By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
Bali : Industrialised countries Monday significantly watered down their commitment to fight climate change by getting a draft statement changed so that there is now no talk of them having to use a 25-40 percent reduction of greenhouses gas (GHG) emissions as the reference point for a post-2012 world.
As the UN conference on climate change here got into hard-nosed negotiations at the start of its crucial second week, Canada was suspected by international NGOs to be behind the major change in the draft statement between Sunday and Monday.
Canada has been in the forefront of countries – followed by Japan and Australia – who say they will not agree to any legally binding reductions of GHG emissions that lead to global warming unless countries such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa do the same after 2012. The current agreement to cut GHG emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – ends in 2012.
Although the US cannot participate directly in the negotiations because it has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration has pushed Canada and Japan to adopt this position, international NGOs suspect.
“If you want to kill these negotiations, that’s what you put on the table,” said Jennifer Morgan of the American NGO Third Generation Environmentalism, a member of the Climate Action Network that has over 400 NGOs worldwide.
Senior Democratic Senator John Kerry also blasted the Bush Administration position here Monday and promised a major policy change from the next government that will take office in January 2009.
The ad-hoc working group (AWG) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been working on the draft statement that is expected to become the major component of the Bali roadmap, to decide the direction the world will take to address climate change.
The crucial second paragraph of the draft text of the statement prepared by the AWG Sunday evening read:
“The AWG also recalled that its work should be guided by a shared vision of the challenge set by the ultimate objective of the convention based on the principles and other relevant provisions of the convention and its Kyoto Protocol. It noted that the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that global emissions of greenhouse gases need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels of 2000 by the middle of the 21st century in order to stabilise their concentrations in the atmosphere at the lowest levels assessed by the IPCC to date in its scenarios. In planning its further work, the AWG took into account the iterative approach to its work programme, including further consideration of the indicative range of emission reductions for Annex 1 Parties (industrialised countries) as a group of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, which provides useful initial parameters for the overall level of ambition of furthr
emission reductions by Annex I Parties, and which would be reviewed at future sessions in the light of the information it would receive, including information on analysis of stabilisation scenarios below 450 ppmv CO2 eq” (parts per million by volume of carbon dioxide equivalent – the measure of its concentration in the atmosphere).
That was the draft text at 19.13 hrs Sunday. But at 14.45 hrs Monday, the entire contents after the first sentence had been removed.
The crucial second paragraph now read:
“The AWG also recalled that its work should be guided by a shared vision of the challenge set by the ultimate objective of the convention based on the principles and other relevant provisions of the convention and its Kyoto Protocol. In planning its further work, the AWG took particular account of paragraphs 18, 19, 20, 21 and 23 of the report of the first part of its fourth session.”
On Saturday, the industrialised countries had already got the UNFCCC to agree that the next review of how they had actually done under the Kyoto Protocol would not lead to any emission reduction commitments from them.
Speaking before the crucial change to the draft statement was finalised Monday, UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said the 25-40 percent reduction should form the main reference point for negotiations.
Asked why Canada was stalling negotiations to address climate change, de Boer replied: “Perhaps because it is not meeting its (emissions reduction) target under the Kyoto Protocol.”
He hoped that the contact groups from the 187 countries would present a “clean and manageable” agenda to the ministers gathering here for the high-level segment of the summit that starts Wednesday.
The dialogue on the future between all countries “recognised the need to fulfil and strengthen developing country commitments” to control GHG emissions, de Boer said.