The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which studies the science of global warming, has issued dire warnings about the rate at which climate change is accelerating.
But judging by the rate of negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Bonn last month, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything is under control.
The talks, which culminate in Copenhagen this December, seem to be driven not by the science — everyone agrees with the IPCC’s findings — but by political considerations.
After two weeks of talks, little progress was made. The real issue behind the slow and careful negotiations, according to South Africa’s chief negotiator at the conference, Alf Wills, was that climate change is not just an environmental issue.
The Bonn climate change meeting is ”an economic one — an economic and social convention,” he said, adding that because of the social, environmental and economic costs involved the talks needed to take a ”balanced approach”.
Among other things the negotiations will affect policy on how clean technology is shared, how to help vulnerable countries overcome the effects of climate change and how to deal with refugees fleeing flooded or drought-stricken areas.
Billions of dollars in adaptation funding is tied to the negotiations and targets for emission reductions could require massive economic overhauls.
At a conference postmortem UNFCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said it was ”a significant session that has advanced our work in important ways”. But he expressed concern about the absence of concrete targets for emission reduction from developed countries.
Much of the hard work at the meeting centred on a ”negotiating text”, a document that incorporates all the submissions made by countries on what they feel should be in the Copenhagen agreement. The document is riddled with clauses in curly brackets, indicating points of disagreement between countries.
By the end the G77 had asked for an aggregate emissions cut of 40% from the industrialised nations and had put forward individual targets for major polluters far higher than any of the targets put forward by the industrialised countries themselves.
With so little headway being made, many observers doubt that a firm agreement will be reached by the end of the year.
Wills said an agreement in Copenhagen depends largely on what the US comes forward with. ”They’re sending positive signals. These are political signals that they want to engage, but they’re not being very specific about what it is exactly that they’re going to put on the table.”
Although De Boer maintained that an agreement would be reached in Copenhagen, he conceded that it would not be the end of the line. ”I expect a comprehensive agreement.
But there are details that will need to be sorted out afterwards.” These details, he said, will require additional technical work and implementation to be decided on and carried out in the months after Copenhagen.