/ 17 November 2006

UN climate talks down to the wire

Environment ministers ground their way towards the end of a 12-day climate summit on Friday, squabbling over a blueprint for negotiating the next round of carbon pollution curbs under the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol.

The talks gathered members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the offshoot of the 1992 Rio Summit, which identified global warming as a peril and launched the Kyoto process to try to tackle the fossil-fuel gases that cause the problem.

Ministers from the main countries in the climate debate met behind closed doors to haggle over obstacles that threatened to overshadow negotiations, expected to start next year, on how to deepen cuts in carbon emissions when Kyoto runs out in 2012.

But they were unable to resolve key disputes, including when the negotiations should formally start or end.

If the meeting ended without setting the dates, ”that would send a bad signal overall”, a diplomat said.

Kyoto requires all countries that have signed and ratified it to do all they can to avert man-made global warming. But only rich countries are obliged to make legally binding pledges to curb their emissions. They have to reduce their share of global emissions by about 5% by the end of 2012, compared with 1990, Kyoto’s benchmark year.

But scientists say climate change is already on the march. As big developing countries, led by China, are eagerly burning oil, gas and coal to fuel their economic rise, carbon pollution is now scaling new heights each year.

From 1900 to 1990, the world’s atmospheric temperature warmed by 0,6 degrees Celsius.

A target sketched in Nairobi would be to peg the rise to two degrees Celsius by 2100 — a goal that is more political than scientific, for the effects of such an increase on weather systems, precipitation and biodiversity remain unknown.

To achieve this target would require cuts in global emissions of about 50% by 2050 compared with 1990 levels. Hence, Kyoto’s post-2012 format must somehow encourage greater efforts by the big developing countries, yet not prejudice economic growth and tighten the screw on industrialised countries.

It must also find a way of boosting cooperation with the United States, which by itself accounts for a quarter of carbon pollution today but refuses, like Australia, to ratify Kyoto.

Protocol review

The problems dogging the Nairobi talks relate specifically to the scope of a review of the protocol for the 2013-2017 commitment period.

Developing countries want the overhaul to be narrowly focused, suspecting it could draw them into binding cuts in emissions.

But the European Union, backed by others, wants a thorough reassessment that would embrace emissions goals and the protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which encourages low-carbon projects in poorer countries.

One area of discord has been whether carbon storage — taking carbon dioxide at source from power stations and pumping it into geological chambers underground, rather than releasing it in the air — should be included in the CDM.

Experts say this is untried technology, for the stored carbon dioxide could imperil future generations if the chamber leaks through cracks or is ruptured by an earthquake.

Another dispute erupted over a Russian proposal to permit non-industrialised countries to set voluntary emissions targets, thus giving them the same rights to Kyoto’s lucrative market mechanisms as rich countries.

Sources said this appeared to be a pitch for Moscow’s ally Belarus, whose carbon pollution fell after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Belarus thus would have lots of surplus emissions — about 50-million tonnes a year — to sell on the world market.

These emissions would not amount to real cuts in pollution and would only depress prices on the world carbon market, said Greenpeace’s Steve Sawyer, who added: ”It’s totally unacceptable… they should not be allowed to hold this process hostage.” — Sapa-AFP