By Joydeep Gupta
Bali(IANS) : The US government delegation threw an agreement on the Bali roadmap out of gear an hour before midnight Thursday, with a new proposal that wanted to get away from international commitments on mitigating emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are leading to climate change and came up with national domestic objectives instead.
A member of the Indian delegation said around midnight the proposal was not acceptable to India. The group of 77 countries had also come up with a counter-proposal and negotiations were on.
Another US proposal on the issue of fighting deforestation as part of the fight against global warming had thrown a spanner into one more section of the Bali roadmap just a few hours before that.
As ministers from about 40 countries met just hours before the end of the Bali summit to finalise a declaration on ways to fight climate change, the US government delegation came out with a counter-proposal.
It was against the entire principle started under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, under which industrialised countries were legally obliged through an international treaty to reduce GHG emissions. The US has signed the convention but not the protocol.
The first phase of the protocol ends in 2012, and the US proposal was for the period beyond, when stricter, legally binding GHG emission reduction commitments from industrialised countries were vital, according to developing countries and the European Union (EU).
But instead of a legally binding treaty, the US delegation proposed “domestic mitigation actions” and “quantified national emission and reduction objectives, taking into account national circumstances”.
The counter-proposal by G-77 would make an effort to satisfy every country including the US, senior members of the Indian and Pakistani government delegations told IANS.
They expected the negotiations to go on through the night.
Hours before this, the US government delegation had also reopened the deforestation issue, which most countries had considered closed with a commitment to start pilot projects on afforestation.
On deforestation, the US wanted to reintroduce a concept that had been rejected earlier – adding the value of all land according to land use to the calculation of the value of forests in terms of the carbon they stored and thus prevented global warming.
The negotiations on deforestation restarted late Thursday evening and went on till half an hour after midnight, when the delegates decided to adjourn their meeting to Friday morning.
International NGOs shadowing the negotiations were livid with the US government stance.
Shane Rattenbury of Greenpeace international said: “This proposal would throw away 12 years of progress. It’s a made-in-the-US plan for a climate catastrophe, undoing any commitments to cutting greenhouse gases. The clear intent of this proposal is to make an effective agreement to save the climate impossible here in Bali – and this in the week that the IPCC gets a Nobel Peace Prize.”
It is now clear that the Bali roadmap that is supposed to start a two-year process of negotiations for GHG emission reductions beyond 2012 will be full of twists and turns.
The disagreements are at two levels – the first between the developing countries and the US-led bloc of industrialised countries that include Canada, Japan and Australia and even the EU on some topics. The other is between the US and the EU.
The only breakthrough in the negotiations Thursday was over the issue of transferring technology to developing countries to help them fight climate change and its effects, though there were unconfirmed reports late in the night that even that might be reopened.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer had said Thursday evening it had been agreed “that the GEF (Global Environment Facility of the World Bank) will put together a new strategic programme for technical needs assessments of developing countries and turn them into project proposals for international funding.”
The Indian government delegation had been unhappy with the word programme and had suggested facility instead. While that was not accepted, the word strategic was added before the word programme.
The major US-EU spat over the EU aim to have a 25-40 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2020 compared to 1990 in the Bali roadmap remained unresolved.
The US has publicly objected to this, saying this would pre-judge the negotiations to be held over the next two years for a new treaty. Reacting to this, European Commissioner for Environment Stavros Lamas said: “What is a roadmap without a destination.”
As things stood till late Thursday night, the 25-40 percent reduction target was included in the preamble to the draft text of the Bali roadmap. By UN rules, nothing in the preamble of a treaty is binding.
The EU was unhappy enough to threaten it would not attend a major economies’ meeting called by US President George W. Bush to discuss global warming. Lamos said: “If the Bali summit does not deliver a meaningful deal, that meet would serve little purpose; it would be meaningless.”