Lima Climate Talks at Crossroads on Ways to Slow Global Warming

By NDTV (December 13, 2014)

About 190 nations faced a crossroads on Friday on how boldly to fight global warming as United Nations talks in Lima went into overtime amid concerns that watered-down goals could undermine a UN climate summit in Paris next year.

Representatives at the talks, which opened on Dec. 1 with hopes for momentum following a climate deal last month between China and the United States, were split over issues including greenhouse gas cuts and new cash to help poor nations cope with a warming world.

"We are almost there," Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told delegates. "I am sure we will find solutions." The talks had been due to end on Friday afternoon but were extended to last overnight.
 

Emerging nations such as China and India want the Lima gathering to stress that the rich will cut greenhouse gas emissions most, and pay for rising climate damage in vulnerable countries. The United States and the European Union want to ensure that poorer nations will also rein in rising emissions.

After Lima, governments are expected to outline national plans for cutting emissions beyond 2020 by an informal deadline of March 31, 2015, to form the building blocks of a global climate deal to be agreed in Paris in December 2015.

But options on the table in Lima range from obliging nations merely to publish a vague outline of their carbon plans on a U.N. website to making all provide detailed projections of emissions that will be reviewed by experts.

"There's the good, the bad and the ugly," said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who said "ugly" would mean only vague action for Paris and "good" would be detailed accounts.

Under the deal announced with the United States last month, China has promised its emissions will peak around 2030, for instance, but may not give the exact numbers and opposes the idea of a review by other countries.

Marlene Moses of Nauru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, which fears rising sea levels and wants tough accounting, said that China was saying: "'We'll show you our cards but don't read them'.

"We are being asked to sign on to an agreement that puts us under water. That's not fair to us," she said.

And many developing nations also want the rich to map out far more clearly how they will raise aid to help the poor cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate change to a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020, agreed in 2009.

A draft text about finance only "invites" developed nations to give clarity about their plans.

This year is set to be the warmest on record, and scenarios by a U.N. panel of scientists indicate that the world should get on track to slash emissions to a net zero before 2100 to limit heat waves, floods and rising sea levels. 

 

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Bolivian President Highlights Indigenous Lifestyle

By teleSUR

Evo Morales warned that capitalism and reducing greenhouse effects are incompatible.

Bolivian President Evo Morales urged the world Tuesday to follow the example of the indigenous experience before the challenges of climate change while at the same ruling out an agreement based on the capitalist model.

“I would like to ask the governments of the world to listen to the indigenous peoples and follow the wisdom of life... [for] they can provide a solution on climate change,” he said during his intervention in the 20th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 20) taking place in Lima, the Peruvian capital.

Morales demanded an agreement based on the protection of life and mother earth, and not on the market, profits or capitalism. “The new agreement must be anti-capitalist,” he argued.

The first indigenous president of Bolivia also emphasized how climate change, “the big global challenge... threatened the perspectives of development of the countries.”

In another part of his speech, he criticized the developed countries, as they have delayed providing a concrete solution to this global problem, and invited the participants to evaluate the role of the capitalist countries in the emission of greenhouse gas.

“We have been used as a pretext so the powers can keep doing the same...; colonialism upon our peoples has continued via a so-called agreement that failed in reducing the emission of greenhouse gas.”

The COP was launched in 1994 in order to reduce greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. This 20th gathering will conclude on a draft that will be approved at the COP 21, taking place next year in Paris, France.

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Southern Demands for A Science-based, Just and Fair Sharing of Global Efforts to Confront the Climate Crisis

Southern CSOs at the UNFCCC COP12 Conference released a statement calling on developed countries to live up to their historical responsibilities and immediately cut emissions deeply, in addition to transferring finance and technology to the South as a part of an owed 'climate debt.'

The Statement calls on 'developing countries' to reject the development model used by the rich industrialized countries and to take on their 'fairshare' of the effort to confront the climate crisis.

Read the full statement from here

Secretary-General's Synthesis Report on Post-2015 Agenda: A Missed Opportunity

By Ulysses Smith, Huffingtonpost

The much-anticipated Synthesis Report of the UN Secretary-General on the Post-2015 Development Agenda was issued on Thursday. Entitled "The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet," the report articulates a "call to action to transform our world beyond 2015." A noble exhortation to be sure, one that, it is safe to say, absolutely no one can argue with. But unfortunately the report falls short of making a valuable contribution to the wider discussion around the new development agenda, particularly when it comes to navigating the difficult road ahead.

What the Synthesis Report adds is yet another vector, consisting of yet another numbered list, against which the new agenda should seek to operate. Now, in addition to 17 goals, and 169 targets, we also have "six essential elements," which will need to be assimilated and accounted for in the final agenda. Instead of making the work of the negotiators easier going into January, when the process of finalizing the new development agenda picks up in earnest, the Synthesis Report has made their work harder, which makes it all the less likely that the international community will ultimately deliver to the world an agenda that is practical, relevant, workable, and effective, something that the world sorely needs.

