Time-Critical Round of UN Climate Change Talks Opens

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, pointed out that three months has already elapsed since the previous UN climate talks in Bali where the time-line and the main elements of a future climate change deal were agreed.

The top UN climate official, Yvo de Boer addresses delegates in Bangkok. (Photo courtesy ENB)

De Boer said a future agreement must be ready well before the Copenhagen climate conference at the end of 2009. It will include a shared long-term vision and enhanced action on climate mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance.

"This leaves us with around one and a half years - a very short time-frame within which to complete negotiations on one of the most complex international agreements that history has ever seen," said the UN's top climate change official. "But I am confident that it can be done if the work is broken down into manageable, bite-sized chunks."

The Bangkok meeting is designed to map out a work program that will lead to that agreement, identifying issues where work needs to be done and in what order they should be addressed.

Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand Sahas Bunditkul told the delegates that there is a need to negotiate "an attractive package" that all governments can support.

According to de Boer, the challenge is to design a future agreement that will halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10 to 15 years, dramatically cut back emissions by 2050, and do so in a way that is economically viable and politically equitable worldwide.

Sahas Bunditkul is deputy prime minister of Thailand. (Photo courtesy ENB)

There is no time to waste as the warming climate is already affecting many parts of the world.

"For the Asia-Pacific region, climate change is no longer a distant threat," said Noeleen Heyzer, executive secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. "It is a reality and a sign of what lies ahead."

"For many of our Pacific island states, it is a looming question of their survival or extinction," she said.

Delegates from 163 countries are attending the Bangkok climate change talks, which have attracted a total of around 1,200 participants, including government representatives, participants from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions.

A new Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action was mandated in Bali to lead the work and is meeting for the first time in Bangkok. Its main task is to spell out the next steps needed to come to the envisioned agreement.

Parties meeting in Bangkok will need to decide which topics require separate workshops in the course of 2008 and possibly 2009, and which areas of work need input from the business sector, international organizations or other stakeholders and what support they require from the UN Climate Change Secretariat.

"Parties meeting in Bali issued a clear mandate for delegates to deliver a plan at this meeting," said Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado of Brazil, chairman of the group on long-term cooperative action.

"What we now need is a bottom-up approach on all the elements, taking all the concerns of the Parties into account," he said.

The second working group that is meeting at Bangkok is the already existing Ad Hoc Working Group on further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol.

Annex I Parties are the industrialized nations already legally bound by the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by the end of 2012.

This group of rich countries will work on the analysis of possible tools available to them countries to reach their emission reduction commitments.

"There is already broad consensus among Parties on the importance of completing this work before political agreement is reached on a post-2012 deal in Copenhagen," said Harald Dovland, who chairs the group. ""Much of the technical work can be done before we meet in Denmark next year."

In Bangkok, this working group will analyze emissions trading and the "project based mechanisms," such as the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, which allows developed countries to meet part of their emission reduction commitments by investing in sustainable projects in developing countries.

Greenpeace staged a demonstration against nuclear power in front of the conference center in Bangkok. (Photo courtesy ENB)

Other tools are land use, land-use change and forestry; greenhouse gases, sectors and source categories to be covered, along with possible approaches targeting sectoral emissions, for example from the steel or cement sectors.

The next UN meeting involving negotiations under both working groups will take place in June in Bonn, Germany, followed by a third meeting in August.

A final meeting for the year will take place at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December.

With 192 governments as Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

To date, the Kyoto Protocol has 178 member Parties. Under the Protocol, 37 states, consisting of highly industrialized countries and countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have adopted legally binding emissions limitation and reduction commitments.

The ultimate objective of both treaties is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.