PREVIEW: 'Wobbly' climate summit could spell end of global talks

By Chris Cermak Nov 23, 2010, 11:10 GMT

Washington - As world governments prepare to hold a summit on climate change next week in the Mexican resort Cancun, one thing is already abundantly clear: there will be no global treaty agreed on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Government officials and even environmentalists are resigned to the fact that any deal on a climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012, will have to wait a few more years.

A sense of urgency that was palpable in Copenhagen, the much-hyped United Nations climate summit of December 2009, has been replaced by a simple hope that the international talks do not collapse completely during the two-week Cancun gathering, which begins Monday.

'At the moment, everything is so wobbly after Copenhagen,' Claire Parker of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global environmental association, told the German Press Agency dpa. 'It's very difficult to predict where it's going to go.'

The result is that Cancun will be a scaled-back conference. There will be very few world leaders attending, and the summit has turned into more of a trust-building exercise designed to get international negotiations back on track.

'The United Nations process is kind of on probation, and Cancun is the step to restore some confidence in it,' said Alden Meyer, a policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based environmental group.

Last December's Copenhagen talks ended mostly in recrimination and failure, despite being billed as the summit where world leaders would agree on the outlines of a new global treaty.

On one final, chaotic evening, leaders cobbled together the Copenhagen Accord, where countries laid out their individual, voluntary plans for cutting the greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists believe are causing global warming.

World leaders pledged to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which most scientists believe would avoid the worst effects of climate change. Yet even the Copenhagen Accord was not agreed to by all countries in the UN process.

In any case, Jennifer Morgan of the US-based World Resources Institute said governments in Cancun must recognize that their current emissions pledges are 'completely inadequate.' Global temperatures would still rise between 3-3.5 degrees.

A variety of factors have weakened the chances of a more far- reaching deal since Copenhagen. The world economic crisis shifted attention from the long-term effects of climate change to immediate concerns for families and governments about paying their bills.

'In a difficult economic climate, it is difficult to persuade people to make any sacrifice for long-term gain,' said the IUCN's Parker. 'The economic situation may take a while, and unfortunately we haven't got that long to address climate change.'

Some mishaps by climate scientists were seized by skeptics of global warming, including the release of emails at a British university that seemed to marginalize dissenting scientists, and mistakes discovered in a highly regarded UN climate report from 2007.

Differences between rich and emerging powers over who should be required to cut their emissions remain as large as ever. That gulf is widest between the world's two largest polluters: the United States, which failed to approve domestic climate legislation this year, and China, which refuses to sign up to legally binding emissions targets.

What might those confidence-restoring steps look like?

Negotiators are hoping to make progress on some of the side issues that are still critical to reducing global emissions and preparing countries for a warmer world.

There is hope that governments will agree to set up a 'Green Fund' to channel aid from wealthy countries to help poorer nations reduce their emissions and deal with the effects of global warming.

The fund would make more concrete a loose pledge by governments in Copenhagen to offer 30 billion dollars in climate financing by 2012 and to contribute up to 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 to fight climate change.

Other areas that have seen some progress in the last year include boosting efforts to help countries adapt to climate change and on tackling deforestation, which accounts for nearly 20 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

The lack of any significant movement in Cancun could spell the beginning of the end for the UN process, with governments shifting focus to their own domestic efforts and using smaller blocs like the Group of 20 (G20) to coordinate action on climate change.

US State Department climate envoy Todd Stern has said he expects 'concrete, incremental progress' in Cancun. But he warned last week that some steps toward breaking the standoff between governments were critical to keeping the talks going.

'The process can't continuously stalemate and remain the main focus of activity,' Stern said after a meeting with other climate envoys in Arlington, Virginia. 'There's going to be a point at which it's not going to work.'