The problem is that 17 goals, and 169 targets, isn't really an agenda, because there are no priorities. A target to "promote sustainable tourism" is on a par with a target to "eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere," which are on a par with a target to "significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere."

There are 169 of these.

Despite falling short in a number of areas, the Millennium Development Goals, the predecessor development agenda to the Post-2015 regime that is currently being considered, have achieved a tremendous amount. In 1990, a decade before the Millennium Development Goals were launched, more than 12 million children died each year before reaching the age of five; in 2013, fewer than seven million did. Maternal mortality has fallen by almost 50% since 1990. 2.3 billion people have gained access to clean drinking water during that time.

The reason the Millennium Development Goals have been successful is that they served to focus world attention on a handful of goals -- eight of them, to be precise, articulated in 374 words. They communicated to the world that these eight objectives would be the world's priorities between 2000 and 2015, and as a result, billions of dollars in development funds flowed into efforts to tackle these challenges.

In a world of unlimited resources, perhaps a kitchen-sink approach that seeks to appease all of the interest groups might work. But in a world of increasing resource constraints, such an approach seems to be a recipe for disaster. Countries will cherry pick, or be subsumed, or throw up their hands and do nothing at all.

What is needed is an approach that takes into account a realistic assessment of the changed development reality, the consequent changed role that a development agenda needs to play, and then a realistic discussion about what can be achieved through development funds.

Unfortunately, the Synthesis Report did not contribute to this process, leaving it to the negotiators to craft an agenda that will work.

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Adapting to a warmer climate could cost almost three times as much as thought, says UN report

By Dan Collyns, The Guardian

Adapting to a warmer world will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and up to three times as much as previous estimates, even if global climate talks manage to keep temperature rises below dangerous levels, warns a report by the UN.

The first United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) ‘Adaptation Gap Report’ shows a significant funding gap after 2020 unless more funds from rich countries are pumped in to helping developing nations adapt to the droughts, flooding and heatwaves expected to accompany climate change.

“The report provides a powerful reminder that the potential cost of inaction carries a real price tag. Debating the economics of our response to climate change must become more honest,” said Achim Steiner, Unep’s executive director, as ministers from nearly 200 countries prepare to join the high level segment of UN climate talks in Lima, Peru, next week.

“We owe it to ourselves but also to the next generation, as it is they who will have to foot the bill.”

Without further action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the report warns, the cost of adaptation will soar even further as wider and more expensive action is needed to protect communities from the extreme weather brought about by climate change.

Delegates from the Alliance of Small Islands States at the UN climate conference in Lima, which opened on Monday, are already feeling those impacts. They have appealed for adaptation funds for “loss and damage” as their homelands’ very existence is threatened by rising sea levels.

“We’re keen to see the implementation of the Green Climate Fund - we’re still waiting,” Netatua Pelesikoti, director of the climate change office at the Secretariat of the Pacific Environment Programme, referring to a fund set up to hope poorer countries cope with global warming.
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“The trickle down to each government in the Pacific is very slow but we can’t abandon the process at this stage,” said the Tongan delegate.

Rich countries have pledged $9.7bn to the Green Climate Fund but the figure is well short of the minimum target of $100bn each year by 2020.

The Adaptation Gap Report said adaptation costs could climb to $150bn by 2025/2030 and $250-500bn per year by 2050, even based on the assumption that emissions are cut to keep temperature rises below rises of 2C above pre-industrial levels, as governments have previously agreed.

However, if emissions continue rising at their current rate – which would lead to temperature rises well above 2C – adaptation costs could hit double the worst-case figures, the report warned.

“This startling report opens up a window on to a nightmarish future, where the global economy is crippled and the most vulnerable countries are even further disadvantaged,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, WWF’s senior global adaptation policy advisor. “This is not a gap, it’s an abyss. We can avoid falling into it, but we’re running out of time.”

“The report leaves no doubt, adaptation must be at the heart of a long-term agreement developed here in Lima. Communities around the world are drastically unprepared for the costly impacts of climate change, which is already destroying lives and livelihoods every day,” said Jan Kowalzig, policy advisor for Oxfam, urging negotiators to scale up funding to meet the $100bn annual commitment.

David Waskow, director of the International Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute, said the $9.7bn raised by the Green Climate Fund was a “key threshold” but added that developed nations’ funding should extend beyond the fund, engaging “large international companies and even small and medium-sized companies.”

“On adaptation there hasn’t been enough funding and most estimates show that less than 20% of climate finance has gone to help countries adapt to climate change,” he added.

Su Wei, the head of China’s climate delegation, said the Green Climate Fund pledges were far from adequate and told Reuters that he was critical of Australia’s refusal to contribute to the fund, saying contributing should be a “legal obligation for all developed country parties”.

Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, last month ruled out contributing to the fund, saying his government was giving aid through other channels.

Figures on global financial flows relating to climate action were published for the first time on Wednesday. They stood at between $340 and $650bn in 2011-2012, the UN said.

