Climate Changing

International talks on climate change earlier this month attempted to reestablish political momentum for a legally binding treaty on greenhouse gas emissions. The original treaty was derailed at last year’s United Nations summit in Copenhagen.

Negotiators got down to two weeks of business in Bonn, Germany, that concluded on June 11. These negotiations followed a minor three-day round of discussions in April that marked the official start of the 2010 climate talks. At the end of the June meeting, discussion leaders presented a draft treaty document to serve as the starting point for more talks scheduled later this year. That draft suggests industrialized countries should aim to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40% by 2020 but does not specify a base year.

The draft will undergo further refinement before the next round of talks in August. Jonathan Pershing, U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change, says the Obama Administration will insist that the new negotiating text build on the Copenhagen Accord, a nonbinding political agreement that emerged at last December’s climate summit in Copenhagen.

That meeting was expected to produce a legally binding treaty that would control emissions of greenhouse gases and provide financing to help developing countries adapt to climate change and install cleaner energy technologies. However, the UN-sponsored discussions stalled over the course of the two-week meeting.

Closed-door talks at the meeting among a group of world leaders convened by President Barack Obama produced the Copenhagen Accord. It calls on countries to set their own goals for controlling domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries also pledged to supply $30 billion per year between 2010 and 2012 to help developing nations (C&EN, Jan. 4, page 8).

The major question for this year’s climate negotiations is whether countries still intend to craft a new, legally binding international treaty on climate change, says Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate-change official. A legally binding agreement “creates accountability” that less formal pacts lack, he explains.

In addition, de Boer says, “one of the main priorities for this year is to rebuild trust, to rebuild confidence in that negotiating process.” Copenhagen “was a pretty horrible conference and did a lot of damage to the atmosphere of the negotiating process,” he adds.

A key part of that rebuilding will be for industrialized countries to begin supplying the money they pledged under the Copenhagen Accord, de Boer says.

A related issue that negotiators are struggling with is how to get the money to developing countries. Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Environment & Development, says that the developing world favors channeling the money through the UN bureaucracy that administers the 1992 global climate-change treaty. But donors from industrialized countries would rather funnel it through the World Bank or through their own development assistance programs, Huq says.

Climate negotiations will resume in Bonn in August, with another round of discussions scheduled for October. Negotiators are preparing for a major climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10. However, climate-talk observers say that they expect no new legally binding treaty before a 2011 climate conference that will take place in South Africa.

The recently ended Bonn meeting marked the last climate negotiation session that de Boer will oversee. Effective July 1, he will become global adviser on climate and sustainability for financial and accounting firm KPMG and will work in academia. Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres has been tapped to replace him.