Upbeat UN climate talks work on hiccups

Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 8 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – The world's climate negotiators worked Wednesday to turn a growing consensus into concrete progress as talks in Mexico made headway on a range of issues including aid for the poorest countries.

One year after the Copenhagen climate summit ended in widespread disappointment, the United Nations and host Mexico have tried to keep hopes in check by concentrating only on building blocks to a future deal.

With three days to go in the two-week conference, negotiators voiced hope at coming to agreement on three key areas: the architecture of a global climate fund, aid to stop deforestation, and verification of countries' climate pledges.

"I believe an agreement is within reach. But that does not mean that we already have it within our grasp," said Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, who is guiding the talks at the beach resort of Cancun.

A new draft proposal spelled out the technicalities for setting up a global climate fund to administer assistance to some of the poorest nations that are most vulnerable to global warming.

The European Union, Japan and the United States all pledged before the Copenhagen conference to contribute to a 100 billion-dollar-a-year climate package for poor nations.

In a revision, the text explicitly calls for a role for women in the fight against climate change. But some environmentalists criticized the draft for removing a reference to ensuring that 50 percent of assistance goes toward helping people adapt to climate change.

The omission would allow wealthy nations to meet pledges through other means, such as offering technical know-how to help curb emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"We need to put real meat on the bones and not put things on the sidelines," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America.

On the sidelines of the conference, the World Bank announced an initiative to help emerging and developing countries set up cap-and-trade markets, under which companies are restricted from carbon output but can trade credits.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that a growing number of countries including China, Chile, Indonesia and Mexico were "actively exploring" setting up such markets, which are now fully developed only in the European Union.

"We are launching this partnership for market readiness to try to share information but also provide some additional financial support," Zoellick said. Australia pledged more than 20 million dollars for the initiative, leading the way on the goal of 100 million dollars in funding.

But the World Bank has long been controversial. Environmental group Friends of the Earth called the World Bank involvement "perverse," saying that carbon markets are "an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change."

"They further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North's over-consumption and have landed us in this climate crisis in the first place," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth US.

Despite movement on an array of issues, one major controversy has hung over the talks -- what to do about the Kyoto Protocol, whose commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions end at the end of 2012.

Faced with the growing likelihood that no new treaty will be in place soon, the European Union has led calls for nations to make another round of pledges post-2012 under the Kyoto treaty.

Japan has led opposition, saying that such an extension is unfair as Kyoto does not cover the two biggest emitters: China, which has no obligations as a developing nation, and the United States, which rejected the treaty in 2001.

But Brazil's climate negotiator, Izabella Teixeira, said she saw "advances" on the Kyoto deadlock, which Mexico had tasked Brazil and Britain with trying to unlock.

Environmentalists following the talks say Canada and Russia have also been against a new Kyoto round, although they were happy to let Japan be the public face of the opposition.

U.N. Climate Talks Seek To Avert Damaging Failure
Robert Campbell, Alister Doyle and Russell Blinch PlanetArk 9 Dec 10;

The world's governments struggled on Wednesday to break a deadlock between rich and poor nations on steps to fight global warming and avert a new, damaging setback after they failed to agree a U.N. treaty last year in Copenhagen.

Several ministers warned that failure at the talks in Cancun, Mexico, could undermine faith in the ability of the United Nations' 194 member states to tackle global problems in the 21st century as power shifts toward emerging nations led by China and India.

"I think that what is at stake here is also multilateralism," said European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. "It's absolutely crucial that this process, which is the only one we have ... can prove that it can deliver results."

The talks in this Caribbean beach resort from November 29 to December 10, have more modest ambitions than at Copenhagen last year, but there are still yawning gaps over the future of the Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations until 2012.

Japan, Canada and Russia say they will not extend the pact unless poorer nations also commit to emissions cuts. Developing nations insist the rich world must lead by setting deeper cuts beyond 2013 before they take on curbs.

"I believe that an ambitious, broad and balanced package is within reach," Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa told delegates, looking tired after 10 days of talks. "That does not mean that we already have it in our grasp."

Negotiators want to set up a new fund to help developing countries combat climate change, work out ways to protect tropical forests, help poor nations adapt to climate change and agree a new mechanism to share clean technologies.

MODEST GOALS

Failure to achieve even those modest steps would be a blow after U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders could only manage a vague, non-binding deal in Copenhagen in 2009, when many had pinned hopes on a treaty.

"A car crash of a summit is in no one's interest," said Britain's Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

Some countries linked deadlock in Cancun to Obama's failure to pass U.S. legislation to curb climate change. All other industrialized nations have already capped their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

"We cannot afford to be held hostage by the political backwardness of one developed country," said Tuvalu's deputy prime minister, Enele Sosene Sopoaga. "This is life and death, a survival issue for Tuvalu," he said of rising sea levels.

Confidence in the U.N. talks has already been hit by Copenhagen, which agreed only a non-binding deal to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.

