At Poznan a number of developing countries – China, Mexico and Brazil – took the opportunity to announce new climate change initiatives. Indonesia’s initiative, one of the world’s top 20 greenhouse gas emitters, was conspicuous by its absence and, given recent disagreements over budgetary control, we shouldn’t expect anything soon. The body expected to take [...]

In Bali last year, the ICC and WBCSD, as representatives of global business at the climate talks, named their one-day side event “Tri Hita Karana”, a proverb taken from a Balinese philosophy which emphasizes that happiness can only be attained if the Creator, people and nature live in harmony with each other. This year, the [...]

Last week, from the midst of COP-14 in Poland, I reported that the major developed countries were engaged in something of a waiting game on emissions targets, each waiting to see what others would do before announcing their own.   As you may remember, on Wednesday of last week Canada, Australia and Japan pulled the [...]

Talks at Poznan about a re-engineering of the Clean Development Mechanism, Kyoto Protocol’s righteous son, have been Bonn-ed. This does not come as a surprise for some observers, but disappointment is understandable. As a flagship of the Kyoto Protocol’s market-based approach to climate change, one could have hoped that delegates fixed at least the most [...]

As Poznan, COP 14, an intermediate negotiations phase draws to a close and delegates from all over the world disperse, it is clear that there was very limited progress made on reforming the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the short-term. The CDM is one of the three mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol that enables developed [...]

Realtime updates on the final COP/CMP session in Poznan, Poland.  The updates are being provided by Climatico analysts in the COP-14. Click here to refresh the page.  [Note: all times are GMT+1] 02.51: COP-14 is now over!  Conclusions and final decisions will be posted on the Poznan COP-14 page over the next 12 hours. 02.41: [...]

Brazilian Minister for the Environment Carlos Minc launched the country’s national strategy to address climate change, signed by President Lola on 1st December 2008. Whilst the developing country previously held a defensive position, the launch of this strategy represents a shift to a more leadership position, with which they hope to influence the G77 and [...]

A meeting of environment ministers today in Poznan is not expected to reach an agreement on a long-term target for global emissions reductions. Despite a growing range of proposed targets – the EU’s 20 by 2020, the G8′s 50 by 2050 (now also endorsed by Mexico), and more recently, Brazil’s deforestation commitment – a consensus [...]

At the beginning of the negotiations at Poznan, it was suggested that the Adaptation Fund (AF) was one of the few areas on which significant progress would be made (see my previous post). In the end, negotiations even on this issue went right to the wire, after there was failure to reach an agreement by [...]

Following El’s blog a few minutes ago, I wanted to give some details and thoughts that are coming in from those around the EU delegation here in Poznan. Despite predicted NGO criticisms of not going far enough, this package was not easy to achieve, as evidenced by concessions that have been made to industrial communities as [...]