Durban climate talks see Europe, least-developed countries issue 11th hour plea

Nice logo, but will the United Nations climate change conference now underway in Durban, South Africa produce a global treaty of some sort before it wraps up Dec. 9? The conference is also called COP 17, that is, the 17th conference of the parties or nations which signed on to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

MIKE DE SOUZA
Postmedia News

DURBAN, South Africa — The European Union and the planet’s least-developed countries have issued an 11th hour plea at international climate change negotiations.

In a joint statement released Friday, the Europeans, along with groups representing small island states and the least-developed states touted progress on delivering an operational green climate fund and other provisions from 2010 agreements to improve international action on climate change.

But they said the gap remains too wide in achieving the ultimate objective of a new international regime that would be more effective and more comprehensive in covering rising emissions than the Kyoto agreement.

“We need not to remind anyone of the scale of climatic threats facing the most vulnerable countries in the world as a result of climate change,” said the joint statement. “The facts are clear and we are still too far from where we need to be to secure the most vulnerable countries’ right to sustainable development.”

Europe’s lead negotiator, Connie Hedegaard, the group’s climate action commissioner, said other countries have no excuses for failing to commit in Durban to a “robust mandate and roadmap” for resolving the negotiations with a binding deal by 2015.

“How can we go out and explain to people that four more years will not be enough to do this?” she asked during a news conference. “There are so many elements (in place). It’s not as if we have to start from scratch. We really do believe four years must be enough.”

The joint statement also stressed that the issue was a “matter of survival” for many countries.

“The price of buying time is rising,” it said. “Durban must deliver.”

Steven Guilbeault, a co-founder of Equiterre, a Quebec-based environmental group, suggested on Friday that the differences cannot be resolved unless countries like Canada and the U.S. bring more to the negotiating table.

“There are a lot of positive signs, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” said Guilbeault, a veteran observer of climate change negotiations. “So the question is whether this can be done in the next 24 hours.”

Both Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent and Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, have had their official addresses to the conference this week disrupted by protesters who say the two countries are blocking progress.

India and China have also been singled out by some nations and observers as reluctant to join a new legally-binding treaty, while Japan and Russia have said they are not prepared to take on new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under Kyoto after 2012.

The Kyoto agreement, signed in 1997 as an update to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is the only legally binding international document requiring reductions in the pollution that trap’s heat in the atmosphere.

While Canada, Russia and Japan have indicated they want to move away from the agreement, Europe has said it will take on targets in a new round, after the current commitment period of 2008 to 2012, if the other countries agree on achieving a new binding deal by 2015.

Kent said Thursday that Canada is also supporting this target date, but suggested that interim targets under Kyoto could delay implementation of the new deal.

But environmental groups are not convinced the Canadian government’s position is genuine, suggesting they are trying to protect oil-and-gas companies from a regime that would cut into their profits by forcing them to clean up their environmental footprint.

“I’ll put it bluntly,” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International. “Mr. Kent is in the pocket of the fossil-fuel industry, he acts in their interests. He acts against the interests of the Canadian people as a whole, because the energy choices that Canada makes now determine where Canada’s economic competitiveness will be in the future.”

But Kent indicated Thursday that he was concerned about the environment, noting that “time is really running short” for the world to take action to prevent temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

This level is considered by countries to be a dangerous threshold, that would cause irreversible damage to economies and ecosystems.