UN's Ban at climate talks: 'We need results now'

Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Yahoo News 7 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, trying to revive long-stalled climate talks, told world environment ministers on Tuesday he is "deeply concerned" that many years of negotiation have proven largely fruitless.

"The pace of human-induced climate change is accelerating. We need results now, results that curb global greenhouse emissions," Ban declared at the opening of high-level talks at the annual U.N. climate conference.

In the two-week session's final days, environment ministers will seek agreement on knotty side issues in coping with global warming, but once more the U.N. climate treaty's 193 parties will fail at Cancun to produce a sweeping deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions and control climate change.

"I am deeply concerned that our efforts so far have been insufficient," the U.N. chief told delegates.

"Nature will not wait while we negotiate," he said. "Science warns that the window of opportunity to prevent uncontrolled climate change will soon close."

U.N. environment chief, Achim Steiner, reminded the conference that countries' current, voluntary pledges to reduce emissions would, at best, offer the world limited protection against serious damage from shifts in climate.

Another reminder came from the mountains of south Asia: In a new report, experts said people's lives and livelihoods are at "high risk" as warming melts Himalayan glaciers, sending floods crashing down from overloaded mountain lakes and depriving farmers of steady water sources.

Low-lying Pacific island states, in particular, are losing shoreline to rising seas, expanding from heat and the runoff of melting land ice. Following Ban to the podium, President Marcus Stephen of Nauru, one of those states, said the reality of climate change has been lost in scientific, economic and technical jargon.

"Without bold action, it will be left to our children to come up with the words to convey the tragedy of losing our homelands when it didn't have to be this way," he said.

Despite such evidence of growing impacts, and scientists' warnings that temperatures will rise sharply in this century, nations have made little progress over the past decade toward a new global pact on emissions cuts to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Republican rebound in Washington promises to delay action even further.

Instead, environment ministers will focus on secondary tools for confronting global warming, laying the groundwork, for example, for a "green fund" of $100 billion a year by 2020.

Financed by richer nations, the fund would support poorer nations in converting to cleaner energy sources and in adapting to a shifting climate that may damage people's health, agriculture and economies in general.

Negotiators also hope to agree on a mechanism giving poorer countries' easier access to the patented green technology of advanced countries, and on pinning down more elements of a complex plan to compensate developing nations for protecting their climate-friendly forests.

"Some important decisions are ripe for adoption, on protecting forests, on climate adaptation, technology and some elements of finance," Ban told reporters.

He urged governments "to be flexible and to negotiate in a spirit of compromise and common sense for the good of all the peoples."

Year after year at these U.N. sessions, activists frustrated by their slow pace have rallied in protest. On Tuesday, hundreds marched from downtown Cancun toward the heavily guarded beach resort area where the conference is taking place. About a dozen protesters managed to get inside the conference complex, marching briefly through a meeting hall before being escorted away by security guards.

High-level guidance from the environment ministers may be needed most in the coming days' debates over limited gestures proposed on emissions reductions.

The U.S. has long refused to join the rest of the industrialized world in the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 add-on to the climate treaty that mandates modest emissions reductions by richer nations, and whose commitments expire in 2012. The U.S. complained Kyoto would hurt its economy and should have mandated actions as well by such emerging economies as China and India.

Last month's election of a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives all but rules out for at least two years U.S. legislation to cap carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases emitted by industry, vehicles and agriculture. Such American action is deemed essential to winning a new global pact on emissions.

China and other poorer, growing nations, have rejected calls that they submit to Kyoto-style legally binding commitments — not to reduce emissions, but to cut back on emissions growth. Their first obligation, these governments say, is to lift their people from poverty, and not potentially hobble their economies.

In a nonbinding Copenhagen Accord emerging from last December's climate summit in the Danish capital, the U.S. and other industrial nations announced targets for reducing emissions by 2020, and China and some other developing nations set goals, also voluntary, for cutting back on emissions growth.

That accord was not accepted by all treaty parties. Now many negotiators want to have the voluntary targets "anchored" more formally in a final Cancun document — but how, with what wording and form of commitment, will be subject to backroom haggling in the coming days.

The glacier report, issued here by the U.N. Environment Program and glacier researchers, said that since the early 1980s, "the rate of ice loss has increased substantially in many regions, concurrent with an increase in global mean air temperatures."

