Bali News
Articles about Bali - current news and events

The road to Bali: Key UN talks aim at climate deadlock

September 25th, 2007

Efforts to revive the campaign to tackle Earth’s accelerating climate-change crisis go into top gear here on Monday.

World leaders will gather ahead of the 62nd session of the General Assembly for an unprecedented summit, followed later in the week by ministerial-level talks in Washington among 16 countries together accounting for 90 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

With luck, these two meetings will blow away some of the thick political fog which has begun to obscure a crucial climate conference taking place in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

“We cannot go on this way for long,” says UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. “We cannot continue with business as usual. The time has come for decisive action on a global scale.”

More than 70 heads of state and government will attend Monday’s UN event, making it the largest meeting ever of world leaders on climate change.

It takes place against an ever-higher, always-grimmer pile of evidence that fossil-fuel gases are warming the planet, causing glacier shrinkage, melting Arctic sea ice and retreating permafrost.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), gathering the world’s top climate scientists, forecast this year that by 2100, drought, floods and powerful storms will become a greater risk, driving up the probabilities of mass hunger, homelessness and waterborne disease.

Despite this shock, political action has been hamstrung.

Progress remains bedevilled by worries about the cost of reducing emissions, the clout of powerful lobby groups and accusations that some countries are making sacrifices while others are getting a free ride.

With time running out, hopes are pinned on the December 3-14 Bali meeting of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Its task will be to agree a two-year roadmap for deciding emissions cuts and other action after 2012, when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out. “It’s important that (the New York meeting) serves to send a very clear signal at the highest political level that the negotiations need to begin in Bali,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told AFP.

The Washington meeting, on September 27 and 28, will dig boldly into some of the biggest problems in the climate-change debate.

Proposed by US President George W. Bush — under pressure on climate change at home and abroad — the meeting is sketched as the start of a 15-month process among the world’s major economies, including four European countries, as well as China and India.

It could coax national commitments for tackling emissions, as well as initiatives to reduce pollution from specific sectors, such as transportation, steel, carmaking and cement.

And it will put the spotlight on innovative technologies to ease emissions, including carbon sequestration, which green groups warn could worsen global warming if it fails.

Other countries eye the Washington talks warily.

Some diplomats say they fear — despite US assertions to the contrary — a covert attempt to stitch up an unambitious, voluntary deal within a small club, rather than within the global forum.

Bush opposes core principles of the current Kyoto process, attacking its binding caps for industrialised countries as too costly for the US economy and saying it is unfair that Asia’s giants, like other developing countries, do not have similar commitments.

Opposition by the US, the world’s No. 1 emitter, nearly scuppered Kyoto and crippled the effectiveness of its first commitment period.

So the Bali roadmap for negotiations on post-2012 commitments will have to find a way of somehow incorporating the United States into a global strategy and also help the emerging giants brake their own huge rise in emissions.

These nations remain hostile to demands to sign up to targeted commitments, pointing out that rich countries are to blame for 70 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today.

“India’s position is, ‘you reduce your emissions and help us reduce ours as well’,” said a senior environment ministry official in Delhi.

“India’s emissions are just four percent of that of the US. Our economic growth is nine percent, while our energy consumption is 3.6 percent… We have the challenge to stamp out poverty, and this can only be done by sustained economic growth.”

Source: AFP

Entry Filed under: Events