The president of COP 17, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, speaks at the final plenary session of the climate change meetings in Durban, South Africa (Source: Worldwatch).
As the new year begins, climate negotiators have begun to move on from their engagement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. After two weeks of intense negotiations on the future of the international regime to combat climate change, they bring home pieces of an ambiguous mandate—but also some critical steps forward. Below, we discuss some of the outcomes of those exhilarating talks in early December.
Symbolic survival of the Kyoto Protocol
Under European Union leadership, signatories of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to enter a second commitment period for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, extending the treaty terms through 2017 or 2020. This symbolically salvaged the agreement—the only existing climate treaty with internationally binding reduction targets. However, the 27 EU countries, together with Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland, are the only countries to take on these targets, and they agreed to do so only under the condition that all major countries agree to a new, truly global and comprehensive climate treaty, if necessary outside the Kyoto structure.
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China, Climate Change, developing countries, emissions reductions, European Union, Green Climate Fund, India, negotiations, UNFCCC, United States
The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins today in Durban, South Africa (Source: UNFCCC).
This week the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) begins. In Durban, South Africa, delegations from countries around the world will continue negotiating greenhouse gas reductions in order to prevent global warming from spinning out of control. So it is just in time that the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases its latest statistics on global CO2 emissions.
The provided figures contain CO₂ emission source breakdowns by fuel, sector and region over the period 1971 to 2009. According to the data, nearly two thirds of worldwide emissions come from two sectors – electricity and heat generation (41 percent) as well as transport (23 percent). Remaining emissions come from industrial processes (20 percent), residential (6 percent), and a multitude of additional sources (10 percent). Regarding energy, coal is the leading CO₂ emission source, accounting for 43 percent of those emissions, followed by oil at 37 percent and natural gas at 20 percent.
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China, Climate Change, coal, developing countries, emissions reductions, India, negotiations, UNFCCC, United States
(Photo: The Adopt a Negotiator Project) The Kyoto Protocol (KP) still sits in troubled waters, as three of its signatory countries threaten to jump ship on its continuation beyond 2012.
Governments just finished another round of negotiations in Bonn, Germany under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. If the international climate talks are a ship, the last two weeks’ voyage saw equal parts clear sailing, stormy seas, and listless drifting, as nations advanced toward agreements on addressing ocean carbon storage and clean technology transfer, fought over the future of the Kyoto Protocol, and wasted nearly three days just trying to agree on the agenda for parts of the meeting.
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2010, 2011, 2012, Adopt a Negotiator, agenda, Annex I, April, Bangkok, bolivia, Bonn, Canada, Cancun, cannonballs, Carbon, clean technology transfer, climate, Climate Change, crew, EU, European Union, Germany, government, greenhouse gas pollution, harbor, horizon, international, japan, June, Kyoto Protocol, legal, listless, million, nations, negotiation, ocean, poorer, REDD, reducing emissions from deforestration and forest degradation in developing countries, richer, Russia, sailing, ship, stormy, U.S., UNFCCC, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, water
Source: treehugger.com
The most recent negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change just concluded in Bangkok, Thailand. While some progress toward international climate change action was achieved, the talks were full of mostly minor diplomatic victories on procedural and scheduling issues. Big questions, especially the fate of the Kyoto Protocol and a new global climate agreement, remain unanswered. Meanwhile, worldwide carbon pollution continues to rise.
The Bangkok negotiations lasted from April 3—8 and marked the first session of the 2011 global climate meetings. Governments spent most of their time trying to agree on a schedule of what to decide on in 2011 meetings. So, if you thought climate talks already had been tough to follow, try listening to negotiators negotiate about what they are going to negotiate about later. On the final day, countries ultimately agreed on a workplan for the rest of the year. The two key areas of work are: figuring out if and how to keep the current Kyoto Protocol alive; and continuing to develop a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, one that will involve a larger range of countries cutting their climate pollution.
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2011, 2012, 2013, 2018, April, Bangkok, Bonn, Cancun, carbon pollution, civil society, Climate Change, commitment period, cooperation, countries, December, developing countries, diplomatic, Durban, emerging economies, emissions limits, gap, Germany, governments, japan, June, Kyoto Protocol, negotiators, November, path, Policy, political challenges, procedural, rich countries, Russia, scheduling, South Africa, spirit, steps, successor, technical challenges, Thailand, UNFCCC, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, United States, workplan
By Haibing Ma and Alexander Ochs
Recently, a China Daily news report caught Uncle Sam’s attention, presumably at an inconvenient time: just when the U.S. Senate finally admitted to abandoning its plan of issuing a federal climate bill by the end of this year, top Chinese officials were discussing how to launch carbon trading programs under their country’s next Five-Year Plan (2011–15). Serving as China’s overarching social and economic guidance, Five-Year Plans consistently lay out the most crucial development strategies for this giant emerging economy. Once included in the plan, carbon trading will be viewed as part of China’s national goals and will be domestically binding. This occurred most recently with the country’s 2010 energy intensity target, which called for a 20 percent reduction from 2005 levels and was disaggregated into provincial and local targets, with local officials held accountable for achieving them. In short, China seems to be accelerating full-throttle toward a low-carbon economy.
Chinese policymakers have been eyeing a domestic emission-trading scheme for a while. Last August, Xie Zhenhua, Deputy Director of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), announced that China will launch a pilot carbon trading program in selected regions and/or sectors—basically the same message conveyed in the recent China Daily story. On one hand, this reiteration demonstrates that the Chinese government is seriously considering such a market-based mitigation mechanism; on the other hand, the fact that the program’s status is still in discussion a year later shows that putting cap-and-trade into action might be not be that easy in China either.