Glaciers in southern South America and Alaska's coastal mountains have been losing mass faster and for longer than glaciers elsewhere in the world, it said.

The experts said the incidence of "glacial lake outburst floods" has grown over the past 40 years, accounting for some of the 5,000 Asian deaths each year from flash floods. More broadly, the swift depletion of glacial waters may leave tens of thousands of farmers without irrigation water.

UN chief warns world failing on climate
Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 7 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned the world was missing its last chance to control climate change, appealing to nations at talks in Mexico to ramp up progress.

In an emphatic address to the 194-nation talks, the UN chief highlighted studies by scientists who say the world has a limited gateway to cut carbon emissions or risk irreversible damage to the planet.

"I'm deeply concerned that our efforts so far have been insufficient, that despite the evidence and many years of negotiation we are still not rising to the challenge," Ban said as the two-week talks entered the final four days.

"Business as usual cannot be tolerated," he said. "Cancun must represent a breakthrough."

"The world, particularly the poor and vulnerable, cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the perfect agreement," Ban said, adding: "Every country can and must do more."

Host Mexico has encouraged nations to look for building blocks to an eventual climate accord, hoping to undo some of the damage from last year's Copenhagen summit, which disappointed many environmentalists.

To the surprise of some of the hardened negotiators, the talks have appeared to bear fruit with a compromise eyed on one of the key stumbling blocks -- verification of nations' promises to fight climate change.

China climbed down from its past refusal on verification after India drafted a compromise under which all countries responsible for more than one percent of emissions would submit to verification but not face "punitive consequences."

"It does represent progress," US lead negotiator Todd Stern said.

The draft is "definitely not adequate yet, but it's a step in the right direction. If we can keep moving a few more steps, we might actually get there," Stern said.

But Stern warned that another dispute remained "very tough" -- on the future of the Kyoto Protocol.

With few expecting a new full-fledged treaty anytime soon, the European Union has led calls to extend the Kyoto Protocol past the end of 2012, when requirements under the landmark 1997 agreement are set to expire.

The EU position has triggered protests from Japan. It says Kyoto is unfair by not involving the two top polluters -- China, which has no requirements as a developing country, and the United States, which rejected the treaty in 2001.

"It is absolutely imperative that we deliver something, something substantial," EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said. "To come out of Cancun with nothing is simply not an option."

Even if countries carry out pledges they have already made, they are off track to meet the goal agreed in Copenhagen to check rising temperatures at two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

"There is a giant gap. We need to acknowledge and commit to close that," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.

The US Congress looks unlikely to approve any restrictions on carbon emissions after the Republican Party's victory. President Barack Obama's administration, however, has pledged to meet its Copenhagen target of cutting emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

The Cancun conference is also making progress on how rich nations can help in reducing emissions from deforestation in developing nations -- known to negotiators as REDD.

The loss of trees accounts each year for 12 to 25 percent of the carbon emissions due to the loss of vegetation that counteracts the gas.

Activists and negotiators from several Latin American nations have pressed against a deal out of suspicion over calls to set up a market, in which nations would offer forest aid in return for credit to meet their climate goals.

Thousands of activists and Mexican peasants, holding rainbow flags and playing drums and flutes, marched in central Cancun, many of them to reject the REDD deal.

"REDD is a false solution because you are creating a market on our forests, you are not protecting our Mother Earth," said US activist Kari Fulton.

"We are standing here to say that we want protection and to be respected," she said.

U.N.'s Ban Urges Climate Deal, Short Of Perfect
Gerard Wynn and Timothy Gardner PlanetArk 8 Dec 10;

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged almost 200 nations meeting in Mexico on Tuesday to agree to a modest deal to rein in climate change without holding out for perfection.

After U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders failed at last year's U.N. summit in Copenhagen to work out a sweeping new climate treaty, Ban stressed that Cancun has more modest ambitions.

"We cannot have a perfect agreement at this time ... perfect is the enemy of good," Ban said on the sidelines of the November 29 to December 10 talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun where ministers were meeting.

Rich and poor nations are deeply split about the future of the U.N.'s existing Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 developing nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a first period to 2012. Kyoto is blocking progress on other issues.

Ban said there were four areas being discussed where "we can make progress but we may not be able to make the full agreement."

The talks are seeking a four-way package on climate aid, ways to curb deforestation, help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change and a mechanism to share clean technologies.

