Related News:
Climate Envoys Seek Consensus on $100 Million in Aid for Poorer Nations
Envoys from more than 40 nations are in Geneva to brainstorm ways to help poorer nations get the estimated $100 million a year needed to fight global warming.
Officials from the European Union, Brazil, China, France and the U.S. are trying to lay the groundwork to reinvigorate the next round of international climate negotiations later this year in Cancun, Mexico. Their agenda for the meeting that started today in Geneva includes a new climate fund, coordinating public financing and boosting private funding.
“Funding for developing countries holds a key to action, which is why the meeting that will start today is so important,” Christiana Figueres, the UN diplomat leading the global climate talks, told reporters in Geneva today.
Negotiators failed at last year’s meeting in Copenhagen to bring China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest emitters, into the 1997 Kyoto treaty that obliges most developed nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. While Copenhagen yielded a non- binding agreement for more than 130 countries to provide $100 billion a year of help by 2020, envoys are “backtracking,” U.S. lead negotiator Jonathan Pershing said last month.
Some nations are demanding more money and others want carbon-dioxide reductions to apply only to industrialized countries, Pershing said.
“We aim to establish the roots of a consensus,” Franz Perrez, Switzerland’s lead climate-change negotiator, said yesterday at news conference opening today’s meeting.
‘Temporary Constraint’
Industrialized nations promised at Copenhagen to provide $10 billion a year in assistance for poorer counties from 2010 to 2012. Sources of almost all of this so-called fast-track financing have been identified, with some of it to be distributed though bilateral agreements between nations Figueres said today. How to raise and distribute the $100 billion a year in long-term funds through 2020 is under discussion, she said.
“I believe there’s sincerity on the part of industrialized countries of living up to the pledges that they made in Copenhagen, both with respect to fast-track as well as long-term financing,” Figueres said. “That sincerity has to be dealt with in the context of the financial crisis, which we all expect the world will be able to move out from. It’s a temporary constraint, not a permanent constraint.”
The financial crisis, together with the complexity and uncertainty of climate regulation reduced private investment last year in emission-reduction projects in developing nations. While the global carbon market grew 6 percent to $144 billion last year, the value of investment in project-based activities dropped 54 percent, according to World Bank data.
Jittery Markets
Under the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the world’s second-biggest carbon market after the European Union cap-and- trade program, investors can earn tradable credits for investing in emissions-reduction projects in developing nations. Those offsets can be used for compliance in the EU market.
Private investment needed to cut emissions enough to limit the earth’s temperature increase since pre-industrial times to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is also on the agenda of the Geneva meeting, co-organized by the Swiss and Mexican governments.
“Carbon markets are jittery about what will happen after 2012,” the International Institute for Sustainable Development said in briefing notes for the meeting. “Clear policy and regulatory signals are needed if a stronger global carbon market is to emerge and private sector investment is to return.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ewa Krukowska in Geneva at ekrukowska@bloomberg.net; Dylan Griffiths in Geneva at dgriffiths1@bloomberg.net
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page