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[Square brackets] riddle 200 page text at Bonn informal talks -decarbonization & energy efficiency
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"We have a 200-plus-page text riddled with square brackets," Yvo de Boer said at the opening of the Bonn UN Framework Convention on Climate Change informal negotiating session happening now. "And it worries me to think how on earth we're going to whittle that down to meaningful language with just five weeks of negotiating time left." According to Marianne Bom, the head of the UN's Climate Secretariat was referring to 2,000 square brackets indicating unresolved issues.
The informal negotiation session on strengthening international climate action started on August 10th and will end on August 14th. It is one of six UNFCCC sessions to develop an effective international climate change deal in Copenhagen in December.
The negotiating text being hammered out comprises all 192 Parties to the UNFCCC. It covers the issues of a shared vision for long-term cooperative action, enhanced action on adaptation, mitigation and finance, technology and capacity building.
Yesterday, on the third day of the informal negotiations, Yvo de Boer said that the governments are making headway in narrowing the number of options contained in the 200 page text. He reported that this week’s progress could be seen in the areas of providing technology and finance to help developing countries reduce emissions. He also reported that governments were trying to translate mid-term emission reduction pledges into legally binding targets.
Two more meetings will be held prior to the December Copenhagen meeting. One will be in Bangkok, Thailand in October and the other will be in Barcelona, Spain in November.
On August 11th, EU delegates met with representatives of NGO’s and the business community. “We think it is important and valuable to listen to a wide range of voices in this connection,” says Anders Turesson, chief negotiator for Sweden and chair of the EU group.
Federica Bietta, deputy director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN), in an interview with BusinessGreen.com, said that the talks about 20 pages of text covering the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) were proceeding well. "We should get it down to 10 pages," she said. "We are seeing a lot of areas of agreement that include both developed and developing countries… there is a much stronger consensus in the room on this than there are on some of the other issues."
She was worried about the level of ambition from developed countries in targets to cut emissions.
While a panel of UN scientists have outlined that emission cuts should be between 25 and 40 percent to avert the negative effects of global warming, on August 10th, the Climate Action Network (CAN) International awarded its first Fossil of the Day award to New Zealand for announcing the adoption of a 2020 target range of 10% to 20% below 1990 levels. CAN-I is a worldwide network of over 450 non-governmental organizations working to promote government and individual action to limit human induced climate change to sustainable levels.
Efficiency and decarbonization
As countries seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions and set emissions goals in preparation for the UN meeting in Copenhagen, there are many who are concerned that national policies in lowering emissions will not suffice. According to Professor Sir David King, Britain’s former chief scientist and now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University, in that case, another solution to climate change might be geo-engineering.
“We need to remove the carbon dioxide, I suspect not from the atmosphere because it’s too expensive ... but possibly from the oceans as they are acidifying,” King said.
Geo-engineering uses technology to deliberately modify the environment to promote human habitability. It can be made profitable for the private sector by establishing a market price.
“I haven’t worked out what the price of carbon dioxide would have to be to encourage companies to start pumping it out of the oceans, but that is the way we need to move forward,” King said.
Robin Webster, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, is reluctant to discuss geo-engineering since it might give an impression that the need to reduce carbon emissions is not as important as addressing the potential of a technical solution to global warming.
The other carbon problem as described by Lisa Suatoni of the Natural Resources Defense Council, is ocean acidity due to increased amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “Ocean acidity has increased by 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution. It removes the building block for producing shells. A lot of organisms may not be able to survive. According to a documentary by the Natural Resources Defense Council on Discovery's Planet Green network, “Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification,” coral reefs can also be threatened by ocean acidification and rising water temperatures.
So far, industrialized nations excluding the US are planning to cut greenhouse emissions between 15 and 21 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 according to official data presented at the UN informal negotiations.
Before major economies including China and the US last month backed a target of limiting global warming to a 2 degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report indicated that the world’s GDP would be affected less than 0.12 per cent annually over the next 25 years. “We are talking about the reduction of the world's GDP, but there will be benefits [in addition to climate change mitigation] such as health benefits from reducing air pollution, improvement of energy security," said Bert Metz, co-chairman of the IPCC's Mitigation Working Group, who produced the report.
According to the IPCC, by 2050, stabilizing emissions to between 445-710 parts per million (ppm) would reduce the world’s GDP by 5.5%.
Facing the challenge of cutting emissions needs to be done so that businesses and governments in the countries trying to implement international climate policies acknowledge that reducing emissions comes from energy efficiency and decarbonization. Many countries are considering developing sector growth in clean energies and developing incentives to improve energy efficiency. Decarbonization efforts are being considered. While countries decide their emissions reductions, different approaches should be pursued and encouraged in order to be workable and implementable and answer global warming concerns.
While the US carbon-capping laws are expected to be debated in the Senate in September, progress towards a new world treaty to curb climate-warming greenhouse gas emission will at the very least see page reductions. The goal is 30 pages by the end of the meeting in Bangkok.
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