The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change this year, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar, promises to be a more staid affair than the three previous sessions — in Copenhagen in 2009; Cancún, Mexico, in 2010; and Durban, South Africa, last year. While there is always the potential for a diplomatic disaster at any negotiation involving 194 countries, the agenda for the two-week Doha convention includes an array of highly technical matters but nothing that is likely to bring the process to a screaming halt.
“There’s pretty broad agreement that after three very high-key meetings, this is a far lower-intensity summit,” said Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’ll be all kinds of haggling, but there are no particularly huge minefields there.”
Despite the occasional chaos at Copenhagen, Cancún and Durban, negotiators achieved a number of significant steps, including pledges by most major countries to reduce their emissions of climate-altering gases, a promise by rich nations to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help more vulnerable states adapt to climate change, a system for verifying emissions cuts and programs to help slow deforestation.
The delegates in Doha hope to firm up these promises and create the concrete means to fulfill them.
“We hope that in Doha we will conclude the design phase of all these institutional arrangements and catapult them into implementation,” said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who serves as executive secretary of the U.N. climate convention. “It is high time, because we are so far behind our targets in every single report. The international response has not been enough.”
Last week, the U.N. Environment Program said the world was unlikely to meet the United Nations’ stated goal of keeping global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). The group said the current pledges were too weak and the rise in heat-trapping emissions was so fast that the world risked falling further behind without swift and ambitious new action.
In Durban last year, delegates affirmed the two degree Fahrenheit target and, after a contentious marathon negotiating session, signed a pledge to conclude a new global climate change treaty by 2015 to take effect starting in 2020.
Whether that accord can be reached remains an open question. The Copenhagen summit meeting three years ago, with more than 100 heads of government on hand, dissolved into failure on the final night. Delegates this time have three years’ planning time to fashion a new treaty, but the hugely difficult issues of national sovereignty, compliance verification and equity between rich and poor nations will not easily be resolved, no matter how much time is available.
Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute, said the success of the talks would hinge on the approach of the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters and most vibrant economies, the United States and China.
China has led the world in adoption of low-carbon energy sources, but also consumes growing quantities of dirty-burning coal every year. Its new leadership has given few signals on how it intends to approach the U.N. climate process, Ms. Morgan noted, but previous Chinese leaders have resisted any international regime that they perceive as limiting China’s economic growth.
As for the United States, Ms. Morgan said she hoped that the re-elected Obama administration would commit to a new international regime with a renewed strategy and a commitment to take domestic action consistent with its international pledges and its support of the two degree target.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/business/energy-environment/un-climate-talks-promise-little-drama.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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