Here are some of the problems: A non-voluntary emission-trading system cannot work without a mandatory cap on emissions, either for the economy as a whole or for individual sectors. However, China is currently unlikely to set an absolute emission target because this would contradict its long-standing position at international climate negotiations that industrialized countries have a historic responsibility to take the lead in this area. Most Chinese climate officials and experts agree that China could probably peak its emissions between 2030 and 2035, but huge uncertainties remain.
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cap and trade, carbon trading, China, Climate Change, emissions reductions, energy intensity, MRV, NDRC, Tianjin Climate Exchange, U.S., UNFCCC
International youth invite delegates to hide their emissions by throwing plastic "emissions" balls through a parody of the LULUCF loophole rules (Photo courtesy SustainUS)
Logging loopholes, gigaton gaps, and other funny phrases await resolution from negotiators now that the United Nations climate talks have wrapped up in Bonn. From finance to forests, a lot of issues will be taken up by governments when they meet again in—surprise—Bonn, in August, and then again in China later this year. Waiting until the annual high-level climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, in November to address these issues would leave little chance of solving them by that summit’s end.
Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) issues dominated much of the discussion in Bonn. Many developed (Annex I) nations argued for historical “baseline” rules that would give them credit for more emissions reductions than they actually achieved. That baseline serves as a reference period for assessing how greenhouse gas emissions from forestry practices (mostly logging) and land use activities (creating or destroying wetlands, grasslands, etc.) have changed over time due to human activity. If developed countries get their way, the rules would allow carbon storage from forest growth to count toward their reductions, but ignore future emissions from fires and logging.
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1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C, Annex I, August, baseline, Bonn, buffet, Cancun, carbon offsets, China, Climate Change, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Accord, December, deforestation, developed, developing, emissions, emissions reductions, finance, fires, forest degradation, forestry, forests, G8, gigaton gap, gigatonne gap, grasslands, greenhouse gas, island nations, John Mulrow, Kuwait, land use, land use change, logging, logging loophole, LULUCF, Marion Viewig, plastic, Qatar, REDD, Saudi Arabia, SustainUS, UNFCCC, verification, wetlands, Youth
Photo courtesy Broddi Sigurðarson. Indigenous New Zealanders celebrate their country endorsing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
At the December 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, treaty negotiators agreed to include recognition of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the proposed draft agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. If approved, the new climate treaty would be the first international environmental law to maintain that indigenous peoples must express their “free, prior, and informed consent” for any conservation program to proceed within their territory. (In a promising move, the precautionary brackets on this controversial text were removed in Bonn earlier this month.)
The inclusion of “free, prior, and informed consent” would, theoretically, protect indigenous peoples from unfair treatment in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) deals that are under way as part of international climate agreements. Many indigenous peoples organizations are concerned that groups may be coerced into REDD benefit-sharing agreements or forced off their land entirely.
Due in large part to opposition from the three countries that had not adopted the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—the draft climate treaty states only that safeguards “should” be followed and merely “notes” that the UN has adopted the declaration.
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free prior informed consent, indigenous peoples, REDD, UNFCCC
The UNFCCC discussed rules for offsets in Bonn, Germany last week
No matter how hard you try, shoving carbon emissions back into the earth is no easy task. But at recent UN climate talks in Bonn, the carbon-shovers were once again vying to prove why their methods are most deserving of carbon offset money from developed (Annex I) countries.
Most controversially, the United Arab Emirates (a non-Annex I country) pushed a proposal to receive carbon offset money for its nationwide carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plan. Masdar, a major clean tech company based in Abu Dhabi, one of the emirates, describes the project as “a network of pipelines…to pump carbon from emitting sites to oilfields, where it would be injected into reservoirs to maintain pressure and increase oil recovery.”
Under the proposal, offset money would come to the UAE through the Clean Development Mechanism, a UN-reviewed instrument that allows Annex I countries to reduce their emissions by funding emissions-cutting projects in non-Annex I countries. In addition to reducing emissions, these projects must contribute to economic development by providing some added value in areas such as electricity access or jobs. For example, the CDM Bazaar lists an offset project that promises to reforest degraded areas of Nicaragua, “provid[ing] jobs for these communities, reducing poverty, [and] creating opportunities for social development.”
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carbon offsets, CDM, Climate Change, forests, UNFCCC
Starting last week, international climate negotiators entered a new round of discussions to prepare for the next Conference of the Parties, scheduled for Cancun, Mexico, this December. Here we all are once again, in the lobby of the Maritim Hotel in Bonn, and the question after the first week of negotiation is: Are we moving forward? It’s certainly true that the shock of last December’s Copenhagen summit is slowly fading and everyone is actually getting back to work. We’ve also taken up discussions on content again, after a depressing three-day session in April on purely procedural matters.
The UNFCCC talks in Bonn, Germany, image courtesy of UNFCCC
The agenda now looks pretty much the same as it has in every session for the last two years. This is good, because it means that we are getting back to work and that all the past effort was not in vain. But it is also disturbing, because it means that we are likely talking in the same old circles that by most accounts did not lead to a result in Copenhagen. There are slight shifts in the agenda items, though. Increasingly more emphasis (and negotiation time) is being given to questions surrounding the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of both mitigation and adaptation actions, as well as financial support for these actions.
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Climate Change, Copenhagen, development, finance, UNFCCC
