Differences crop as UN climate talks move into decisive week
The United Nations (UN) climate talks moved into their decisive week with rich nations seeking to get the pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord, agreed last year, as part of climate negotiations and the developing world insisting on second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
The United Nations (UN) climate talks moved into their decisive week with rich nations seeking to get the pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord, agreed last year, as part of climate negotiations and the developing world insisting on second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
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Ministers from around the world, including 35 head of the states, have reached Cancun to find a political solution to negotiations that in the first week of 2010 climate summit had narrowed to some disputes. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not coming.
Pressure on ministers to produce some agreement was apparent when European Union's climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said, "We cannot leave Cancun empty handed".
The ministers are looking at decisions on establishing a "green fund" to help poorer nations rein in greenhouse gases and to adapt their economies and infrastructure to a changing climate; an agreement making it easier for developing nations to obtain patented green technology from advanced nations; and pinning down more elements of a system for compensating developing countries for protecting their forests.
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Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the outcome at Cancun should be built on an agreement on second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, immediate disbursement of fast track finance and continued dialogue on Intellectual Property Right (IPR) issues.
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Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the outcome at Cancun should be built on an agreement on second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, immediate disbursement of fast track finance and continued dialogue on Intellectual Property Right (IPR) issues.
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"Hard to say where we are. I can see a workable result that gets decisions across all the major areas," said US special envoy Todd Stern.
Negotiators have two text of documents -- one each on Kyoto Protocol and Long Term Cooperative Action (LCA) on climate change -- to work on but most experts say that finding any agreement on them at Cancun will be difficult. The LCA has some elements of the Copenhagen Accord, brokered by US president Barack Obama with India, China, Brazil and South Africa, jointly called Basic group in 2009. As many as 140 nations have endorsed the accord and 85 have made pledged mitigation action. The pledges in the Copenhagen Accord are purely voluntary, and are insufficient to meet the scientific goal of limiting average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above what it was before the industrial age began.
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Some breakthrough has already taken place in Cancun with China agreeing to the US concern that all their operations including fully domestic actions, would be open to international scrutiny. "It is a good start. We have to work on it regarding details beyond Cancun," Stern said, while listing some remaining issues such as to whom countries will report their actions and whether other nations will be able to seek answers. "Our differences are reducing," said Xie Zhenhua, China's climate minister.
The Latin American nations Bolivia and Venezuela have, however, come up as biggest spoilsport for United States with they insisting on clear identification of protection of rights of indigenous people in agreements on forestry and finance and second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol.
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Christiana Figueres, the UN's top climate official, said backstage efforts were under way to finesse the Kyoto issue. "There is already an active search for that medium ground," she said.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
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