First of 2 parts

IN less than two weeks, envoys from 192 countries will reunite in Barcelona to negotiate on the substantive agenda for a new deal that must save the world from catastrophic climate change.   Earlier this month in Bangkok, negotiators strived to streamline the negotiating text that would provide the basis of that historic deal in Copenhagen, and thus moved the process forward.

At the same time, however, developing nations took to task rich countries for allegedly plotting a “great escape” from the Kyoto Protocol,  the only legally binding instrument the world has to combat climate change, in pursuit of a new agreement that would include the United States.  The Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), sets binding carbon emission reduction targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community at an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels during the first commitment period from 2008 to 2012.

Evasion of 2nd commitment period?

Kyoto Protocol members are obliged to enter into a second commitment period after 2012, which will have to be negotiated and ratified, but must provide for ambitious emission reduction targets, among others. Developing countries want rich countries to cut the carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels under the second commitment period. The Bush administration never saw fit to bind the United States, one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, to the Kyoto Protocol.

There have been lingering suspicions that developed countries want out of the Kyoto Protocol but were only confirmed by the European Union (EU) itself during a meeting with the G77 and China Group in Bangkok, representatives of the latter told reporters at the end of the Bangkok talks.

“We were told and it has been expressed in the clearest possible terms…that the decision was made a year ago that they are going to ‘move away’ [of the Kyoto Protocol]. That’s the term used,” Ambassador Lumumba D’Aping of Sudan, chairman of the G77 and China Group. He said the EU is pursuing a new agreement that he believed “would be taking the international climate-change regime many steps backwards.”

Developed countries are convinced that the United States—which is not, and has said that it will never be, part of the Kyoto Protocol—would be part of a new agreement.

“It now looks like the Annex I [countries] would like to make a ‘comparable effort’ in a collection of national pledges instead of an international binding treaty, and at low ambition levels. This is simply unacceptable. It would betray the trust of the world public that is demanding a major step forward, and not a major step backwards, in developed countries’ commitments and actions,” D’Aping said.

‘Don’t shift the post, or throw the baby’

He said the “most logical thing” to do would be to improve on the Kyoto Protocol through negotiations on the second commitment period by setting ambitious emission reduction targets, finance and transfer of technology necessary to achieve those goals, and successful adaptation.

“You do not shift the post and say, ‘I’m walking away from this.’ It’s like throwing away your baby and saying, ‘No, I want to have a new one.’ There is no any other way of dealing with that,” he said.

D’Aping said the Kyoto Protocol is non-negotiable as it is “the lifeblood” of any future agreement. “It is the only acceptable legal binding instrument that gives us the certainty of moving rapidly to address the threats that are faced by the billions of citizens of the world.”

He said that what made the stance of developed nations toward the Kyoto Protocol “irresponsible” was the fact it was made at the time that Asia, the host continent of the sessions,  was being ravaged by destructive typhoons attributed to climate change.

“We do believe that it is irresponsible even to contemplate the idea of discarding one agreement in order to enter into negotiations for another 15 years. Neither the test of truthfulness or test of arrogance or conscience or responsibility will justify such an act,” he said.

Bernarditas de Castro Muller, a climate-change advisor of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines and a coordinator for the G77 and China Group in the climate-change talks, said in an interview with the BusinessMirror that the G77 had invited the EU negotiators to a meeting to know the real score on the Kyoto Protocol.

“We invited them because we want to find out why are we here? What are you really trying to say? Because from their proposals, we can see that they really don’t want the Kyoto Protocol. Then they will tell the media it’s not like that,” she said on the sidelines of the Bangkok meeting.

She said the EU delegation informed them that “they will abandon the Kyoto Protocol because the US is not part of it.”

Muller said that developed countries have been moving  “toward shirking and skirting these responsibilities, shifting these responsibilities to developing countries themselves.” This is inconsistent with the Kyoto Protocol, the Convention, and the Bali Action Plan which place the burden of binding emission targets and financing on developed countries since they are primarily responsible for climate-altering greenhouse-gas emissions that developing countries are most vulnerable to but are not financially prepared to adapt to or mitigate.

De Boer: Constructive process, strong fear

“All we’re asking for is for everybody to meet their responsibilities in accordance with the principles that we have agreed upon. And all we’re seeing is that our partners are not willing to continue this kind of global cooperation for meeting all our commitments in accordance with the principles that we have agreed upon in Rio,” she said, referring to the Rio Summit in 1992, where the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was forged.

