A tax on airline tickets, an auction of pollution rights, an international climate change bond: These are some of the proposals likely to be presented at the 162-nation climate conference that opened on Monday in Bonn, but few, if any, conclusions are expected. The most difficult issues have been put off until next year, when a new and presumably more climate-friendly administration takes over in Washington.
More than 2,000 delegates opened the two-week meeting, launching an 18-month process of intense negotiations on a new agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, and to discuss raising the billions of dollars needed every year to fight global warming.
The discussions began with a warning from poor countries and environmentalists that global warming is already harming millions of people, worsening the global food crisis and changing the earth more rapidly than scientists earlier predicted.
Climate change “for us is not a distant reality, but a present reality,” said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, whose Indian Ocean island nation could vanish if sea levels rise just a few feet.
The recent cyclones that have battered Myanmar and Bangladesh “should be a wake-up call to all of us,” he said, speaking for 49 nations grouped as Least Developed Countries.
The Bonn talks are to go into the details of an agreement to be concluded in December next year and signed in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“The critical issue will be financial engineering,” said Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official.
“The developing countries made a major step forward by saying in Bali [last year] they are willing to take real, measurable and verifiable steps to limit their emissions — provided real, measurable and verifiable money is put on the table,” he said.
De Boer said on Sunday that by 2030 the world will need to spend US$200 billion to US$300 billion a year to contain global warming and help developing nations adapt to their changing conditions — such as less rainfall, harsher storms and the extinction or migration of species.
Several delegations have brought proposals to Bonn for raising those funds.
Mexico wants to create a pool of regular donations from each country according to its financial means, which would be distributed to developing countries according to need.
The EU and several small countries are working on proposals for a climate tax on aviation and shipping.
The growing carbon market could be a major source of revenue. In the EU, industries are allocated pollution rights, which they can trade on the open market — companies that do not use all their credits can sell them to others that have exceeded their pollution limits.
Many delegations, supported by environmentalists, say those emission credits should be auctioned rather than allocated for free.
Damien Demailly, of the environmental group World Wildlife Fund France, estimated that such auctions could raise US$40 billion annually.
De Boer has floated an idea to create a climate change bond that would be sold by developing countries to investors. The bond issue would evolve from the current system under which countries gain credit for projects they finance in another country that can verifiably reduce that country’s carbon emissions.
The talks are based on an accord reached in Bali, Indonesia, in December when the US, India and China indicated they would take part in a post-2012 arrangement.
The new climate pact will succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
At least seven more major meetings are scheduled before Copenhagen, with the next due in August in Accra, Ghana.
“In the half year since Bali, the science has gotten a lot worse,” said Bill Hare, a scientist for the Greenpeace environmental group.
“The negotiators here are gathering under a darkening cloud,” Hare said. “The level of ambition is far too low.”
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