The Durban conference on climate change ended on a much better note than many expected, but continued to delay the toughest questions for at least three years. The final outcome of the conference, COP-17, is a two-page, breakthrough document called the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” [...]

The end of the Durban conference is approaching, and in all likelihood, the end of the Kyoto Protocol along with it. Developments in the last few days indicate the outcome is more likely to confirm a global disagreement, rather than agreement, over the idea of a second Kyoto commitment period, or “Kyoto II,” for all countries, both developed and developing. [...]

With the Durban climate change negotiations barely a week old, key countries are drawing their “red line” positions in the sand. On one side of the line, where the Group of 77 (G77) + China and other developing countries firmly sit, is a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol that continues binding targets for current country signatories after the first period expires at the end of 2012 (excluding Canada, which has announced that it is pulling out of the treaty altogether). On the other is a European Union plan for a new global agreement with binding targets for all countries beginning in 2015 and in force by 2020. [...]

On Monday, Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada “will not make a second commitment to Kyoto.” In addition, Canada will no longer take steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol and may begin to formally withdraw from the agreement next month. In place of the Protocol, Canada’s goal is for “a new international agreement, eventually binding, which would include all the major developed and developing emitters.” [...]

Heading into Durban and the United Nations Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as the Seventeenth Conference of Parties (COP-17), the G77 remains committed to its long-standing position of achieving a legally binding agreement. Given the ongoing stalemate between developed and developing countries, however, many media accounts say they are unlikely to achieve it anytime soon [...]

China’s emissions have risen sharply in recent years due to rapid industrialisation, fuelled chiefly by coal burning. In terms of national emissions, it has overtaken the US; its per-capita emissions are currently much lower, but rising quickly. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has recently put China’s annual emissions at 6.8 tonnes of carbon [...]

It has taken a long time in China, but official policies finally aim to achieve a sustainable balance between environmental protection and economic growth in significant ways. Developments over the last several weeks and months include a draft proposal for new rules on fines for pollution, discussions of an environmental tax and increased environmental spending, [...]

While Ontario’s ambitious feed-in-tariff (FIT) policy is being put to the test by domestic and international opposition, including a challenge from Japan, Japan has just achieved a major breakthrough for its own FIT policy as it continues to recover from the tsunami and nuclear disaster this past March. Both examples will have implications for renewable [...]

The value of an EEZ is on clear display in the South China Sea dispute and in the Pacific small island states battling the climate change threat. Despite their differences – one carries the weight of changing geopolitics and possible military force; the other, the disappearance of states altogether from the world map – both [...]

Article by Guest Contributor: Joelle Westlund Emerging from the four preparatory rounds in Bonn, Germany and Tianjin, China, developing countries have reason to doubt the progress to be made at the COP16 conference in Cancun. In the meetings leading up to  the conference, China and the United States have already disclosed their predisposition towards agreements [...]