By Joydeep Gupta
Bali(IANS) : Hundreds of negotiators from 187 countries attending the Dec 3-14 UN conference on climate change here continued to fight tooth and nail Thursday over a draft Bali roadmap meant to address global warming. The map that is being drawn will be full of twists and turns, complicating the process of negotiations over the next two years, the deadline for striking a deal for a post-2012 world, when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out.
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 European Union (EU) on some topics. The other is between the US and the EU.
As ministers and senior bureaucrats huddled behind closed doors, spoke to their capitals and were hustled by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to come up with an agreement, it appeared on the eve of the Bali summit finale that compromises had been struck between the developing and industrialised countries, at least on some of the major sticking points.
But the acrimonious fight between the US and the EU due to the insistence of the former to dilute commitments to fight global warming as far as possible was nowhere near resolution on the penultimate day of the summit.
To the thousands of media personnel and NGO representatives waiting outside the closed meeting rooms and busy speculating about what was going on, it often appeared that those dragging their feet were oblivious of the big picture – that climate change is here, it’s getting worse, farming is already being affected in tropical and sub-tropical countries, floods, storms and droughts are getting more frequent and more damaging and the sea level has now even now risen to the point where it is drowning homes in small islands.
Al Gore, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, made a fervent appeal to the government delegates to come up with a meaningful agenda and deadline for negotiations while Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the other winner, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), once again briefed the government delegates on how fast climate change was accelerating.
Gore told the negotiators to ignore the current US government stance and go ahead with the assumption that a new US president who would come into office early 2009 would be far more supportive of the fight against climate change. But it appeared that the ministers had ignored Gore instead, many not even caring to listen to him.
The only breakthrough in the negotiations Thursday was over the issues of transferring technology to developing countries to help them fight climate change and its effects.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said 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.
Earlier Thursday, speaking at a closed-door roundtable on technology transfer, the head of the India delegation, Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal said: “Previous deliberations have stressed upon the imperative for technology needs assessments in developing countries that identify technology priorities for mitigation as well as adaptation (to climate change).
“This approach needs to be further elaborated to include the existing capacities for in-house technology development and technology adoption or absorption. Based on such a country-driven approach, future modalities for development, transfer and adoption of technologies in developing countries can be identified.”
Sibal also said: “What would India like to see as the elements of a substantive body of actions under the convention (on climate change) pertaining to technology? There are, I believe, three major elements: appropriate funding modalities and approaches; a facilitative IPR (intellectual property rights) environment and enhancing the absorptive capacities within developing countries.”
While that was sorted out, the major US-EU spat remained. The spat is over the EU aim to have a 25-40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2020 compared to 1990 in the Bali roadmap.
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.”
Portugal’s Environment Minister Humberto Rosa said Thursday afternoon: “We are disappointed because we still haven’t heard from the US on what is their level of ambition or engagement in the Bali roadmap.”
Diplomats have now started calling the 25-40 percent reduction an ambition rather than a target. Portugal is currently in the chair of the EU.