UN climate conference: weak deal avoids total failure
Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) – World chancelleries greeted with a sign of relief the last minute agreement at the 16th United Nations Conference on Climate, which ended last week in Cancún (Mexico). The deal includes a number of decisions whose details remain yet to be drawn up. However, fears of another failure, after that of Copenhagen in 2009, loomed as a dark cloud over the conference site. Once again, the most powerful and polluting nations, the United States and China, stood out for their unwillingness to reach a deal that would require them to carry out major cuts in pollution output.
The agreement came after a two-day marathon. About 200 nations signed on, except for Bolivia, which deemed it inadequate and announced its intention to take recourse at the International Court in The Hague. However, given the low expectations before the conference, most delegates and environmentalists were relieved, viewing the deal as “balanced” and “better than expected”.
The Cancún Accord calls for deep cuts in emissions that cause green house gasses in order to keep temperature rises to no more than 2 Celsius over pre-industrial levels. It reaffirms the Kyoto Protocol and calls on rich countries to cut their emissions by 25 to 40 per cent within 2020 over 1990.
Still, the United States is not bound by that Kyoto process because it did not ratify the protocol. What is more, the figures mentioned are just targets, nothing more.
The accord also includes action to stop deforestation.
On the tough issues, no agreement was possible. The gap between rich industrialised and developing nations is still wide. The latter want energy to develop their economies and fight poverty. To do so, they rely on technologically simple but highly polluting sources such as coal. Some like China are becoming major polluters in their own right.
Developing countries blame current pollution levels on developed countries; for this reason, they want exemptions on pollution controls or massive economic and technological transfers to develop clean but more expensive and sophisticated sources of energy.
In general, emerging nations want to push back binding targets in order to pursue their own development.
Xie Zhenhua, China's climate chief and deputy director of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, approved of the deal. “While there are some shortcomings, we are satisfied," he said, adding however, “The negotiations in the future will continue to be difficult”.
Echoing such views, Huang Huikang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative, said the deal was “possibly the best one we can get for the moment”. For his part, US climate envoy Todd Stern noted, “What we have now is a text that is not perfect, but is certainly a good basis for moving forward,”
For experts though, real progress is still far off as long as the worst polluters, starting with the United States and China, do not accept binding targets.
In fact, on major issues, Cancún was a stalemate. Washington wants Beijing to cut its emissions, whilst China (and India) rejects limits if they stop its economic development, and leave tens of millions of people in poverty.
Indeed, the deal includes emission constraints on developing countries and international controls, but postpones implementation to the time when developed countries provide adequate levels of aid.
Thus, the path forward appears uncertain on how to translate general principles into real action.
In the meantime, a Green Climate Fund was agreed with funds destined to the countries most affected by climate change. The United States, the European Union and Japan are expected to raise and pay out US$ 100 billion per year by 2020.
All other issues are left on the table until next year’s conference in South Africa.
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