Fri, Dec 10, 2010 page7

• Cancun climate talks hunt for compromises

  • AP, CANCUN, MEXICO
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  With just two days left, delegates to the annual UN climate conference haggled and cajoled into the night in search of compromise on a raft of issues, including whether industrial nations should generate US$100 billion a year, or up to US$600 billion, to help poorer countries cope with global warming.

  “The progress made is encouraging, but unresolved issues are still many,” Zimbabwe’s Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, chair of a conference working group, said on Wednesday of the half-dozen key disputes. “We need to do better and we need to do more.”

  This year again the UN talks will fail to produce an overarching deal to slash emissions of global warming gases. From the start, the two weeks of talks focused instead on reaching agreement in secondary areas under the UN climate treaty.

  

  Greenpeace activists submerge 10 countries’ most representative monuments under the sea in Cancun, Mexico in order to draw attention to the consequences of climate change on Wednesday.

  PHOTO: EPA

  Setting up a “green fund” for developing nations would top the list of conference accomplishments, and late on Wednesday the special climate envoy of host Mexico foresaw success.

  “Our expectation is it will be decided at Cancun,” Luis Alfonso de Alba said.

  Earlier, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, leading a discussion on climate financing, described the fund as “crucial for building trust between the developed and developing world,” trust that UN officials hope could eventually pave the way to a comprehensive climate deal.

  Last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, was -supposed to have produced that deal — a global pact under which richer nations, and possibly some poorer ones, would be required to rein in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

  That agreement would have succeeded the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which mandated modest emissions reductions by developed nations that expire in 2012. Alone in the industrial world, the US rejected Kyoto, complaining that emerging economies, such as China and India, should also have taken on obligations.

  Last year’s summit produced instead a “Copenhagen Accord” under which the US, China and more than 80 other nations made voluntary pledges to reduce emissions, or at least to limit their growth.

  In a sign of the sensitivity of even voluntary pledges, the US and China are squabbling in Cancun over an effort to “anchor” them in a fresh UN document. The Chinese want separate listings to maintain a distinction between developing and developed countries, and the Americans want a single integrated list.

  The green fund would help developing nations buy advanced clean-energy technology to reduce their own emissions; adapt to climate change by building seawalls against rising seas, for example, and upgrade farming practices to compensate for shifting rain patterns.

  Behind closed doors, the Cancun debate zeroed in on the size and sources of the fund. Developing nations view such finance not as aid, but as -compensation for the -looming damage from two centuries of industrial emissions from developed nations. They consider the goal set in the Copenhagen Accord inadequate at US$100 billion a year by 2020 and propose instead that richer countries commit 1.5 percent of their annual GDP — roughly US$600 billion a year at present rates.

  Developed nations have 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, Ethiopian 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 said in the Ban-led discussion.

  Zenawi was a co-chairman of a high-level UN panel of international political and financial leaders that studied potential sources for such long-term climate financing. In its final report last month, the group said the greatest contributions should come from private investment and from either a direct tax on emissions or from carbon trading.
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