Special Report: Fight against Global Warming
BANGKOK, March 31 (Xinhua) -- A five-day round of United Nations climate change negotiations kicked off in Bangkok Monday, opening the first steps to implement the Bali Roadmap adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference on the Indonesian island resort last December.
At the Bali conference, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to step up international efforts to combat climate change and to launch formal negotiations to come to a long-term international agreement at the conference in Copenhagen by the end of 2009, to lay down measures and obligations for the world after the first commitment period of Kyoto Protocol expires by the end of 2012.
The Bangkok meeting is designed to both map out a work program that will lead to that agreement and to advance work on the rules through which emission reduction targets of developed countries can be met.
UN officials are again warning, when the meeting opened Monday morning, that time is running out to prepare an agreement in time to enter into force before 2012.
Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary of the UNFCCC, pointed out that three months had already elapsed since the Bali conference and that a draft of a future agreement would need to be ready well before Copenhagen.
"This leaves us with around one and a half years -- a very short time-frame within which to complete negotiations on one of the most complex international agreements that history has ever seen," said the UN top climate change official.
"But I am confident that it can be done if the work is broken down into manageable, bite-sized chunks," he added.
Around 1,200 participants from 163 countries, including government representatives, participants from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions, are attending the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2008.
At the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali last year, Parties to the UNFCCC decided on both the time-line and the main elements of a stronger climate change deal, including a shared long-term vision and enhanced action on the four building blocs: mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance.
The Bangkok meeting is supposed to be technical-oriented and "boring", UN officials said.
A new Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) was mandated in Bali to lead the work and is meeting for the first time in Bangkok. Its main task is to spell out the next steps needed to come to the envisaged agreement.
"What we now need is a bottom-up approach on all the elements, taking all the concerns of the Parties into account," said Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, chairman of the AW-LGA.
Equal time will be devoted to the discussions of four key building blocks -- mitigation, adaptation, technologies and financing -- in the Bangkok talks and negotiations later, said Machado.
The second working group that is meeting at Bangkok is the already existing Ad Hoc Working Group on further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP). This group of rich countries will work on the analysis of possible tools available to these countries to reach emission reduction commitments.
"There is already broad consensus among Parties on the importance of completing this work before political agreement is reached on a post-2012 deal in Copenhagen," said Harald Dovland, chair of the group.
The next UN meeting involving negotiations under both working groups will take place in June in Bonn, Germany this year, followed by a third meeting in August and a fourth at the UN Climate Change Conference in December, both to be held in Poznan, Poland.
The tools that the working group will analyze in Bangkok include emissions trading and the "project based mechanisms," such as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which already allows developed countries to meet part of their emission reduction commitments by investing in sustainable development projects in developing countries.
Other tools are land use, land-use change and forestry; greenhouse gases, sectors and source categories to be covered, along with possible approaches targeting sectoral emissions, for example from the steel or cement sectors.
With 192 Parties, the UNFCCC has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Under the Kyoto Protocol which has 178 member Parties, 37 states, consisting of highly industrialized countries and countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have legally binding emission limitation and reduction commitments, as they have been recognized as the major emitters of green house gases (GHG), throughout the last two centuries of industrialization process.
Developing countries hold that the industrialized countries should continue to take on the main responsibility for climate change mitigation by being committed to further cut on GHG during the next phrase for Kyoto Protocol. One suggestion is that the rich group cut GHG emissions by at least 25 percent to 40 percent from the level of 1990 in the next commitment period of 10 to 15 years.
Meanwhile the rich countries are calling for capping emissions in the developing world, especially emerging economies and growing emitters like China and India.
It is unfair to charge the same on the developing countries, where poverty eradication is still the top priority, as on the developed countries when the latter still emit GHGs per capita three or four times that of the former, China's Special Representative on Climate Change Talks Yu Qingtai told Xinhua on Monday.
Aside from committing themselves to further and deeper cut on emissions, the industrialized countries are obliged to transfer more technologies needed for mitigation and adaptation efforts at affordable price to developing countries, and setting up more aid fund to finance the world's poorer members' efforts.
However, little progress has been made in those two areas due to the reluctance of rich countries, both from the government side and the private sector and big industries' side.
It is impossible for the developing countries to discuss cutting emissions of their own without knowing where the money needed will come from, acknowledged De Boer.
"For me, the most important issue in the negotiations toward a global agreement is how much the individual industrialized countries are willing to reduce their emissions," said De Boer at a press briefing after the opening.
