... but the reality is, on the ground there is a tremendous groundswell of activity on climate change," he told reporters.

While the conference was under way, Zoellick announced a new $100 million World Bank fund to help countries set up carbon-trading programs.

China, India, Chile and Mexico are among countries that have expressed an interest in drawing on the fund, he told The Associated Press.

"People get lost in the negotiating part of this," he said. The fund is an example "of an ongoing innovation that doesn't depend on treaty text."

Three miles (seven kilometers) from the climate talks' principal negotiating venue, Walmart chairman Rob Walton attended a function that addressed using everything from cattle in Brazil to palm oil in Indonesia as sustainable sourcing for the giant retailer founded by his father.

Walmart says it plans to reduce its carbon footprint over five years to what would be the equivalent of taking 3.8 million cars off the road. Much of that will come by reducing the energy used by suppliers in China, where most of its nonfood products come from.

"People are spending less time on the negotiations and shifting more focus on concrete action," said Stephen Cochran, vice president of the New York-based nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which works with Walmart in China and in the U.S.

That doesn't mean there isn't still a need for a global accord, however, Cochran added.

Such an agreement would set common rules and firm up guarantees that green investment pays.

Financier George Soros discussed a private rescue plan for depleted Indonesian peatlands. The former jungle areas, which were cleared for rice paddies or palm oil, release huge amounts of stored carbon as they dry out and burn.

Marcel Silvius of Wetlands International, who accompanied Soros to Indonesia earlier this year, said several billionaires were applying to Jakarta for concessions for degraded land. By blocking drainage channels and allowing the peatlands to re-flood, natural forests may regenerate, and local communities could be enlisted to manage the new growth.

Investors can make returns on carbon credits under the forestry strategy outlined in the Cancun Agreements. But some people, including Soros, see it as philanthropy from which they expect no return, Silvius said. He said 6 million to 7.5 million acres (2.5 million to 3 million hectares) of land, an area the size of the Netherlands, could be restored in Indonesia.

For its part, Denmark announced that it will donate $15 million over three years to the Global Green Growth Initiative, founded six months ago by South Korea to help countries develop eco-friendly technologies. Seoul kicked in $30 million, or $10 million a year.

The fund already has projects in Ethiopia and Cambodia, with more in the pipeline in Indonesia and the Philippines, said Rae-kwon Chung, a director of the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

The initiative "is the machinery for promoting green growth," and is designed to promote a lifestyle totally different from the fossil-fuel economies of the West — "a paradigm shift," Chung said.

"This is more meaningful than what's happening here," said Chung, a former South Korean climate negotiator, nodding toward the negotiating rooms.

In the U.S., statewide trading strategies are in place and expanding internationally, even as Congress fails to act on climate legislation.

California reached agreements this year with the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and Brazil's Acre province for pilot projects on forest preservation in exchange for carbon credits. Emissions trading was a pillar of California's 2006 climate bill, which called for reducing pollution to 1990 levels by 2020.

Cancún agreement rescues UN credibility but falls short of saving planet
• $100bn climate fund likely to come from private sector
• Limited successes include aid for preventing deforestation
Suzanne Goldenberg The Guardian 12 Dec 10;

The modest deal wrangled out by the 200 countries meeting at the Mexican resort of Cancún may have done more to save a dysfunctional UN negotiating process from collapse than protect the planet against climate change, analysts said today.

"The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. "The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them."

The agreement produced in the early hours of Saturday reinforces the promise made by rich countries last year to mobilise billions for a green climate fund to help poor countries defend themselves against climate damage.

It was not clear how the funds would be raised. At Copenhagen last year, rich countries agreed to raise $100bn (£63bn) a year by 2020 for the fund. However, US officials said at the weekend that most of this would come from the private sector.

Cancún also produced a victory for forest campaigners who were looking to the talks to produce a system of incentives to prevent the destruction of tropical rainforests in countries such as Brazil, Congo and Indonesia.

Under the deal, developing countries will receive aid for not burning or logging forests. Deforestation produces about 15% of the world's carbon emissions.

But with a widening divide between rich and poor countries over the architecture of a global agreement, Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister credited with preventing a collapse of the two-week talks, told negotiators the result was "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process".

Negotiators, clean-energy business associations and campaign groups warned that Cancún's most significant result was putting off the tough decisions until next year's UN summit in South Africa.

"The outcome wasn't enough to save the planet," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But it did restore the credibility of the United Nations as a forum where progress can be made."

The Global Wind Energy Council said Cancún was only counted a success because of the extremely low expectations going into the talks. "None of the fundamental political, legal and architectural issues that still must be resolved in order to establish an effective global climate regime have been solved," it said.

Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned that the failure to resolve difficult issues at Cancún – especially over the future of the Kyoto protocol – makes the risks even higher next year.

He wrote on his blog: "The Cancún result punts the dispute to next year's talks. But that solution will not be available again: the current Kyoto commitments expire at the end of 2012, making the next UN conference the last practical opportunity to seal a new set of Kyoto pledges."

But negotiators did not have many options. After the failure of the Copenhagen summit last year, a breakdown at Cancún would have condemned the 20-year climate negotiations, Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's climate commissioner, told reporters on Saturday.

