INTERVIEW: World Bank: In Africa, all not gloom at climate talks

By Pat Reber Dec 5, 2011, 10:54 GMT

Washington - The Kyoto Protocol faces a cloudy future in international climate-change talks, which World Bank chief climate envoy Andrew Steer admits are politically 'very challenging.'

But Steer sees a ray of hope at the meeting, which continues through Friday in Durban, South Africa, where the broader story is not just global warming but Africa's own progress.

South Africa, which relies on coal for most of its electricity, plans to launch its own high-profile renewable energy project at the Durban meetings, jockeying for place as a global contender in green technology.

Ethiopia is to launch its green growth strategy in Durban, while Morocco will be touting its plans to build the world's largest concentrated solar powerplant and export electricity to Europe.

'The notion that some negotiators used to have that 'We'll only do something about climate change if you rich countries pay us' is just nonsense,' Steer said.

In Kenya, investment in green technologies such as wind, geothermal, small-scale hydro and biofuels went from virtually zero in 2009 to 1.3 billion dollars in 2010, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme.

Steer said Kenyan farmers are experimenting with low-tillage techniques and crop rotations used elsewhere in the world that can sequester up to 1 ton of carbon per acre per year.

'I think the Africa story is particularly interesting for Durban, to change the psychology of Africa towards climate change, away from Africa as victim and towards Africa as a player, seizing the opportunity,' Steer said.

Steer is especially engaged in green technology as head of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), a collaboration of worldwide development banks that pools about 6 billion dollars a year in loans and grants for projects to develop renewable energy and reduce the carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The three-year-old effort has leveraged 10 times the annual amount in private investments - a sort of role model for the much larger Green Climate Fund, slated for 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 - which organizers of the United Nations talks in Durban hope to finalize.

The Green Fund concept was launched at the 2010 talks in Cancun, with the goal of helping poor countries develop low-carbon technology and adapt to the growing effects of global warming.

Developing countries, including China, were exempt from Kyoto's binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions. But part of the Green Fund agreement - which is not part of Kyoto - nudged them toward making pledges in exchange for financial help.

Steer's CIF Climate Investment Fund is playing a special role as advisor and likely interim trustee to the Green Fund, as it gets up and running. Although the United States and Saudi Arabia refused to sign off on a consensus document beforehand - some say the US wants a bargaining chip for other issues at the talks - organizers hoped it would survive the summit.

'The Green Fund is a matter of creating a board and firing the starting gun,' Steer told dpa.

The original Kyoto Protocol expires in December 2012, and previous summits have kicked the urgent question of what happens afterward on to Durban.

The European Union says it is willing to renew Kyoto into a second period, but only if the two largest emitters - China and the United States, which together produce 40 per cent of global greenhouse gas - to be part of binding talks later in the decade.

The US, which never ratified Kyoto, and China, which was exempted as a developing country, are still insisting that the other go first in that declaration, continuing the stalemate that has blocked progress for years on the extension.

Steer says there's no doubt that 'it's very important to struggle with the issue of the global deal, the legal form, Kyoto or not.'

'But don't fail to notice what's already going on in the world, and don't fail to move forward the building blocks such as the technology, the agriculture, the adaptation, that actually will be part of a final global deal when the politics and economics are right for it,' he said.

'We want a global deal, ... but we shouldn't all go to Durban and get depressed if there's not a global deal,' he said. 'We think that Durban can play a role in changing the hearts and minds and behaviour, and that's really what it's all about.'