About 20 000 delegates have begun descending on Durban for the COP17 international climate change conference which starts on Monday. But its success remains uncertain. Even the adoption of a Green Climate Fund – the minimum achievement expected – has now been cast into doubt.
More ambitious expectations such as keeping alive the Kyoto Protocol or agreeing to a much broader legally-binding treaty which commits all major emitters of carbon to emission cuts, remain even more elusive.
Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who will preside over the two-week conference, this week laid down making the Green Climate Fund operational as the minimum achievement she hoped for from COP17.
“The Green Climate Fund represents a centre piece of a broader set of outcomes for Durban,” she said at a briefing in Cape Town.
The fund will help finance the efforts of poorer countries to mitigate and adapt to the effects of global warming. It was agreed to in principle at the COP16 conference in Cancun, Mexico.
Cancun also agreed on other practical measures to tackle climate change. These include an adaptation committee to guide developing countries in adapting to climate change and a technology committee to ease the transfer of technology to developing countries to help them mitigate climate change.
Nkoana-Mashabane said all the Cancun Agreements must be operationalised.
“Developing countries demand a prompt start for the (Green Climate) Fund through its early and initial capitalisation,” she said.
At Cancun and at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries agreed to mobilise $100 billion a year to help developing countries. But disagreements have arisen about where the money should come from.
US special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said this week there was a misconception that developed country governments would fund all of the $100bn a year through the Green Climate Fund.
In fact, the $100bn would be the total from all sources, including individual governments, international development banks, private companies and carbon markets.
The issue of how big a role the private sector should play in financing the Green Climate Fund had now created uncertainty about whether or not the fund would be operationalised in Durban, a diplomat close to the negotiations said.
This had been one of the main deliverables hoped for in Durban.
The US was looking for more private sector financing of the fund.
Stern acknowledged that the US had not yet adopted the proposal on the structuring and financing of the fund “because there are some things we think are a bit problematic”.
But he insisted that the US remained “a strong advocate” of the fund and believed it would be adopted in Durban.
Nkoana-Mashabane said that implementing the Cancun agreements would not be enough and that Durban also had to resolve the issue of the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and agree on the legal nature of a future climate change system.
The first commitment period of Kyoto Protocol – the only legally-binding international treaty committing countries to specific carbon emission cuts – expires at the end of next year.
If COP17 cannot agree to a second commitment period, then Durban could earn notoriety as “the graveyard of Kyoto” as climate change law specialist Andrew Gilder warned this week.
He believed the Kyoto Protocol would be kept alive as the SA government had put so much effort into that. But it is by no means clear SA will succeed.
Japan, Russia and Canada have already vowed they will not stay in the protocol unless other major carbon emitters such as the US, China and India, which are not signatories, agree to be legally bound to specific emission cuts, either under the Kyoto Protocol or under a new much broader global treaty.
That has left only the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand still in the Kyoto Protocol and bound to emission cuts.
But even this group has threatened not to sign a second Kyoto after 2012 unless the big emitters agree in Durban to negotiate a new legally-binding agreement.
As the EU’s ambassador to SA, Roeland van de Geer said this week, the big emitters like the US, China and India must at least give a “commitment to commit” to new agreement to be negotiated by 2015 and implemented by 2020.
Norway’s chief climate negotiator Henrik Harboe noted that the EU and the four other countries still in the Kyoto Protocol together produce just 15 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, so others had to come in.
The “robustness” of the commitment by the US and the big developing countries to a broad treaty during the negotiations at COP17 would determine how the EU, Norway and the other countries would respond.
At best, this could be an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol for a legally-binding second commitment period.
But if the EU and co are not satisfied with the promises in Durban, they might only agree to a COP decision that they reaffirmed their Kyoto targets and planned to carry them out, even beyond the formal expiry of the first commitment period.
Whether this second option would avoid the broad perception that “Durban is the graveyard of Kyoto” seems doubtful.
Greg Barker, the UK climate change minister also stressed that the UK, and other EU members, would only sign up to a second Kyoto Protocol commitment period if the big emitters outside the protocol understood that that was a stepping stone to a broader agreement.
But even without such agreement, Durban could do important practical things to mitigate and adapt to climate change, such as getting finance to African and other developing countries. - Foreign Editor