Climate talks over: What's next?

This month's  global climate talks in Poznan, Poland, are history. Negotiators achieved their main objective: Give marching orders to a pair of working groups to develop formal negotiating texts, starting next March in Bonn.

Oh, yes – and have the texts ready for debate and tweaking at the next global climate conference, scheduled for Copenhagen at the end of next year. Feel free to add extra meetings to the schedule if needed.

This was the two-year timeline set last December in Bali. It's a tall order.

One comment during a final press briefing in Poznan hints at the challenge. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was asked whether, since the two-year allotment for talks under the Bali Road Map is half over, half the work needed to reach the finish line has been achieved.

"No, it hasn't," Mr. de Boer acknowledged. "The last year was a year of exchanging ideas, ... and now we're moving into a full negotiating mode and it's going to be a very heavy agenda. As in any marathon, you need to do the really fast running at the end."

Fast running and some high-hurdling as well.  Money for adaptation and to help developing countries pay for green technologies remains a big hurdle. A number of developing countries, including China and India, proposed what in effect would be a tax on two methods for meeting emissions goals under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The levy, which already exists on a third mechanism, would raise an estimated $20 billion between now and 2012 to help developing countries adapt to local effects of global warming.

Former East bloc resistance

Some of the stiffest opposition to the tax came from former East bloc countries – so-called economies in transition. They are the biggest beneficiaries of "joint implementation" projects, one of the two Kyoto mechanisms in question. This program allows one Kyoto country – France, for instance – to get credit against its emission-reduction targets by financing climate-friendly projects in another Kyoto country, such as the Czech Republic.

The beef: A levy on such projects would make them too expensive compared with other Kyoto "flexible mechanisms" for meeting targets – emissions trading and green projects in developing countries.

But de Boer noted another, large-scale problem: "Let's be honest," he said. "Doing a deal in Copenhagen is to an important extent about engaging developing countries. And an important part of engaging developing countries is mobilizing financial resources. In principle, on the part of many industrialized countries, the notion of extending the share of proceeds is not abhorrent. But politically this was just not the time to do it."

What makes it so politically inopportune now to press the issue?

First of all, the global financial crisis running full tilt. Second, it's conceivable that the European Union, which opposed the new levy, wanted to avoid ruffling any more feathers among key former Soviet bloc countries, now EU members, as the EU tries to wrap up an agreement among its members on reducing emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Some of these countries, heavily reliant on coal for meeting their energy needs, were chafing at the program the EU was trying to adopt.

Other countries may also dig in their heels

Now that the negotiating rubber is finally hitting the road,  expect more countries to begin digging in their heels as they line up behind – or oppose – various ideas on how things should be done.

"We're moving into a different phase of the negotiations," de Boer observed. "Countries take much harder positions and express their interests much more strongly. They're almost creating defenses in important areas where they think they might be under attack. So it's logical that you see a certain amount of hardening as this process progresses."

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