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World Focus: Climate Change Talks kick off in Bangkok
April 1, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
by Carol Zhou (8)
Top climate brokers from more than 160 nations launched a new round of talks in Bangkok on Monday aimed at setting out a plan for the most ambitious treaty yet for battling global warming.
Opening the five-day meeting with a video message, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged countries to work together to find a solution to climate change.
Meeting for the first time since marathon negotiations in Bali, Indonesia late last year, delegates at the UN-led talks will thrash out a plan toward a new global pact on slashing greenhouse gas emissions and battling climate change.
Negotiators have opened their first talks on forging a devilishly complex global warming pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
They face wide divisions between rich and developing countries over how to slash greenhouse gases.
The weeklong gathering of representatives from 163 countries launched a 21-month process aimed at concluding a new climate change agreement by December 2009 to rein in gases such as carbon dioxide blamed for the rise in world temperatures.
Organisers of the UN-led talks – mapped out in a massive conference in Bali in December – urged delegates to work quickly to ensure action before the worst effects of global warming, such as extreme weather, become unavoidable.
“With the 2009 deadline, we have just one and half years in which to complete negotiations on what will probably be the most complex international agreement that history has ever seen,” said Yvo de Boer, UN climate change executive secretary. “And I’m confident that it can be done.”
Many scientists and the United Nations agree that the world needs to stabilise emissions of greenhouse gases in the next 10-15 years and slash them by 50% by 2050 to prevent temperatures from triggering devastating changes in the environment.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires 37 industrialised nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. The next pact is aimed at providing for further cuts starting in 2013.
Although rich and poor nations now generally agree that the world must take action to halt climate change, they are divided on how to go about it.
The United States, which never ratified the Kyoto deal, is pushing for fast-developing nations like India, China and Brazil to sign up to binding carbon emissions cuts, while the European Union wants industrialised countries to take the lead. US and Japan say a global pact will only be fair if it calls for up-and-coming polluters in the developing world to take on emissions reduction commitments as well.
Developing countries, led by rapidly growing China, demand that the bulk of the considerable costs and actions be assumed by rich nations that grew their economies in decades past by polluting the environment. They also want aid and technology to increase energy efficiency.
Christian Aid climate change policy specialist Andrew Pendleton said: “Recent scientific observations and new work by highly respected institutes such as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center point to global warming happening faster and with more extreme consequences than even last year’s UN climate science report suggested.
“We are deeply concerned about the plight of the world’s poorest communities, where people are highly vulnerable to climatic changes, and already suffering its consequences.“It is time for the richer countries to commit themselves to taking unilateral action. Climate change is a global emergency and the world simply does not have time for deadlocked negotiations.”
The specialist is calling on the countries meeting in Bangkok to agree a five step emergency programme:
1. Negotiators should agree a way of calculating different countries’ responsibility for climate change and their ability to pay to cut emissions.
2. Industrialised countries should each enact national legislation to limit emissions to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 in advance of a 2009 agreement.
3. Governments in industrialised countries should also take urgent steps to regulate against new sources of emissions, such as coal-fired power plants.
4. Developing countries should write corresponding climate change plans showing how they would deal with climate impacts and limit their own emissions
5. According to the agreed ‘responsibility and capability’ index of countries, those in a position to pay for emissions cuts should do so both at home and in countries less able to pay, by funding sustainable development initiatives and transferring technology in a measurable, verifiable and reportable way.
Don’t let climate change talks end in deadlock!
