DURBAN 2011:MINISTERS AND delegates representing almost every country in the world were last night struggling to overcome obstacles and reach a credible agreement with just one day left to go at the UN climate change conference here.
The EU cancelled a press briefing so that its chief negotiators could concentrate on finding a way forward that would include a renewal of the Kyoto Protocol and setting up the Green Climate Fund. But few expected that Kyoto would survive.
Host country South Africa, which is working hard for a successful outcome, said Durban was a “decisive moment in strengthening the global climate regime” by implementing agreements reached last year in Cancún and establishing a “platform” for the future.
The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), representing many of the most vulnerable countries, made a last minute appeal to the EU, the US and other developed nations to show that they were serious and not in Durban “just for a vacation”, as its chairman said.
Grenada’s foreign minister, Karl Hood, complained that the negotiations were “going round in circles” instead of addressing the real issue of setting targets to cut emissions, based on the scientific evidence. “We need to begin the work right now to avert disaster.
“Where we live, some say it’s a paradise when you come to visit. But we live there, and we have seen the real effects of climate change – the coastal degradation, the changes in weather patterns, the hurricanes and the flooding,” he told a press briefing.
Fiji’s environment minister, Samuela Saumatua, said his government had started relocating the first of many coastal villages “because of climate change”, which would only get worse. Yet in Durban, delegates were behaving “like ostriches burying their heads in the sand”.
Selwin Hart, chief negotiator for Barbados, said it was clear that current pledges to cut emissions were inadequate to limit global warming at 2 degrees. But the review promised in Cancún, to strengthen these pledges, had become “extremely controversial”.
When it was put to Mr Hood that the US climate envoy, Todd Stern, had said that the US was “strongly committed to a promptly starting process to move forward” towards a new climate regime, the AOSIS chairman said there was no evidence of this in the negotiations.
Referring to widespread perceptions that the US had been “trying to delay action on climate change to 2020”, Mr Stern said this was “completely off-base” as it, along with other countries, would be “working hard to implement the targets or actions we agreed in Cancún”.
“What is embedded in Cancún is so much more meaningful in terms of potential emissions reductions than anything in Kyoto that there’s no contest,” he said, referring to the fact that the voluntary pledges made last year covered more than 80 per cent of global emissions. But Oxfam climate policy adviser Tim Gore said there was a “major gaping hole” in relation to how countries might become more ambitious between now and 2020 “to get us under the 2-degree target”, and this “10-year time-out” would have “punishing human impacts”.
Hasan Mahmud, environment minister of Bangladesh, which recently hosted the Climate Vulnerable Forum, said “hundreds of thousands of people are being displaced by climate change”. And, as these were all innocent victims, adaptation must be seen as a “global responsibility”.
Ilana Solomon, of ActionAid USA, said the Green Climate Fund – which Mr Stern was “confident” would be set up in Durban – could become an “empty vault” because the US would not agree to identify sources of finance for it, such as carbon levies on aviation and shipping.
