GOVERNMENT is dismayed at the outcome of the latest climate talks in Bonn Germany and will be reviewing the report of Guyana’s negotiator, Andrew Bishop both at the level of the Low-Carbon Development Strategy Steering Committee and Cabinet Sub-Committee on Natural Resources Sub-Committee. This is according to Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, who spoke on the issue at his weekly post-Cabinet press briefing held at the Office of the President on Thursday.
The latest climate change meeting was held in Bonn Germany from August 2 to 6, and saw the participation of Parties to the Convention on climate change and of the Kyoto Protocol (KP). The next round of talks will be in Tianjin, China in October, and after that will be the COP 16 in Cancun Mexico in November and December.
Repeating the old adage, “Man proposes, but God disposes,” Dr. Luncheon said that this most aptly describes the negotiation process, leading up to Copenhagen and subsequent to that, including the just-concluded Bonn talks.
“The Bonn talks did not contribute any solace or heightened expectation of any outcome,” Dr. Luncheon said.
The talks in Bonn resulted in the negotiating text becoming more bogged down with bracketed options reducing the chances of a binding agreement by 2011. Experts in Bonn opined that an agreement that is sufficient to keep the earth from warming at too fast a rate may not come before 2012, the year at which the Kyoto Protocol is to expire. There was talk of extending the life of the Kyoto Protocol.
Presentations to the closing plenary of meeting condemned the talks as a backward step and accused the developed countries of making efforts to dismantle the negotiation process and the global climate regime.
The groups noted that a number of Annex I Parties have expressed an unwillingness to commit to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol – suggesting they intend to violate their legally binding obligations. The advocacy groups said too that many developed countries are also opposing a science and equity-based aggregate target under the KP.
The groups believe that the Annex 1 Parties should adhere to their commitments under article 3.9 of the KP.
They noted also that some Annex 1 Parties are also seeking to migrate favoured elements of the Protocol, like market mechanisms, into a new agreement under the Adhoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) and to establish a system of voluntary pledges as envisaged in the Copenhagen Accord.
They said that such a voluntary system offers no guarantee that the global effort will be sufficient to curb climate change, or that the contributions of individual countries will be adequate and fair.
The group observed that the proposals made at the meeting for new Kyoto targets are “riddled” with loopholes. They noted that firstly, Annex I Parties are pushing to include weak land-use and forest accounting rules that would allow them to increase their emissions. This, they said, amounts to around five percent of the emissions of Annex I Parties in 1990. Second, they said that upwards of 11 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent of surplus allowances (just under 90 percent of Annex I Party emissions in 1990) could undermine any Annex I effort. Thirdly, they noted that Annex I Parties are shifting the mitigation burden to developing countries by using carbon markets to “offset” their emissions,.
They said that measured against scientific analysis and the demands of developing countries, the pledges and the weak rules proposed by Annex I Parties are insupportable.