World leaders approve new global climate talks approve package, fund

World leaders approve a modest plan to curb climate change as the two-week UN climate talks wrap up Dec. 10 in Cancun.

Mike de Souza
POSTMEDIA NEWS

CANCUN, Mexico – The world’s governments approved a modest plan early on Saturday Dec. 11 to combat climate change, including a new fund to help poor nations, despite objections by Bolivia.

“This is a new era of international co-operation on climate change,” Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa told delegates at the end of two weeks of talks overshadowed by disputes between rich and poor countries.

The deal comprises a “Green Climate Fund,” reaffirms a goal of raising $100 billion in aid by 2020 and has measures to protect tropical forests and new ways to share new clean energy technologies.

Espinosa banged down her gavel on the deal despite objections by Bolivia, which said the deal demanded too little of developed nations in cutting greenhouse gases.

“It’s really pretty historic,” said Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat of the deal. “It’s the first time that countries have agreed to such a broad set of instruments and tools that are going to help developing countries in particular to meet the challenges of mitigation and adaptation.”

The plan was unlocked after delegates simply put off until 2011 a dispute between rich and poor nations over the future of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut emissions until 2012.

The deal does not include a commitment to extend Kyoto beyond 2012, when its first period expires, but it would prevent a collapse of climate change negotiations and allow for some modest advances on protecting the environment.

Environmental and social justice organizations were more skeptical of the deal.

Earlier on Friday, Canadian officials stressed the importance of charting a new path in the battle against global warming by engaging Americans and turning away from the Kyoto Protocol.

Environment Minister John Baird and Canadian Ambassador to the United States Gary Doer both insisted the Kyoto deal would never work because the U.S. refused to accept the treaty.

Baird said the Obama administration’s commitment to fighting climate change still provides an opportunity if the international community decides to take advantage.

“We had an opportunity last year, when that administration had a super majority in the Senate and we didn’t take advantage of it,” Baird said. “Let’s not look back a year from now and say we missed another opportunity to bring the Americans in the tent.”

Doer added that previous climate-change legislation adopted by the House of Representatives would not get passed in the Senate.

“Obviously, that represents a challenge even for the United States on (the) Copenhagen (accord),” he said. “Kyoto is not on the radar screen at all, in terms of policies in the United States.”

But Steven Guilbeault, deputy director of Equiterre — a Quebec-based environmental group — said the government’s arguments were fallacious.

“If you’re here to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and fight global warming, then you need Kyoto,” said Guilbeault, a veteran observer of UN climate negotiations.

“Yes, Copenhagen covers 80 per cent of emissions, but that’s on a path toward a four-degrees-Celsius (increase in average global temperatures) . . . It’s not enough.”

Climate scientists say humans must rapidly scale back activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions, such as deforestation or the consumption of gasoline and other fossil fuels, in order to avoid dramatic consequences around the world linked to global warming.

Guilbeault said a better solution would be to introduce a binding U.S. target into the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since the U.S. had already ratified that treaty in the 1990s, it would not need to bring this back to its Senate for approval, Guilbeault explained.

The Kyoto Protocol is the only international treaty on climate change that sets legally binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — which trap heat in the atmosphere — between 2008 and 2012.

The Copenhagen accord is a three-page document without any legally binding targets that was also embraced by Japan, which has indicated it won’t accept a new round of targets under Kyoto.

Baird has indicated at the conference that it’s possible to implement legally binding targets within the Copenhagen framework, supported by the Obama administration, but many developing countries would rather stick with the Kyoto treaty, signed in 1997.