Before Copenhagen, a Meeting in Bonn on Climate Change
By Ekaterina Strekalova
June 10 — The United States has increased its participation in negotiations to combat global warming as United Nations officials and world leaders meet in Bonn, Germany, to establish a framework for the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.
“We’ve seen a very, very positive momentum generated by the re-engagement of the US,” whose representatives “were really welcomed with open arms back into the process,” Kaveh Zahedi, the climate change coordinator for the UN Environment Program, said in a phone interview from Bonn with UNA-USA.
- A view in November, 2007 of the melting Collins Glacier in King George Island, Antarctica, shows one of the effects of climate change. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe.
It is hoped that a new agreement on the environment can be reached when world leaders meet in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18 to negotiate a successor pact for the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The US did not ratify the treaty.
Representatives of 182 countries will wrap up nearly two weeks of meetings in Bonn on June 12, where they have sought to iron out differences on emissions reduction and other environmental policies ahead of Copenhagen.
Zahedi said that by the end of the talks officals “should have a much better idea” of the specific concerns of all the parties involved in the negotiations and thus have a clearer picture of how they envision the terms of the successor agreement.
The result will be “even more comprehensive, even more solid and even more reflective of all of the party views,” he emphasized.
The picture of emissions as the major cause of the greenhouse effect, which is an increase in the earth’s temperature over time caused by heat-trapping carbon gasses in the atmosphere, has significantly changed since 1997, when the first UN- brokered environmental agreement was reached in Kyoto, Japan.
The protocol was adopted to establish legally binding commitments worldwide for the reduction of what are now called greenhouse gases. Developing countries, not included in the Kyoto pact, are now a primary focus of the negotiations for the new agreement.
Nationally appropriate actions of the developing countries are being discussed at the Bonn conference, along with the level of environmental engagement of the developed countries. Quantified emission reduction commitments and actions of developing countries are essential in avoiding the most damaging potential of climate change, experts on climate say, yet countries have widely varying capacities to make such reductions.
One challenge of the negotiations is a lack of specific numbers representing targets of greenhouse-gas emissions for each country. While some countries have named their proposed goals, others have yet to do so.
“Right now we have some numbers on the table but not enough,” Zahedi said. “For example, the EU had said that it would reduce its emission by 20 percent by 2020, or by 30 percent if other countries come aboard.” Like all the countries involved, the US is setting its own targets, which Zahedi said were below what many countries were hoping the US would offer.
While UN officials are drafting a climate change pact in Germany, people around the world contributed to raising environmental awareness by participating in activities on the UN World Environment Day, which was June 5.
This year, the day was marked partly by the world premiere of an environmental documentary film, “Home,” directed by the French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a goodwill ambassador for the UN Environment Program. Arthus-Bertrand was also named as the agency’s 2009 Champion of the Earth in the category of Inspiration and Action. For more information on the film, visit www.home-2009.com.
For further information on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, go to http://unfccc.int/2860.php.
Ekaterina Strekalova is an intern in the publications department at UNA-USA and a Ph.D candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Source: http://www.unausa.org/Page.aspx?pid=1304
