MODEST EXPECTATIONS CHARACTERIZE UNFCCC MEETING IN DOHA

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
11/30/12

The latest round of United Nations climate change negotiations kicked off Monday in Doha, Qatar to relatively modest expectations compared to recent years. A year after delegates from nearly 200 countries negotiated an eleventh-hour agreement in Durban, South Africa to formulate legally-binding emissions reduction targets for both rich and poor countries by 2015, many experts this year said they do not expect many marquee bargains to emerge out of this year’s Conference of Parties summit under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Instead, many hoped that the two weeks of high-level discussions would lead to incremental progress for major climate deals later down the road.

In an interview published last week in Yale Environment 360, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said one of the major goals of the summit would be to finalize some sort of work plan for the Durban emissions reduction agreement through 2015. Nations need “to put forth some clarity on how governments are going to organize their work from now until 2015 in order to insure that they would be putting themselves in a good position to adopt a universal agreement in 2015,” Figueres said. “And, as they do that, at the same time they need to identify where are the possibilities for increasing the ambition of everyone on mitigation and adaptation.”

Commitments of U.S., China Seen as Key

In Durban, nations last year agreed to finalize an emissions reduction plan for both developed and developing nations in 2015 that would go into effect beginning in 2020. However, little progress has been made in terms of details since. Reports from Doha this week indicated that all eyes continue to be on the U.S. and China as both countries appear to fret over their respective levels of commitment to an emissions reduction agreement. While the U.S. has maintained its position that it will not agree to any binding measures without a similar level of commitment from China, the Chinese argue that the U.S. has the highest historical contribution of greenhouse gases to global warming and should subsequently be liable for a larger share of emissions reductions.

Almost immediately after arriving in Doha, a coalition of 100 of the world’s least developed countries—many of which are considered the most susceptible to the impacts of climate change—called for all large emitters to commit to significant legally-binding emissions reductions. Meanwhile, many environmental groups in attendance at Doha also called on the U.S. to take a leadership role on the issue. BlueGreen Alliance Executive Director David Foster wrote to Todd Stern, the U.S.’ chief climate negotiator, earlier this week underscoring this year’s meeting in Doha as a “pivotal” moment for establishing a roadmap for the years ahead. “Now, more than ever, we need the United States to assume a leadership role if the world is to sufficiently take on the global climate change challenge,” Foster said.

IEA Chief Not Optimistic

But others in the international energy community remained more pessimistic about the negotiations. “I’m not optimistic at all,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven told reporters this week at an event in Washington. “I was in Durban last year and I wasn’t optimistic there, but at least there was a kind of global engagement on climate change. I don’t think we are going to make much progress at this moment.” In the most recent edition of IEA’s World Energy Outlook released earlier this month, the organization underscored that time is running out to limit global temperature increases to the 2°C mark above preindustrial levels agreed to in last year’s UNFCCC negotiations. Instead, IEA predicts that under current policy trajectories, nations are on track to increase emissions by roughly 6°C by the end of the century. Meanwhile, a report released recently by the World Bank estimated that global temperature increases could increase fivefold over the next decade if worldwide pledges to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are not met, a level that could spike to a 4°C increase by the end of the century.

Many reports from Doha indicated that more concrete progress could be achieved this year by rounding out the details to the Green Climate Fund agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009. At the time, the world’s rich countries said they would aim to raise $100 billion annually for the fund by 2020. While those developed countries have to date funneled nearly $30 billion into the fund, those commitments expire this year, and few other details surrounding the fund have been finalized to date that would allow it to stand on its own two feet.

What also could see progress this year is the finalization of some sort of second commitment period to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is set to begin in early 2013 and could act as a stop-gap emissions reduction measure until some other global deal is reached. However, only about 15 percent of the world’s sources of greenhouse gas emissions are expected to commit to a second Kyoto phase—within the last year Canada, Japan and Russia have all said they are dropping out of the pact—essentially leaving only the European Union and Australia involved in the discussion.

Check back next week for more in-depth coverage of the UNFCCC’s COP meeting in Doha.