SOUTH AFRICAN president Jacob Zuma opened the UN climate conference in Durban yesterday hours after the city was hit by flash floods that claimed the lives of eight people and destroyed dozens of homes.
The Sunday night storms – which Oxfam’s Tim Gore yesterday said were a “stroking reminder” of the extreme weather events caused by global warming – brought the number of people killed by floods in KwaZulul-Natal to 13 in less than two weeks.
Mr Gore said some 239 million people in Africa “go hungry every night” because so much of the continent’s agriculture consists of small-scale food production “highly vulnerable to changes in climatic conditions”.
He said 13 million people were hit by famine in the Horn of Africa, which had pushed up the prices of staple foods like sorghum by 400 per cent and maize by up to 200 per cent.
“We are in Durban with one purpose: to find a common solution that will secure a future for generations to come,” said Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s minister for international relations, who is chairing the 12-day session involving 194 countries.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said the 17th UN conference on this issue “needs to reassure the vulnerable, all those who have already suffered and all those who will still suffer from climate change, that tangible action is being taken for a safer future”.
But Tasneem Essop, a former South African provincial minister and now climate policy advocate for the World Wildlife Fund, described Durban as one of the most unpredictable of UN climate conferences. “Everything is fluid, everything is still in play,” she said.
The EU is pushing for a deal in Durban that would see an internationally binding legal framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions being adopted “no later than 2015”, to come into effect in 2020, but this is being opposed by the US and even by India and Brazil.
China, which has now surpassed the US as the world’s biggest emitter, wants EU member states and other developed countries to sign up for a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire at the end of next year. But it will not join them.
Dr Jonathan Pershing, leader of the US delegation, said it wanted to “make fully operational” the agreements reached in Cancun last year. But on the broader issue, “we want to know more about the content of an agreement before we commit to any particular accord”.
Grenada’s Dessima Williams, chairwoman of the Association of Small Island States, said “the push by the world’s biggest carbon polluters to delay flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence . . . and represents a betrayal of the people most vulnerable to climate change”.
However, the BBC quoted sources as saying that there is a “real prospect” of agreement being reached on how to operate the proposed Green Climate Fund, which is being set up to channel up to $100 billion (€75 billion) aid to vulnerable developing countries by 2020.
