A year to resolve differences

Vesela Todorova

• Last Updated: January 20. 2009 9:03PM UAE / January 20. 2009 5:03PM GMT

The world has less than a year to resolve differences over a new climate change deal expected to be reached during talks in Denmark in December, the Danish minister for climate and energy said yesterday.

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and December’s meeting in Copenhagen is expected to result in a new agreement on how to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and help the countries expected to be hardest hit by climate change to adapt.

Connie Hedegaard said her government was hoping for “an ambitious global deal” to be agreed at the UN meeting.

“It will have to be a truly global deal,” she said, adding that large polluters such as the US and China, as well as developing nations – so far excluded from binding emissions cuts – should take on a more active part.

The world’s efforts to tackle climate change are centred on several international treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. While the UN convention agrees on the need to begin considering possible measures, the Kyoto Protocol has binding targets to emissions for 37 industrialised countries. The rest of the signatories, more than 140 governments, are obliged only to report their emissions.

“When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, two thirds of all emissions came from the industrialised countries,” said Mrs Hedegaard. “Now, developing countries are responsible for more than half of all greenhouse gases and will be emitting two thirds of emissions in 2020.”

Mrs Hedegaard was speaking from the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, where she also had a meeting with Mohammed bin Dha’en al Hamli, the Minister of Energy, and Rashid Ahmed bin Fahad, the Minister of Environment and Water.
Developing nations have argued that their growth should not be constrained to solve a problem caused by rich industrialised nations.

Mrs Hedegaard said: “I will never argue developing countries’ rights to have growth.” But the developing world had to commit to improve on the business-as-usual model, she said. Rich industrialised countries should still bear the largest burden but “they cannot do it alone”.

The US needed to take a much more active role than it did now, she added.
The US, the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, an act that has discouraged other large polluters such as China from signing up, say critics.

“The US is key to this process,” said Mrs Hedegaard. “As long as the US is not doing more, many countries can just sit back... This is one of the problems, everybody is waiting for everybody else to move.”

However, she was optimistic that the new Barack Obama administration would join the global efforts in fighting climate change. “We have seen a change in the American thinking in the last few months.”

Mrs Hedegaard said more funds were also needed to achieve a deal. The current system of donor pledges had not been successful because many of the pledges had not been met. “We must try to invent a financial system where countries do not have to pledge every year or a couple of years,” she said.

One way of funding such as scheme would be via a tax on shipping and aviation fuel. This served the double purpose of making aviation and shipping – two sectors excluded from the Kyoto Protocol – consider energy efficiency measures, she said. A deal should also offer incentives to farmers in poor developing nations to preserve forests.

Although the issues were complex and solutions were still being studied, there was sufficient knowledge for politicians to be able to make bold decisions, she said.

According to the most stringent scenario of the International Panel on Climate Change – a UN scientific body that has been instrumental in proving that human activities negatively affect the climate – a 50 per cent decline in emissions over 2000 levels by 2050 will correspond to a temperature rise of up to 2.4° Celsius.

There were hopes that an agreement in Copenhagen would outline goals for 2050 but interim targets were needed to ensure progress in the short and medium term, Mrs Hedegaard said.

The Kyoto Protocol targets emissions of six main greenhouse gases. Of them, carbon dioxide has the largest share in terms of global emission volumes. In the 200 years since 1800, levels have risen by more than 30 per cent.

The power-supply sector has the largest share in global greenhouse gas emissions, with 21 per cent of emissions. It is followed by industry at 19 per cent, forestry at 17 per cent, agriculture at 14 per cent and transport at 13 per cent. In the past three decades, all greenhouse gas emissions increased by an average of 1.6 per cent per year with CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use growing at 1.9 per cent per year.

The largest growth in greenhouse gas emissions has come from energy supply and road transport.

vtodorova@thenational.ae