A NUMBER of ministerial meetings are likely to be held during the year with the aim of injecting much-needed political impetus into the international climate negotiations before December’s UN summit in Durban.
After two days of workshops followed by four days (and nights) of hard bargaining here, delegates representing 175 countries last night finally agreed on an agenda for the negotiations to be held in Bonn and elsewhere in the run-up to Durban.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said South Africa as chair of the Durban conference and Mexico, which hosted last December’s conference in Cancún, would convene the ministerial meetings.
Another ministerial meeting on climate change is expected to be called by Germany in an effort to overcome deep differences between some developed countries (notably the US) and most developing nations over what they expect, or hope, will be outcome in Durban.
Grenada ambassador Dessima Williams, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States, said they “expect the road to Durban to involve discussion of difficult issues – the so-called hot-button issues. Nothing should be off the table, nothing should be too sensitive.”
She emphasised that “none of us want South Africa to be the burial ground of the Kyoto Protocol. We are willing to do everything we can to keep it alive” as the only international, legally-binding framework to combat climate change – due to expire at the end of 2012.
Japan and Russia reiterated in Bangkok that they would agree to a “second commitment period” under Kyoto, although both countries said they would be willing to consider participating in a wider global deal involving major developing countries, such as China and India.
The US position is more negative: not only will it never sign up for a “Kyoto mark 2”, but it doesn’t even see the need for a binding international agreement, as President Obama’s climate change envoy Todd Stern made very clear in New York on Wednesday night.
Chief EU negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said Europe could not deal with climate change on its own. “Ideally, we would like a single legal framework, but it looks as if that’s impossible. So we want other countries to do something, whether under Kyoto or some other way.” Such issues were important, and it was not as it might seem to the outside world that “these buggers can’t even agree on an agenda”. Or as the Third World Network said, it was not about “discussing the shape of the negotiating table, but rather what goes on it”.
Mr Runge-Metzger said: “We had the agenda fight because there are some who see the Cancún agreement as the end of the road, but for us it was a step forward because otherwise it would be meaningless. We needed to give that reassurance to developing countries.”
Ms Figueres said she also expected that the difficult issues – notably Kyoto’s future – that were left to one side in Cancún would be taken up again during the remaining rounds of negotiations this year “in order to come to a strong outcome in Durban in December”.
In Bangkok, she detected in “the honest, very straightforward talk about the scope of the task ahead” a significant shift in attitudes and it was now “pretty clear” that no country was opposed to a renewal of Kyoto – even though some had made it plain they wouldn’t join.
Delegates were also “conscious a middle ground is needed to reassure all sides, and that means capturing unfinished tasks resulting from the action plan agreed in Bali in 2007 as well as clarity on tasks agreed in Cancún,” Ms Figueres told a press briefing yesterday.
Asked about Mr Stern’s suggestion that the US could bypass the UN process, she stressed the importance of the Framework Convention on Climate Change as “the only venue” where every country, large and small, had a voice and the only forum that could make decisions on how to tackle global warming.
This week’s climate talks in Bangkok were attended by some 2,000 participants from 175 countries, including delegates, business and industry representatives, environmental organisations and research institutions. The next meeting is scheduled for Bonn in mid-June.
