04:05 GMT 26th January 2012
After the 14-day negotiations in Durban between 190 countries ended on December 9, South African water and environmental affairs minister Edna Molewa declared the so-called Durban Platform a victory.
'We have been able to preserve the multiple rules based system underpinning the mitigation regime by agreeing on a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol,' she told reporters in Pretoria before acknowledging some of the world's biggest polluters had refused to sign up to a second commitment period.
Despite the refusal of the US, Canada and others to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding agreement the world has in relation to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Molewa maintained that countries had moved from their previously entrenched negotiating positions.
'We realised in Durban that given the current social, developmental, economic and political context, trying to force countries to do more than they are willing and able to contribute is a recipe for the complete failure of the international effort to genuinely address climate crisis and would have resulted in a no deal in Durban, not only killing the Kyoto Protocol but possibly even the UN Convention on climate change itself,' she said.
The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that was adopted in 1997 and set binding targets for 37 industrialised countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
These reductions amount to an average of 5 per cent against 1990 emission levels over the five-year period 2008-2012, although the percentage varies from country-tocountry when their individual commitments are broken down.
However, to date few of the world's biggest polluters have managed to come anywhere near the targets that were set out under Kyoto in 1997. In its most basic form the Durban deal has established a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol for many governments, including 38 industrialised nations.
The design of a Green Climate Fund and a non-legally binding mandate to get all countries in 2015 to sign a more progressive deal with deeper emissions cuts by no later than 2020 were also agreed upon.
While representatives of big business and many of the world's worst polluters chose to see this as a positive step in the right direction, civil society as well as most of the world's poorest countries, which include many from Africa, held the opposite view.
In a statement released by Greenpeace International, the organisation's executive director Kumi Naidoo summed up their take on the talks by simply saying, 'Polluters won, people lost'.
'Our governments listened to the carbon-intensive polluting corporations instead of listening to the people who want an end to our dependence on fossil fuels and real and immediate action on climate change,' said Naidoo.
She went on to criticise the fact that the next treaty on climate change matters would only be implemented in 2020. 'Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that's put off for a decade,' she insisted.
Christian Aid spokesperson, Mohamed Ad ow, also said the lag time in implementing a new legally binding deal was unacceptable as the delayed action to tackle climate change would come a decade too late for poor people on the front-line in Africa and low lying island nations.
'Their lives are already ravaged by floods, droughts, failed rains, deadly storms, hunger and disease and we know that these disasters will get worse and more frequent as climate change bites,' he said.
Adow added that the only 'notable achievement' in Durban was the agreement reached that the Green Climate Fund - designed to assist developing countries mitigate and adapt to the effects of global warming - would soon have staff and an office. However, it remains unclear where the estimated €100bn annual budget will come from that the fund needs to operate going forward.
In a bid to sway negotiators numerous studies showing how climate change is affecting different parts of the world were released throughout the Durban talks, and just for good measure new research on how it is affecting African trees was released two days after the conference ended too.
According to the new study led by scientists at the University of California in the US, trees are dying in massive numbers in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame.
'Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 per cent in the 20th century, the world's most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s,' said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez.
'Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.'
The study, which is scheduled for publication on December 16 in the Journal of Arid Environments, was based on climate change records, aerial photos dating back to 1954, recent satellite images and oldfashioned footwork that included counting and measuring over 1,500 trees in the field.
The researchers focused on six countries in the Sahel, from Senegal in West Africa to Chad in Central Africa, at sites where the average temperature warmed up by 0.8 degrees Celsius and rainfall fell as much as 48 per cent.
They found that one in six trees died between 1954 and 2002. In addition, one in five tree species disappeared locally, and indigenous fruit and timber trees that require more moisture took the biggest hit.
Hotter, drier conditions dominated population and soil factors in explaining tree mortality, the authors found. Their results indicate that climate change is shifting vegetation zones south toward moister areas. Yet in the face of this empirical evidence, negotiators from the US, China, India and Brazil continued to use their differences over each other's commitments in terms of emission reductions as a reason to stonewall any significant progress at the talks.
The EU was to the fore in Durban, forging a 'coalition of the willing' with the Alliance of Small Island States and the group of least developed countries to put pressure on the US, China and India, the big emitters that opposed an ambitious deal. This grouping wanted a credible roadmap for negotiations on a legally binding deal by 2015, which should come into effect by 2020.
However, the US's decision to avoid making any deal in Durban that would commit it to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and continued insistence that countries like China and India make reduction commitments in line with those expected of it, was one of the major stumbling blocks.
China is the world's second largest economy and has outstripped the US, which has never signed up to the Kyoto Protocol because of fears the former threaten its global superpower position, as the world's number one carbon emitter. Yet China's annual emissions are at 5.3 tonnes per capita, less than a third of those of the US (17.5 tonnes), according to World Bank figures for 2008.
In addition, the US, the EU and Japan are historically responsible for much more of the greenhouse gases that have been released into the atmosphere to date than any of its developing rivals because their industrial development began much earlier.
Although both China and India accepted in Durban that there is a climate crisis and emission cuts needed to be deepened, they insisted that it was the responsibility of developed countries like the US, EU and Japan to take action first.
A sign of how difficult a task that tackling the issue of greenhouse emission cuts going forward will be came within days of the Durban talks ending, when Canada's environment minister Peter Kent formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Canada, a major energy producer which critics complain is becoming a climate renegade, has long complained Kyoto is unworkable precisely because it excludes so many significant emitters. 'As we've said, Kyoto for Canada is in the past ... We are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto.
'To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of removing every car, truck, all-terrain vehicle, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle off every kind of Canadian road,' Kent told reporters in mid-December.
Kent said Canada would work toward a new global deal obliging all major nations to cut output of greenhouse gases. China and India are not bound by Kyoto's current targets due to their status as developing nations.
He did not give details on when Ottawa would pull out of the treaty, but maintained, 'The writing on the wall for Kyoto has been recognised by even those countries which are engaging in a second commitment.'
no comments
