/ 21 November 2013

Big polluters backpedal at climate talks

Big Polluters Backpedal At Climate Talks

 With few tangible outcomes and big ­polluters scrapping their pledges to reduce emissions, the more vulnerable nations are demanding that something happens now before it is too late for them.

In 47 years the world will be, on average, 4°C warmer. Its ecological systems will have completely changed and life for the most vulnerable will be tenuous. A global meeting to avert this is being held this week in Warsaw, Poland, and pessimism is at an all-time high. Countries are retreating from their pledges to lower targets, and a global agreement might come into force only in 2020.   

The 19th Conference of the Parties (COP) started with little hype. The last two meetings, in Durban in 2011 and Qatar in 2012, had a sense of urgency because the only global agreement on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, was about to end.

By locking delegates into a room in Durban, the South African delegation forced an agreement that another protocol would be in place by 2015. This would form the basis of a global and legally binding agreement on how to tackle climate change, which would come into force in 2020.

But the only tangible thing that has emerged in recent years has been the Green Climate Fund. This is meant to have $100-billion a year by 2020 to help countries to adapt to a changing climate. There is supposed to be what is termed "fast start" money in the fund by now. But nobody has been willing to hand over anything, and proposals are still being discussed.   

On Wednesday evening in Warsaw, the Chinese delegation led a walkout with 131 other developing nations to protest the lack of progress on funding for "loss and damage".

This is the argument at the core of all COP meetings: the developing world wants the rich world to pay for it to use less carbon-intensive energy and for the damage caused by climate change because the majority of emissions were produced by the developed world.

The developed world blames the recession for a lack of funds, and argues that, because emissions from the Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are now on a par with the developed world, they should not benefit from any funding.

A negotiator for the Philippines, Yeb Sano, has been the star of COP following a hunger strike that had lasted 12 days by November 21 in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan. The island nation started the congress by saying that climate change would make these kinds of disasters commonplace.

Political change in some of the world's biggest greenhouse-gas polluters has resulted in them backtracking from pledges to lower emissions. Australia, which is building a thriving economy on coal exports, has elected a government that does not believe climate change is driven by humans. Canada has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol and other climate agreements. Japan has lowered its targets, and Europe is refusing to increase its targets. The United States has started lowering emissions only through executive orders that bypass Congress.  

Although negotiations have dragged on for nearly two decades, climate change science has advanced rapidly. The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in October, concluded that it was ­"virtually certain" that humans were driving ­climate change.

The World Bank's Turn Down the Heat report, said pledges by nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions would result in the world being 4°C warmer by 2060. Half of this increase would occur in the next three decades.

Another report by environmental coalition Banking On Coal found that coal production had increased by 70% since 2000, driven by investment from banks in Europe, the US and China.