Bonn, June 2009 – The pace of the current negotiation has indeed probably reached a new record of slowness here in Bonn, Germany. So slow even Imelda Abano noted in her article that the negotiators take as much as one whole hour only to agree on one sentence. Two topics may have to be restarted from scratch. With this kind of pace, no one will even dare to guess whether Copenhagen, the final round of the two-year series of negotiation on a post 2012 climate treaty in December this year, will actually be a success. Indeed, rumors abound that even the Danish government has already prepared for an “extension” of the possibly failed Copenhagen session, to be held sometime in the first half of 2010.
To make things worse, the Premier of Japan yesterday announced the Japanese “commitment” to reduce emissions by eight percent below 1990 by 2020. With “commitment” like this, who needs enemy? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already indicated that the world needs a reduction in the industrialized countries (like Japan, the US, or European countries are) of 25 – 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, with significant
This Bonn round is a part of a series of talks this year. The series itself is a part of a two-year process started in December 2007 in Bali — thus called the “Bali Roadmap” — to negotiate on a new treaty to continue the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol that ends in 2012. The new treaty is hoped not only to extend but also to improve and deepen commitments by all countries to reduce emissions of climate change-inducing greenhouse gases.
Three further sessions will be held prior to Copenhagen, Denmark: August 10 – 14 in Bonn, Germany (informal), September 28 – October 9 in Bangkok, Thailand (I really hope that the Thai government has stabilized by then), and 2 – 6 November in Barcelona, Spain. The Copenhagen round will be held on December 7 – 18, 2009.
Two topics have been on my watch list: the clean development mechanism (CDM), which is the interest of my company (a large-ish CDM project development company), and the issues surrounding the post-2012 treaty, which is my own interest and on which I am asked to advise the Indonesian Government. I will spare you the details on the CDM. That’s for another article.
On post 2012, there are quite a number of proposals — draft treaty — currently floating around. Among others, the Australian, the American (which they call “agreement”, not treaty), the Tuvaluan, and the Costa Rican. Even the NGO community has proposed an ambitious, $160 billion per year worth of proposal that allows for significant reduction of greenhouse gases and plenty of financial resources for developing countries. No one has started discussing this yet. But it doesn’t look easy.
The building blocs for the post-2012 treaty are mitigation (how to curb climate change), adaptation (how to live with it), finance (how to pay), and technology (how do to it). Another one, not considered as a building bloc but quite important is the shared vision, which is the metrics that determines the global targets (“aspirational goals”) of stabilization of concentration and reduction commitments. How to frame — and for how much — developing country commitments also remains an issue. Finally, whether reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation be considered as developing country commitments (through the nationally-appropriate mitigation actions, NAMA, a new jargon everyone needs to learn) or not. Nothing so far looks closer to any form of agreements.
Everyone will start packing up and go home tomorrow. Probably with some bad taste that they (we) have not really done what we are to do. Which is to lay the framework to save the planet.
