Emission reduction pledges not ambitious enough – UNFCCC chief
03 June, 2009
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) welcomed a near-complete list of post-2012 emission reduction pledges from industrialised countries, but warned that the level of ambition is not high enough.
Speaking on Monday as the latest round of talks on a post-2012 international agreement kicked off in Bonn, de Boer said that his confidence is buoyed by developments since the start of the year, including the fact that almost all developed countries have tabled emissions cuts.
“The challenge now is to get that list complete and to raise the ambition level though negotiation on international co-operation,” de Boer said.
But both de Boer and Michael Zammit Cutajar, chairman of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) said that the meeting got off to a good start.
Zammit Cutajar said that the draft negotiating text, which he described as “very complex and messy”, was accepted by countries as “a good starting point” for negotiations, despite criticisms from both developed and developing countries. He added that he expects more criticisms, but that countries will have the opportunity to propose changes.
“It is a big achievement that they weren’t rejected,” said Alina Averchenkova, a Switzerland-based senior policy analyst for asset manager First Climate, noting that both the AWG-LCA text and the two under the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) were both accepted as the basis for the negotiations.
There is increasing pressure for the two tracks to merge, given the duplication of work involved, but this is unlikely to happen before the December talks in Copenhagen, said Averchenkova. “It’s important that they merge at some point, but I don’t see it happening before Copenhagen,” she said.
One reason why it is difficult to merge the two is because the US never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, meaning it is excluded from talks under the AWG-KP – but is an active participant in the AWG-LCA discussions.
Meanwhile, John Kilani, director of sustainable development mechanisms at the UNFCCC secretariat, last week told Carbon Finance that no country – yet – has raised objections to the concept of nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs) by developing countries. “The principle of NAMA seems to be acceptable to almost all parties and it’s not very often at this stage of negotiations that you get issues that are unanimously agreed,” he said.
“But that being said, it’s also the fact that NAMAs mean different things to different people ... the devil is in the detail,” Kilani added. For example, NAMAs could be domestic cap-and-trade schemes, carbon taxes or a sectoral-based mechanism.
Zammit Cutajar said that there is no deadline for ideas for new mechanisms to be included in the deal, noting that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was only thrown into the mix late in the Kyoto Protocol discussions. However, de Boer quipped that, “as is traditional, the conference in Copenhagen will end at exactly 6pm on the final day” – most tend to run late into the night. But he said that it would be better to submit ideas sooner rather than later so that negotiators have time to understand them fully – adding that the late entry of the CDM into the 1997 talks “hampered” people’s understanding of the mechanism.
De Boer also warned on the lack of time left to hammer out an agreement, with less than 200 days until the key talks in December, and less than six weeks of negotiating time planned before then.
“It’s important to recognise that the session here in Bonn over the next two weeks really represents a significant new step in the talks,” de Boer said.