Without success in Cancun, faith in the seemingly endless U.N. talks, which require unanimous support for any accords, could wither away.

"I think the U.N. process has real problems, potentially fatal," said Robert Stavins of Harvard University. "Anything under the United Nations tends to polarise developing and industrialized countries."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged progress toward working out how to raise $100 billion a year in aid from 2020, promised under a 140-nation deal in Copenhagen to help poor nations combat global warming.

"It is not a panacea for the climate problem, but it is crucial for building trust," he said. Draft U.N. texts circulating in Cancun give options both of $100 billion, and a far higher 1.5 percent of rich nations' gross domestic product.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg warned developing nations against ignoring the Copenhagen Accord and demanding more. There were risks that some rich nations, facing austerity at home, might simply respond by offering less, he said.

(Editing by Kieran Murray)

Cancun delegates debate climate fund: Who pays?
Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Yahoo News 9 Dec 10;

CANCUN, Mexico – Should airline passengers pay a small tax to help out? How about global money dealers? Or perhaps governments should take what they spend subsidizing gasoline prices and put it toward the climate cause.

Delegates to the U.N. climate conference hope to agree in its final days on setting up a new "green fund" to help poorer countries grapple with global warming. Then the real arguments will begin — over where the cash will come from.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped into the middle of the debate earlier this year by enlisting a high-level group of international political and financial leaders to offer advice. On Wednesday the U.N. chief presented their ideas to the conference, including airline and foreign-exchange levies, as he led a discussion with key figures on the panel.

It will be "challenging but feasible and doable even in the context of the ongoing economic crisis" to raise $100 billion a year by 2020, as promised by richer nations at last year's climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Ban said.

He said "adequate" financial support would build trust between the developing and developed world, needed to forge an eventual umbrella agreement among all nations to fight climate change.

Besides the green fund, the annual two-week meeting of parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty may also agree on ways to make it easier for poorer nations to obtain patented green technology, and may pin down further elements of a plan to compensate developing nations for protecting their climate-friendly forests.

But once more, as at the Copenhagen summit, negotiators won't produce a sweeping deal to succeed the relatively modest Kyoto Protocol after 2012, one that would slash greenhouse gases to curb climate change.

The U.S. has long refused to join Kyoto, which mandates limited emissions reductions by richer nations, and whose commitments expire in 2012. The U.S. complained the accord would hurt its economy and should have mandated actions as well by such emerging economies as China and India.

Washington's climate envoy, Todd Stern, repeated that position in Cancun on Wednesday, saying the U.S. won't sign up to any legally binding climate pact unless it applies to "all the major countries," including China and India.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions from industry, vehicles and agriculture continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.

The green fund would be considered a key success for Cancun, but many details would remain to be worked out later, and agreement here was far from assured.

The financing would help developing nations buy advanced clean-energy technology to reduce their own emissions, and to adapt to climate change, such as building seawalls against rising seas and upgrading farming practices to compensate for shifting rain patterns.

The debate here zeroed in on the size and sources of the fund.

Behind closed doors, haggling over proposed Cancun decisions, delegates dueled over what developing nations considered an inadequate goal — the $100 billion a year by 2020.

The developing south views such finance not as aid but as compensation for the looming damage from two centuries of northern industrial emissions, and propose that the richer countries commit 1.5 percent of their annual gross domestic product — today roughly $600 billion a year.

Northern delegations resisted such ambitious targets, and also objected to language indicating most of the fund's money should come from direct government contributions.

One of the developing world's own leaders, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, defended the north's stand on that point.

In view of the economic crisis, "it is not feasible for most of that money to come through the (government) budgetary process at the moment," Zenawi, a cochairman of the U.N. high-level panel, said in the Ban-led discussion.

In the Cancun talks, northern delegations leaned toward the conclusions of Ban's advisory group as the basis for the inevitably intense debate over funding that will follow any Cancun decision.

The group's final report last month said the greatest contributions should come from private investment and from "carbon pricing," either a direct tax broadly on emissions tonnage from power plants and other industrial sources or a system of auctioning off emissions allowances that could be traded among industrial emitters.

Either route would make it economical for enterprises to minimize emissions, and would produce revenue. Zenawi said his group recommends that at least 90 percent of such revenues flow to domestic budgets and the remainder to the global fund.

The United States has been a major holdout against such carbon pricing plans, however, and the impending Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives all but guarantees none will be enacted for at least two years.

The U.N. advisers also see possible revenue sources in a tax or trading system for fuel emissions of international airliners and merchant ships, or a fee on air tickets, with a potential for $10 billion a year.

They also suggested a possible levy on foreign-exchange transactions, producing possibly another $10 billion, and removal of government subsidies of fossil fuels, with the money redirected to a climate fund.

Fuel subsidies are believed to run into tens of billions of dollars annually worldwide. The U.S. federal government gave $72 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry between 2002 and 2008, says a study by the Environmental Law Institute.