Building trust tops global climate agenda

Meanwhile, the financial crisis in the US – the worst since the Great Depression – has gone global, raising anew the issue of costs of emissions reductions. An IPCC analysis, released Friday, estimates that the cost of cutting global emissions by 25 percent by 2030 is growing. Last year’s estimate put the figure at about $200 billion a year. Friday’s update increased the estimated cost by 170 percent.

During a press conference in Warsaw last week, Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC’s executive secretary, acknowledged that the financial crisis “will throw a shadow over the climate-change negotiations.”

Several climate-policy specialists in the US and Europe note that the election of Barack Obama, along with leadership changes on key congressional committees, may brighten prospects for a new climate pact. Negotiations are expected to begin in earnest in Bonn in March, after the front-door keys to the White House have changed hands. Mr. Obama has argued that the financial crisis marks an opportunity to restructure the economy to emphasize energy efficiency and green technologies.

Yet many remain cautious. “We’ve heard good rhetoric in the past,” during the Clinton-Gore administration, says Jennifer Morgan, climate-change program director for E3G, an environmental think tank and advocacy group in London. “But they didn’t do much.”

A diplomat who keeps close tabs on developing-country delegations sees Obama’s recent pledge to reduce US greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by an additional 80 percent by 2050 as an example of politics as usual. “That’s Obama kicking the can down the road and leaving the leadership for the next president,” he says. The Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions among industrial countries to fall an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, he notes.

Still, some US environmental-group leaders note that Obama’s 2020 number would represent a big change, especially given the trend in US emissions over the past eight years. One way to make up for the perceived lack of vigor in that target would be for the US to pursue ways to help the developing world pay for its mitigation and adaptation efforts, they say.

Financing, in fact, is a critical issue at the Poznan talks, say climate policy specialists.

Developing countries have offered the most ideas for how to set up adaptation and technology-transfer money, they say. Among industrial countries, Norway and the European Union have suggested some ideas. Norway is committing some $2.8 billion to fight deforestation. But much remains to be done.

One proposal that has gained traction among tropical and industrial countries involves earning carbon credits as a financial incentive in exchange for meeting commitments to crack down on tropical deforestation. The approach holds potential for reducing a proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions, advocates say. It also could serve as a model to show other developing countries that if they can’t commit to economywide emissions reductions, it is possible to commit to reductions in a specific economic sector, such as cementmaking or forestry.

But the idea remains controversial among some environmental advocates and groups that focus on the rights of indigenous people who live in and around tropical forests.

“It would trigger a land grab that would endanger forest-dependent communities,” says Joseph Zacune, climate-change coordinator for Friends of the Earth International. “Including forests in a carbon market would create another huge offsetting scheme that will allow the rich world to buy their way out of carbon emissions reduction.”

• Mark Rice-Oxley in London contributed to this report.

Previous

1 | 2