In the runup to Cancún, negotiators acknowledged there was no prospect of reaching a new treaty. They hoped instead for progress on the "building blocks" to a deal, such as detailed agreements on climate finance, preventing deforestation, enabling technology transfer and accounting for emissions cuts by emerging economies such as China and India.

However, even those modest ambitions were put in jeopardy when Japan and then Russia announced they would not sign on to a second term of the Kyoto protocol unless the world's big emitters, China and the US, were also legally bound to action.

Campaign groups such as Greenpeace also blamed the US for taking a hard line at the talks – partly for fear of being accused of giving up too much to China by Republicans at home.

Despite those tensions, however, America and China avoided the mood of confrontation that undermined the talks at Copenhagen last year.

Planting the seeds of hope
Cancun represents a stepping stone to a deal, but it is a breakthrough
Jessica Cheam Straits Times 13 Dec 10;

CANCUN: Before arriving in Mexico, I did not know what to expect, half dreading that precious days would be wasted at a conference that would end just as Copenhagen had last year - in disappointment.

But if there is one word I would use to sum up the United Nations climate talks, it would be this: hope.

And I do not just mean hope for a better future with the approved deal, which shows some progress has been made in international cooperation on climate change. I mean hope in humanity and the spirit of unity that nations can demonstrate when the right conditions are in place.

For some time now, critics have doubted whether the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was the best way to advance climate talks, wondering if another forum, such as the Group of 20 or Apec summit, would be better equipped to effect progress. The greatest issue was the UNFCCC's consensus rule, which requires every country to be on board before any deal can be approved.

There has been talk of moving to a majority vote system to facilitate speedier decisions, but as one senior government official pointed out to me, such a framework would present its own problems because a global treaty on climate change needs universality to work. Unless every country comes on board, it would be difficult to implement an equitable system whereby the rules could be applied across the board to all economies.

As the week ended, hope was restored in this multilateral process - and the meaning of consensus redefined forever.

Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa, the conference chairman, finally issued fresh texts - now known as the Cancun Agreements - setting out some decisions that seemed to have struck a chord with all parties.

When world leaders met for an informal plenary session to give their feedback, there was a palpable sense of optimism in the air that the summit - for the first time, after three years of inaction - had made a breakthrough.

The Cancun Agreements are far from perfect and need plenty of work still. But they contain language that eliminates many of the square brackets and options in the legalese that encumbered previous versions and made negotiation tedious.

Furthermore, they now contain crucial elements such as an annual US$100 billion (S$131 billion) fund to help developing countries tackle climate change, a limit on global temperature increases, funding for forest protection and mechanisms for technology transfer from rich to poor nations.

For the first time, voluntary pledges to cut emissions by developing nations, first noted in last year's Copenhagen Accord, were captured in an official UN document.

The language was diplomatically crafted to appease the majority - and it worked. Major countries such as the United States and China, Europe, the African bloc, small island states and the least developed countries all gave their support. They commended Mrs Espinosa for her dextrous handling of relations and her leadership in drafting the text.

I was in the room when she received a thunderous standing ovation from the delegates, many of whom cheered and shouted words of encouragement. The air was highly charged with a force that swept over everyone and made my hair stand.

It was a force so mighty that when Bolivia stood in its path, bent on wrecking the deal, the objection was swept aside. Cuba, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia were among those that had initially expressed reservations about adopting the text, but eventually, even they said they would not stand in the way.

As Mrs Espinosa put it: 'Consensus does not mean that one nation can choose to apply a veto to a process that other nations have been working on for years. I cannot ignore the opinion of another 193 states that are parties.'

And so the Cancun Agreements came to pass, and the world's nations showed they could work together to get something done.

Now, the larger question is: So what?

Already, some people are slamming the deal for not being ambitious enough.

Clearly, the real work is just beginning. The end-goal - to legally bind nations to cut emissions - has not been forged into the agreement and commitments are merely being postponed. Many more details have to be worked into the text before the final, comprehensive agreement can be reached.

But it is all too easy for observers to sit back in their armchairs and criticise, especially those who have not been to the meetings and have not witnessed the back-breaking process of managing negotiations between 193 nations.

It would be unfair to overlook Cancun's achievements, which have unlocked a flow of funds from richer nations to those that are vulnerable to climate change and which have laid out guidelines on aspects of climate change cooperation in the boldest form seen so far.

It is not easy for 193 nations to just sort things out when so many wildly differing interests are at play.

Furthermore, the international laws and mechanisms involved in implementing such a global deal are highly technical and require a long time to fine-tune. I think few truly appreciate this aspect. Many expect the participants to sort it out overnight, or else give up the process.

It is easy to be discouraged, and I myself have had doubts about whether this process is the best way to tackle climate change. But the process hardly benefits from having people belittle every step taken in the right direction.

At Cancun, I witnessed what the unity of countries could achieve. Coming so swiftly after the disastrous climate talks in Copenhagen, when trust foundered and no one could agree on anything, this triumph is nothing short of a miracle.

The challenge now is to seize hold of this hard-won momentum and goodwill in the process before the world wearies of it again and relegates climate change back to the back-burner.

However, to move forward, the leaders must have everyone's support.

The Cancun Agreements represent a stepping stone - a significant one. Now, it is even more imperative that the world build on the momentum generated to make that last dash to the holy grail: a legally binding international framework that will change the course of the future.