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UN climate chief doubts solid agreement in Cancun
– says accord will not be ‘exhaustive’
By Neil Marks in Mexico City
The United Nations climate chief doubts there will be a complete agreement by world leaders on a new climate pact to make the earth cooler and provide funding for poor countries battered by the severest of weather events when they meet in Cancun from late November.
“There are political disagreements around how and when to agree on actions,” Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres told Latin American journalists via video conference from her headquarters in Bonn, Germany.
Figueres, from Costa Rica, has seen some of the worst floods and landslides in Latin America this year and she was adamant that it is industrialised nations which spew the bulk of harmful greenhouse gases that cause global climate change that ought to take action.
Action is needed on two fronts: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing funding to poor countries to cope with the weather-related disasters, such as floods, hurricanes and droughts.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres
Figueres said that it is the rich, industrialised nations which caused the problem in the first place who should contribute to a fund to help poor countries and to compensate those countries, such as Guyana, which have preserved their forests – forests that, among other things, breathe in the harmful carbon dioxide and other gases harmful to the environment.
Figueres, who took over the job in July this year, will preside over her first meeting of the 177 countries which form part of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and which are negotiating the new climate pact. She is careful not to give promises of a spectacular outcome in Cancun, while still not yet wanting to appear a prophet of doom over these tortuous negotiations.
“Agreements in Cancun will not be exhaustive, but will be integral,” she suggested.
Figueres has already called on the United States, the biggest polluter along with China and India, to act on reducing greenhouse gases.
With Cancun looking doomed not to reach a legally binding agreement to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol, some countries want the Kyoto Protocol to be extended beyond its 2012 lifetime. But there is no agreement on how long the extension could be for.
The other problem with extending Kyoto, countries like Japan argue, is that the United States is not part of Kyoto and could therefore wriggle out of commitment to make substantial emissions reduction cuts. The US senate this year failed to pass legislation to slow greenhouse gas emissions.
The United Nations says the current levels of commitment would not prevent a temperature rise of more than two degrees Celsius, which scientists call the threshold of dangerous climate change such as floods and rising sea levels.
Under the political agreement made in Copenhagen last December, more than 110 countries agreed to limit warming below two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels but they did not say when they would do this.
There is also broad agreement on funding for poor countries to deal with climate change and President Bharrat Jagdeo is part of a group of world leaders selected by the UN to raise financing. They will present their report in Cancun for the climate summit which begins at the end of November.
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