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ENVIRONMENT: Heat Rises Over Meeting on Climate Change

Sanjay Suri

BONN, May 13 2005 (IPS) - Experts will review implementation of policies to contain climate change at a meeting in Bonn next week.

A seminar of governmental experts to be held May 16-17 will ”review how governments are implementing the commitments they have already made,” Carrie Assheuer from the office of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Bonn told IPS.

”It will be an informal exchange,” Assheuer said. The experts will also look beyond a review to consider other ”policies and measures that support implementation of measures over climate change.”

The seminar will look at two issues primarily, according to the UNFCC. These will be ”actions relating to mitigation and adaptation to assist parties to continue to develop effective and appropriate responses to climate change,” and secondly, ”policies and measures adopted by their respective governments that support implementation of their existing commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.”

The seminar will be followed by the 22nd sessions of the subsidiary bodies to thhe climate change convention. The subsidiary body for scientific and technological advice will meet May 19-27, and the subsidiary body for implementation will meet May 20-27.

The meetings became controversial Friday when Friends of the Earth International (FoE) said the seminar will fail to discuss the critical issue of how climate change should be tackled.

”Climate change is the biggest threat the planet faces,” Friends of the Earth International’s climate campaigner Catherine Pearce said. ”So why are the urgent actions needed to tackle the problem being ignored by this UN conference. The alarm bells are ringing, but the world is dithering. Unless we act soon it will be too late.”

Agreed at the latest UN climate conference in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in December 2004, the seminar has no mandate to open up negotiations on future commitments beyond 2012 (when the first commitment period ends), FoE said.

The seminar, however, presents ”an unprecedented opportunity for governments to discuss action outside of the formal negotiations – domestic measures to reduce emissions and strategies to cope with the impacts already being felt around the world,” FoE said. The seminar ”must go beyond talking about efforts to meet current targets of the Kyoto Protocol, which are inadequate to meet the growing climate challenge. The seminar must lay the foundations for a formal process for post 2012 negotiations to be launched in Montreal.”

Future commitments must ensure average global temperatures do not rise above two degrees above pre-industrial levels, FoE said.

”This seminar should be the place where industrialised countries show that they are serious about climate change and ready to address their historic and ongoing role in causing the problem,” Pearce said. ”Rich nations must demonstrate the greatest efforts in reducing their own emissions, and enable developing countries to choose climate-friendly technologies to foster sustainable development, for example through opening new international funding streams to drive the transformation of our global economy.”

Friends of the Earth Germany, will be organising a climate demonstration outside the seminar Monday. German minister for the environment Jürgen Trittin will be visiting the demonstration, FoE said.

But the seminar will not necessarily duck the issues FoE has raised, the UNFCCC says. ”It sounds like they (Friends of the Earth) have formed their opinion already,” Assheuer said. ”The seminar has not taken place yet.”

An informal seminar was recommended by the last meeting of the convention of parties to the climate change convention that took place in Buenos Aires in Argentina in December last year.

FoE points out that past emissions of greenhouse gases, largely from industrialised countries, mean that the world cannot avoid an increase of average global temperature to 1.3 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

According to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 2001, the globally averaged surface temperature is projected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C over the period 1990 to 2100. Increases of 0.6 degrees C have already been reported.

Climate change is occurring because greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide and methane, are pushing the global temperature to artificially high levels and altering the climate, the UNFCCC says. The 1990s appear to have been the warmest decade of the last millennium, and 1998 the warmest year.

The current warming trend is expected to cause extinctions. Numerous plant and animal species, already weakened by pollution and loss of habitat, are not expected to survive the next 100 years, the UNFCCC says. ”Human beings, while not threatened in this way, are likely to face mounting difficulties. Recent severe storms, floods and droughts, for example, appear to show that computer models predicting more frequent ‘extreme weather events’ are on target.”

The sea level rose on average by 10 to 20 cm during the 20th century, and an additional increase of nine to 88 cm is expected by the year 2100, UNFCCC says. Higher temperatures cause ocean volume to expand, and melting glaciers and ice caps add more water.

If the higher end of that scale is reached, the sea could overflow the heavily populated coastlines of such countries as Bangladesh, cause the disappearance of some nations entirely (such as the island state of the Maldives), foul freshwater supplies for billions of people, and spur mass migrations, UNFCCC warns.