Assessing the outcome of the Bangkok talks, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer described the process as “constructive” but there remained “strong fear” and dissatisfaction among developing nations about moves to “kill” the Kyoto Protocol when “there’s still nothing better in sight.”

De Boer said, however, that “the question of legal form is the one that comes in the end”; otherwise, “it’s like arguing over the color of the wrapping paper of the present you have yet to go out and buy.”

Addressing reporters on the last day of the Bangkok talks, Sweden’s chief negotiator, Anders Turesson, asserted that the EU is not out to “murder” the Kyoto Protocol.

“Once again we’ve heard the killing of the Kyoto Protocol. We even heard murder. We are not killing the Kyoto Protocol. We are actually on our second rescue operation,” Turesson said.

The EU’s first “rescue mission” was when the US Senate voted against the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as it did not include binding targets for both industrialized and developing nations, and might “harm” the US economy.

Turesson said that the second “rescue mission” would involve “preserving the Kyoto architecture, the contents.”

He added: “We believe that the only way to do that and to develop it and strengthen it in the future is indeed to do what we are now suggesting, namely, to find a new home within a single legal instrument,” Turesson said.

EU: No intent to drop anything

He said EU countries “do not intend to drop anything” from the Kyoto Protocol and that discussions within the EU on the Kyoto Protocol is “about the Kyoto architecture with all its elements, all its pieces, from the legally binding commitments as to emission reductions onwards to all the mechanisms, to of course the compliance system as well, we have the important requirements.”

Turesson said the EU “would rather talk about developing and strengthening them because, of course, the protocol must be improved in many respects.”

Such words did not reassure developing nations, who issued strong statements at the closing plenary of the Bangkok talks under the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA).

Speaking for G77, Sudan Ambassador Ibrahim Mirghani Ibrahim said: “No amount of selective reading or creative interpretation will be sufficient to hide the fact these negotiations constitute re-negotiations of the Convention with a view to generating new commitments that are entirely inappropriate for developing countries and eliminate or diminish the appropriate commitments of developed countries. We oppose them directly and emphatically.”   

China’s head of delegation, Su Wei,  referred to the two tracks of the AWG-LCA and the Ad-hoc working group on the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) as a train that started in Bali on a two-track railway but is now under threat of  “new roadblocks on the Convention” thrown in by developed countries.

“The train should have already been accelerated so as to arrive in Copenhagen in time. But to our great disappointment and dismay, the train encounters big problems in running along the two-track rail, with one track, the Kyoto Protocol, on the verge of being destroyed. The Kyoto Protocol track is cut into pieces and its debris and fragmented pieces are placed on the Convention track. Serious consequences will follow.... Please don’t derail our train to Copenhagen,” Su said.

3 possibilities

Trying to make sense of what he called the “colorful language about the Kyoto Protocol” bandied about by developed and developing nations, Malta’s Ambassador for Climate Change Michael Zammit Cutajar, AWG-LCA chairman, presented three “possibilities” during a news briefing at the United Nations Convention Center in Bangkok, where the meetings were held.

One, Cutajar said, is to forge ahead with an improved version of the Kyoto Protocol which the United States will not ratify. Another is a variation of the Kyoto Protocol with the same accounting mechanisms and compliance requirements “but legally would be something different” that the US may ratify and which, he thinks, embodies the EU’s  proposed “single legal instrument.”

A third option, he said, would be to “go ahead with something different from the Kyoto Protocol which would have, if you like, less stringent requirements on the developed country parties and that is worrying the EU. I’m not speaking for the EU but I’m interpreting what I see there.”

Artur Runge-Metzger of the European Commission  said the EU wants “to see a broader agreement which covers not only the US but also the more advanced economies taking very strong action like China and India” in terms of emission-reduction targets, adding that the latter “has always been the stumbling block for the US when signing up to the Kyoto Protocol.”

Runge-Metzger said the EU expects from Copenhagen “an ambitious, comprehensive, a global and a legally binding agreement that ensures the participation by both the US and the advanced developing countries.”

“A deal that would exclude major economies would not be able to prevent global warming  from reaching dangerous levels,” he said.

(Conclusion on Tuesday, October 27)