KENYA: The UN Climate Change Summit is likely to end this evening with agreement on measures to help African and other least-developed countries to adapt to global warming and a "work plan" aimed at achieving deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
This "step-by-step" approach to dealing with what nearly everyone now agrees is a major threat to humanity effectively defers the really hard decisions to 2007 or later, to the chagrin of the environmental lobby, which wanted Nairobi to produce results.
The Climate Action Network (CAN) criticised this "lack of urgency": "Over the past few years, we have become used to soft and endless dialogue completely disconnected from the reality experienced by people around the world, especially in developing countries.
"It is inconceivable for parties [ to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] to leave Nairobi without concrete and progressive decisions on climate change. It is even less acceptable to leave African soil without decisions which benefit Africa."
But EU sources said yesterday that "good progress" was being made, particularly on the "way forward to agree on new targets" for emission reductions by the 36 developed countries - including Ireland - which signed up for the Kyoto Protocol.
"The pace may be glacial, but even the glaciers are speeding up," as one long-time observer of UN climate change talks put it. An Irish source likened the process to the social partnership talks at home, commenting that patience was an essential ingredient.
"The general feeling is that, although we are not going to reach final conclusions here, we will identify a 'work plan' for the years ahead," Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said last night.
"That will send an important signal to the carbon market. It needs a clear message that there will be a market after 2012 [ when the current phase of Kyoto expires] and that it's embedded now so that there won't be a gap between the commitment periods. And that narrow time frame is concentrating people's minds."
But Mr Roche said the countries which ratified the 1997 protocol - designed to cut emissions by an average of 5 per cent on 1990 levels by 2012 - "can't carry this on our own, and we need to get some indication from the US, China and India of what they will do".
The Minister was heartened by Australian prime minister John Howard's announcement this week that his government was now seriously considering the establishment of a carbon market. Australia joined the US in 2001 in spurning Kyoto, but it was now clear that it is "doing a lot" on climate change.
But the US position has not changed. Under-secretary of state for global affairs Paula Dobriansky said the Bush administration was sticking to policies focused on braking - rather than cutting - emissions in the US, 22 per cent of the global total.
However, the US delegation in Nairobi is noticeably more subdued than at last year's summit in Montreal. "Of all the delegates who got up on the rostrum here, Dobriansky was the one who least knew which way it was going," one observer said.
The Democrats' mid-term victory and the fall-out from the British government's Stern Review, which warned that climate change was a potential economic catastrophe, have contributed to the less aggressive US stance.
"[ Sir Nicholas] Stern's review has been a pivotal point, because he actually put a price on it - the equivalent of two world wars," Mr Roche said. "He's saying things I have believed in for some time, that moving to low-carbon economy makes sense in any event."
In terms of reaching agreement on an "adaptation fund" for Africa, holding the conference in Nairobi has made a difference, he believes.
"You'd want to be very hard-hearted going round the outskirts of this city not to see that there are real problems," said Mr Roche.
