Developed countries focused on loopholes instead of responsibilities, say campaigners, writes FRANK McDONALDEnvironment Editor, in Bonn
THE LATEST round of UN climate talks ended here yesterday with little agreement on whether anything of real substance had been achieved and with all parties being urged to work harder towards reaching a global deal at the Copenhagen summit in December.
“We’ve moved into negotiating mode at this session,” said Michael Zammit Cutajar, chairman of the key ad-hoc group on long-term co-operative action under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But it would be a case of “sleeves rolled up” from now on.
He noted there had been a fourfold increase in the size of the negotiating text, because delegates had added so much to it over the past two weeks.
Having started out at 53 pages, it was now more than 200 and he said it would need to be “squeezed like a concertina”.
Malta-born Zammit Cutajar, who served as the UNFCCC’s first executive secretary, likened the road to Copenhagen to “an evolutionary process in reverse, where the big bang comes at the end”.
The real question, as he said, was “how big it’s going to be”.
His successor, Dutchman Yvo de Boer, said Bonn had been a “significant session” because so many governments had made it clear what they wanted to see coming out of Copenhagen. However, he was in no doubt that they needed to “raise their sights higher”.
Although it had been “a really constructive meeting”, he was “quite concerned” about the absence of numbers. Was this the main hump? a journalist asked. “This animal has got more than one hump,” de Boer said.
Coincidentally, there were two camels outside. Avaaz, one of the most active campaigning groups, had brought in the animals, complete with herders dressed in clothes more appropriate for the Sahara, to highlight that “shrinking targets” to cut greenhouse gas emissions would mean more drought and expanding deserts.
John Ashe, former ambassador to the UN for Antigua and Barbuda, conceded that little progress had been made in his ad-hoc working group, which was set up to seek further commitments from developed countries under the Kyoto Protocol post-2012.
Ashe was asked what he intended to do as chairman of the “KP” ad-hoc group to persuade countries to put figures on the table.
Smiling broadly, he replied he had some “techniques available that I couldn’t divulge”.
He will be trying these out when delegates meet in Bonn again for an informal session in August, followed by further rounds of talks in Bangkok and Barcelona to prepare the ground for what Yvo de Boer still believes will be a “comprensive agreement” in Copenhagen.
But Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission’s chief negotiator, said the negotiating text had grown so “exhorbitantly” in Bonn that it would be a “mammoth task” to conclude a deal in December without a “further acceleration of pace” in the talks.
The Climate Action Network, an umbrella for campaigning groups, complained that developed countries covered by Kyoto were “focusing on what they can get away with” instead of on what could be jointly accomplished in setting a collective goal.
“The rich countries are kidding themselves, but they’re not kidding anyone else,” said Oxfam Australia’s Julie Anne Richards.
“There are enough good ideas in the [negotiating] text to reach agreement, but they spent most of the time here talking about loopholes”.