 

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IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Synthesis Report. Climate Change 2014

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report - Synthesis Report

The South Demands Clarity in Financing and Adaptation at COP20 | Inter Press Service

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz, IPS News

At the 12-day climate summit that began Monday in the Peruvian capital, representatives of 195 countries and hundreds of members of civil society are trying to agree on the key points of a new international treaty aimed at curbing global warming.

The official delegations and the representatives of organised civil society in the developing South are looking to move forward towards a binding draft agreement on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, to be signed a year from now.

Expectation surrounds the commitments that industrialised countries will make on how to finance the fight against climate change and the inclusion of binding targets to reduce the current vulnerability, civil society representatives told IPS.

“Lima has to produce a text that has elements laying the foundations of the 2015 agreement,” Enrique Maurtua, international policy adviser to the Latin America branch of the Climate Action Network (CAN), told IPS. “It will be signed next year, but the elements have to be here now, such as for example the contributions of the countries and what they will consist of.”

Maurtua said “These contributions have to be equitable, and have to include indicators like historic needs, adaptation or the development needs of the countries.”

The starting point of the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP20) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is something that is less and less debated: the current pace of life and model of development lead to emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.

How to reduce climate change and what to do about the damage already caused are two of the most important questions at the climate conference that got underway Monday in the temporary installations built in the San Borja military complex in Lima, known as “el Pentagonito” (the little Pentagon).

Maurtua stressed that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) “have to be sufficiently robust to set the route towards limiting the global rise in temperature to two degrees Celsius rather than four or six degrees, which is what we’re moving towards now.”

At the current rate of consumption, the planet will be around four degrees Celsius hotter by 2100 than in the years prior to the industrial revolution, before most of the emissions began.

That would cause a dramatic rise in the sea level and drastic changes in soil productivity, glacier size and biodiversity, and the countries least responsible for the emissions would be the hardest-hit: the developing South.

Scientists say that severe climate change can only be prevented by keeping the global rise in temperature to a maximum of two degrees.

The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is the route chosen to reach that target. And that is possible by reducing consumption of fossil fuels, increasing the use of clean energy sources, and developing a low-carbon lifestyle.

In 2020, the new treaty will replace the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 and in effect since 2005. It is to be signed at COP21, to be hosted by Paris in December 2015.

The draft “must mark the end of the fossil-fuel era by 2050 and accelerate the transition to a 100% renewable energy future for all,” said Greenpeace Head of International Climate Politics Martin Kaiser.

On the opening day of COP20 the activist said it’s not about energy like nuclear power that is expensive, centralist and dangerous.

Governments and civil society groups from the developing South agree it is necessary to seek mechanisms to adapt to climate changes, some of which are considered irreversible.

“The issue of adaptation is very important,” Maurtua said. “Adaptation has to have the same weight that mitigation has. It’s basically a question of reinforcing the link between the two. We already have to adapt, but the more mitigation is delayed the more we’ll have to adapt. They are equally important and that also has to be reflected.”

In a report released on the eve of COP20, the international development organisation Oxfam pointed out that both climate change mitigation and adaptation are expensive. In the countries of sub-Saharan Africa alone 62 billion dollars a year are needed to adapt, it said.

What we can hope for, what developing countries are looking for in the national contributions, is a guarantee that financing will have a place in the accord, somewhere, because that is something we’re not seeing right now, Oxfam climate policy adviser Kiri Hanks told IPS.

The activist said there is still debate on how to implement financing for the fight against climate change, but whether in this agreement, in the contributions or elsewhere, there is a need for parity between mitigation and its financing.

Industrialised countries have burned more fossil fuels and deforested faster for centuries, which means their total emissions are greater than those of developing nations.

For that reason, an agreement was reached for industrialised nations to finance the Green Climate Fund, with a contribution of 100 billion dollars by 2020. But few funds have been forthcoming so far, say both activists and official delegates.

Tasneem Essop, the Head of Strategy and Advocacy for the International World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), said negotiators have to reach agreements on the draft protocol, including a mechanism to review the contributions, that would review both ambition levels and emissions.

She said her group wanted to see a mechanism that translates this review into ambition levels. It also wants to see adaptation as part of the text, but with the necessary financial backing.

Essop said civil society has come to Lima strengthened by mass demonstrations in the past few months, with simultaneous marches in cities around the world, demanding action against climate change.

She also said recent announcements of emission reduction commitments by the EU and by China and the United States were encouraging.

But she said the lack of commitment makes it difficult to think that measures that challenge the current model of development will be put in place by 2020.

Maurtua agrees that there is a lack of commitment, especially when it comes to funding.

According to the CAN-Latin America expert, “Several countries have pledged a total of 9.3 billion dollars in contributions. But between 10 and 15 billion dollars should have been pledged by now, which means we still have a ways to go.”

“The route to getting the 100 billion dollars needed by 2020 needs to be established in the Lima draft,” to put the new climate change treaty into effect, he said.

The South Demands Clarity in Financing and Adaptation at COP20 | Inter Press Service