ENVIRONMENT: Global Climate Deal Still Far Away

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jaya Ramachandran

THE HAGUE, Nov 17 2000 (IPS) - As the sixth United Nations conference on global climate change wraps up the first week, environmental officials from some 170 countries are still far from closing a deal.

Friends of the Earth’s Senior Climate Change Campaigner Roger Higman says: “It is becoming increasingly clear to the Dutch government that they have underestimated the work needed to close the deal at COP 6.”

Friends of the Earth International is a federation of autonomous environmental organisations from all over the world.

COP 6 is the acronym for the ongoing conference of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Environment Minister of the Netherlands is chairing it.

The first conference was held April 1995 in Berlin. COPs in Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires and Bonn followed it.

In an effort to move things forward and achieve concrete results, Pronk has produced an overview document setting out the political choices to be made. This document has gone through two drafts so far and a third is expected by the weekend.

It will provide the basis for negotiations in the decisive ministerial section of the talks, which begin Sunday.

The aim is to get a deal – including a new draft text – clarifying as many technical questions as possible in the next few days.

With this in place, the way will be paved for ministers to make final deals.

However, the representatives of the European Union (EU) expressed concern at Wednesday’s press conference that “technical” issues were not being resolved fast enough to present Ministers with a clear political agenda by Sunday.

Key issues related to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, that still need to be resolved, include rules for the Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism and its Joint Implementation and emissions trading systems.

Equally crucial are the rules for obtaining credit for improving “sinks” (by planting new trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for example, thus offsetting emissions), a regime for monitoring compliance with commitments, and accounting methods for national emissions and emissions reductions.

Key issues related to the 1992 UN Climate Convention include technology transfer, capacity building, financial assistance, and the special concerns of developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change or to the economic consequences of emissions reductions by developed countries.

“The various Protocol and Convention issues are strongly inter- linked and will only be resolved as part of a package deal,” says Michael Zammit Cutajar, the Bonn-based UNFCCC executive secretary.

The point, he adds, is that a global strategy on climate change has been agreed under the Convention and its Kyoto Protocol.

This international legal regime promotes financial and technical co-operation to enable all countries to adopt more climate-friendly policies and technologies. It also sets targets and timetables for emissions reductions by developed countries.

However, the Kyoto Protocol text authorising the three mechanisms is brief and leaves it to the Hague negotiations to determine how they should operate in practice.

Most governments, however, have still not ratified the Protocol, which means that its emissions targets for developed countries – which add up to an overall 5 percent reduction compared to 1990 levels during the five-year period 2008-2012 – are not yet in effect.

Many governments are awaiting agreement on the operational details of how the Protocol will work in practice before deciding on ratification.

“The Hague meeting must decide these details and ensure that they will lead to action that is both economically efficient and environmentally credible. It must also strengthen the effectiveness of the many activities taking place under the Convention,” says Zammit Cutajar.

“The Hague conference is a make or break opportunity for the climate change treaties,” he adds.

“Unless governments of developed countries take the hard decisions that lead to real and meaningful cuts in emissions and to greater support to developing countries, global action on climate change will lose momentum,” warns Zammit Cutajar.

In his view the COP6’s success will be measured by the early entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol – hopefully by 2002, ten years after the adoption of the Convention at the Rio Earth Summit.

“With scientists increasingly convinced that we are already witnessing the effects of global warming, we must ensure that the next decade produces real progress on lowering emissions and moving economic growth on to climate-friendly paths,” says Zammit Cutajar.

Developed countries are, however, concerned that this rapid transition to a lower-emissions economy could have short-term economic implications, including a potential impact on trade competitiveness, both among themselves and vis-a-vis those developing countries that are now industrialising.

The Protocol will only enter into force after it has been ratified by at least 55 Parties to the Climate Change Convention, including industrialised countries representing at least 55 percent of this group’s total 1990 carbon dioxide emissions.

So far, only 30 countries – all from the developing world – have ratified the Protocol.