BALI, Indonesia. About 190 nations start talks on Monday to try to sharpen the main weapon against climate change, the Kyoto treaty, by involving all countries ranging from the United States to the poorest in Africa.
Delegates to the U.N.-sponsored talks in Bali, Indonesia, are under intense pressure to launch negotiations on a “roadmap” that will lead to a broader pact by late 2009 to tackle greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for causing global warming.
But the trick is to find the magic formula that gets every nation on board, from the biggest emitters such as the United States and China to the smallest and most vulnerable, such as tropical island states or sub-Saharan African nations.
Over the past years, climate change talks have been bogged down by arguments over who’s going to pay the bill for cleaner technology and how to share out the burden of emissions curbs between rich and poor nations.
The bottom line is no nation at the Bali talks wants its economy to suffer by implementing strict emissions curbs. But climate scientists say time is running out.
“We’re already seeing many of the impacts of climate change,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, referring to melting glaciers, droughts and rising seas. “We are on a very dangerous path,” he told a news conference.
He said the talks had to conclude in 2009 to avoid a gap after the Kyoto Protocol’s first phase ends in 2012.
“It’s here and now. Indonesia is already suffering from the impacts of global warming,” said Fitrian Ardiansyah of the WWF conservation group. WWF said weather records were being broken around the world, from a melting Arctic to Australian droughts.
SHARING THE BURDEN
The Bali gathering aims find a way to update or replace Kyoto, which binds 36 industrial countries to emissions curbs between 2008-12.
The United States says Kyoto is flawed because it excludes developing nations from legally binding emissions cuts.
But China and India, among the world’s top polluters and comprising more than a third of humanity, say it’s unfair and unrealistic for them to agree to targets, particularly as they try to lift millions out of poverty.
They say emissions from rich nations are responsible for the bulk of man-made greenhouse gas pollution to date and those nations should take the lead in fighting climate change.
Publicly, at least, China and the United States say they will be open and flexible at Bali.
“We’d like to see consensus on the launch of negotiations. We want to see a Bali roadmap,” said Paula Dobriansky, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a phone conversation on Sunday that China would adopt an “active, responsible and constructive” approach in Bali. But he urged rich nations to help.
Developing countries will also push for a new system of credits to help slow the rate of deforestation. Trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when they grow.
The Bali talks will also sort out who will manage a global fund to help the world’s most vulnerable regions adapt to climate change. The fund could be worth $1.6 billion by 2012.
“We need to move beyond the reports of melting icebergs — everyone’s aware of that by now. People know the problem is serious. The delegates can now get to work on the problem. There’s no need for a media showcase to convince anyone,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Reuters in Berlin.
By David Fogarty
Source: Reuters
December 4th, 2007
A UN climate change report suggesting the world is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe has reignited the political debate over global warming.
The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says millions of people could be affected by rising temperatures and forecasts more heat waves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels if action is not taken.
Labor leader Kevin Rudd says the scientists are sounding a warning bell.
“This is a call to arms for the nation, a call to arms for the world to act now on climate change before it’s too late,” he said.
Mr Rudd restated his plan to immediately ratify the Kyoto protocol if Labor is elected.
But the Prime Minister says that is looking to the past.
“It’s the new Kyoto, the new international arrangement that matters and the Labor Party has adopted our plan,” Mr Howard said.
He says it is a serious challenge that needs a balanced approach.
Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull also criticised Labor’s promise to ratify Kyoto, instead of looking forward to a new agreement.
The new agreement is expected to be negotiated at next month’s UN climate change conference in Bali.
“There will be a new climate change treaty,” he said.
“Kyoto mark 1, if you like, is coming to an end, because the first commitment period, will be over in a few years.
“The focus really needs to be on the new deal, the next agreement.”
Source: ABC News
November 20th, 2007
Finance ministers from across the world will hold a two-day meeting in conjunction with the international conference on climate change next month in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali.
They will discuss financial issues and policies to address the concern of climate change, Indonesian Finance Minister Mulyani Indrawati said Thursday.
The ministers will meet on Dec 10-11 to convince the governments of the respective countries to agree on a ‘common objective on the financial issues of climate change’, leading to a more appropriate policy for sustainable development and support for the global carbon trading market, the minister said.
‘This is important because many developing countries are uneasy about the issue of climate change,’ Indrawati was quoted by a local newspaper Jakarta Post as saying.
‘For many countries that are trying to improve their economies with limited resources, the climate change issue is an additional obstacle to their development. We therefore expect the meeting to provide a positive discussion to sort out the differences between the needs of developing and the developed countries.’
In an assessment released earlier this year, the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change said that efforts to keep global carbon dioxide levels at a sustainable level would cost three percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and reduce average annual GDP growth rates by 0.12 percent.
Source: Xinhua
November 15th, 2007
A fusion between a traditional wayang (shadow puppet) performance and modern technology has impressed Jakartans during a two-dayshow at Graha Bhakti Budaya hall in Taman Ismail Marzuki, Cikini, Central Jakarta.
The performance, called Wayang Listrik (electric puppet), amused the audience with its funny and critical dialogue presented by one of Bali’s most accomplished puppet masters, I Made Sidia.
Sidia presented a provocative show and proved to his audience that a traditional performance, which might be unappealing to most youngsters, can indeed be entertaining.
The 40-year-old puppeteer kept the audience laughing with his brilliant and innovative jokes in both English and Kawi, an ancient Javanese language.
In his Thursday performance at the hall, Sidia mocked Malaysia over the country’s recent dispute with Indonesia through use of the traditional Indonesian song Rasa Sayange, which Malaysia had used in its tourism campaign.
In Sidia’s Tualen’s Journey story, Tualen, the main character, meets a wild tiger on his travels that he tries to tame by singing the Indonesian national anthem, Indonesia Raya.
However, the tiger in the story becomes angry upon hearing Tualen sing the anthem, after which Tualen asks, “You must be a Malaysian tiger then, huh?”.
Sidia said he used jokes like this to deliver criticism about social and political issues in today’s world through an art performance.
Source: The Jakarta Post
November 3rd, 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
September 25th, 2007
Next Posts
Previous Posts