Bolivia has led calls by some poor nations for deep cuts in greenhouse gases by rich nations that would require a radical overhaul of the world economy to help protect "Mother Earth."

CHINA, INDIA

Many developed nations want emerging economies, led by fast-growing China and India, to do far more to rein in emissions, including greater oversight of their programs to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions.

"The negotiations are still difficult, a result is still possible," said U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern.

"The Kyoto Protocol issue continues to be very tough. It's not clear whether it's resolvable. I would certainly hope so," he said, adding that it was draining time from other talks.

Ban said he was concerned that the world had not done enough to rein in global warming, which a U.N. panel of climate scientists has predicted will cause more floods, droughts, desertification, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

Japan, Russia and Canada have been adamant that they will not approve an extension to Kyoto when the first period runs out in 2012. They want a new, broader treaty that will also bind emerging economies like China and India to act.

But developing states say rich nations have emitted most greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution and must extend Kyoto before poor countries can be expected to sign up.

Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said the talks would have to find a compromise.

"We currently are still stuck on how parties are going to decide on the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol where we have diametrically opposed positions," she said.

"Germans have a wonderful word 'yein' which means both 'yes' and 'no' and I think that's the kind of attitude countries are now engaged in," she said.

(Editing by Christopher Wilson)


China denies softening on emissions stance
* Chinese diplomat says no shift on binding target
* No proposal yet on oversight of developing countries
Chris Buckley Reuters AlertNet 7 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico, Dec 7 (Reuters) - China will insist on keeping its greenhouse gas output free of any binding climate treaty fetters, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Tuesday, dismissing an earlier report that suggested a softening of Beijing's position as a "misunderstanding."

Assistant Chinese Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin made the comments in Cancun, Mexico, where negotiators are trying to agree on pieces of a new agreement to fight the global warming being stoked by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, industry and land use change.

Liu also told a news conference that there would be a "crisis of confidence" if negotiators rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the current main treaty on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, which keeps a barrier so poorer countries, including China, are free of firm goals to curb their emissions.

As the world's biggest emitter of these gases, China is at the heart of many of the long-running talks, which are seeking to build a binding climate pact by late next year.

Many advanced economies want China and other rising economies to accept firmer international obligations to slow their rising emissions and eventually cut them.

On Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's envoy for climate talks, Huang Huikang, told Reuters that his government could bring its "voluntary" goals to slow emissions growth and fight global warming under a binding overall framework. [ID:nN06239915]

That suggested a softening of China's long insistence that it should be free to grow its economy and eliminate poverty unfettered by any internationally binding emissions commitment.

But Liu said China's position had not changed and that there had been a "misunderstanding."

"This in nature is a voluntary pledge, autonomous pledge. Voluntary, autonomous means it's not negotiable," Liu said of China's domestic goals to slow emissions growth, speaking in English.

"In terms of nature, it's different from those quantified limitation reduction targets by developed country parties," he said.

BINDING

Huang told Reuters on Monday that a resolution or decision under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the umbrella pact on the issue, could bring in the voluntary efforts of developing countries to fight climate change.

"We can create a resolution, and that resolution can be binding on China," Huang had said.

But Liu said it was too early to discuss bringing the efforts of China and other developing countries under the convention.

"The negotiations on how to reflect the pledges, the voluntary actions -- the negotiations has not been completed yet. There's just some talking," said Liu. "You cannot prejudge the result by one of the views."

Japan, Russia and Canada have said they will not approve an extension to Kyoto when the first period runs out in late 2012. They want a broader agreement that will also bind the United States, which did not join the protocol, as well as emerging powers like China and India.

China and other developing countries were adamant that Kyoto, with its division between rich and developing countries, must stay, said Liu.

"It's also an issue of political confidence," he said. "It will be an international crisis of confidence" if Kyoto comes into doubt, he added.

Liu also poured cold water on reports that China may have accepted an Indian proposal on the contentious issue of how and how much big developing nations should inform other countries about their efforts to curb emissions.

That Indian proposal was welcomed by some negotiators from advanced economies as a potentially acceptable compromise, which would boost their confidence that emerging economies are doing their part to minimize emissions.

"Actually, there is no substantive discussion yet taken place," Liu said of the emissions vetting and reporting proposals for emerging economies.

"Of course, it's obvious this negotiation will not be completed at Cancun." he said of those issues. (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)