Baltic and European news
International climate talks open in Vienna
2376, 27/08/07
The latest international talks to define a post-Kyoto policy framework to address climate change opened in Vienna on Monday. The head of the UN's climate convention, Yvo de Boer, described the meeting as a crucial opportunity to "measure the temperature" of international negotiations.
There are two main items on the agenda. Parties to the Kyoto protocol will discuss climate change mitigation potentials and future emission reduction targets for industrialised countries. Meanwhile, parties to the protocol's parent convention on climate change (UNFCCC) will look at ways of strengthening implementation of the treaty.
Mr de Boer said he hoped the meeting would help "form the main building blocks of a new climate change regime." It should set the stage for agreeing a full negotiating agenda for the next two years at the major UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December, he added.
On Tuesday, the UNFCCC secretariat will present delegates with a new assessment of investment and financial flows needed to respond to climate change. It puts the requirement for additional annual investment at 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of global GDP by 2030. The estimate is of the same order as last year's Stern report, which suggested that the worst impacts of climate change could be avoided at a cost of 1% of global GDP per year by 2050 (EED 30/10/06 http://www.endseuropedaily.com/21951).
Breaking down the figures, the UNFCCC report says that an additional US$200-210bn will be needed in 2030 to return global greenhouse gas emissions to current levels.
It finds the cost of adapting to climate change harder to estimate, but predicts that by 2030 the additional sum needed will amount to "several tens of billion US dollars". Like the Stern report, however, the UNFCCC study stresses that the "value of the climate change impacts that those expenditures would avoid could be larger".
The report concludes that carbon markets such as the EU ETS will play a key role in generating the necessary extra funds. It also adds that projects already planned under the Kyoto protocol's clean development mechanism (CDM) are estimated to have generated 25bn US dollars of investment in 2006.
But another report by the American NGO Environmental Defense, published as a discussion paper for the Vienna meeting, warns that continuing the CDM in its current form beyond 2012 "will make it essentially impossible to achieve a decline in global emissions by 2020." By transferring reductions achieved in countries with no emission cap to nations with caps, the scheme allows total emissions to continue rising in both, it argues.
The report proposes new mechanisms to deliver real emissions reductions, and recommends phasing out the participation of "major developing economies" such as China and India in the CDM to allow smaller developing countries to get more involved.
Follow-up: UNFCCC http://unfccc.int/2860.php, tel: +49 228 815 1000, plus press release
and Vienna climate change talks homepage
http://unfccc.int/meetings/intersessional/awg_4_and_dialogue_4/items/3999.php.
See also UNFCCC report on climate change investment and financing
http://unfccc.int/cooperation_and_support/financial_mechanism/items/4053.php
and press release
plus Environmental Defense report on CDM
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/6838_ED_Vienna_CDM%20Paper_8_22_07.pdf.
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