As the 32^nd session of the UNFCCC Convention subsidiary body gets underway at the Hotel Maritim in Bonn, many will be hoping the talks can deliver some measure of mediation between parties and begin carving a real path towards Cancun. Outgoing Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, had urged all Parties to ‘overcome differences and work for greater clarity on what can be agreed to by all Parties for Cancun in December.’  The UN’s top climate change official, who will be replaced by Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica after the Bonn meeting, has promoted negotiators to gain finality on the architecture that will launch inclusive and effective global climate action. In an attempt to prevent deadlock in the talks, as witnessed at Copenhagen, do Boer has focused specifically on the need to conclude on “mitigation targets and action, a package on adaptation, a new technology mechanism, financial arrangements, ways to deal with deforestation and a capacity building framework”.

Making allies rather than enemies will be crucial if the talks at Bonn are to proceed. A strong coalition is the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), supported by more than 100 Parties, has already asserted it will not shift from its position centred on mitigating global temperatures to a 1.5 degree rise above pre-industrial levels to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations below 350ppm. Grenada, on behalf of AOSIS, has already affirmed that this goal must be reflected in the draft negotiating text. These small island states, some of the most vulnerable to continued climatic change and associated implications such as sea level rise, have been resolute in their demands that pledges of 2°C will not be sufficient.

It is expected the US will be an important voice with their negotiating team having already flagged to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Co-operative Action (AWG-LCA), one of the two subsidiary bodies of the UNFCCC, that it does not recognise the current text proposed as a basis for negotiations. Although the Copenhagen Accord was not formally adopted by the Conference of the Parties, 120 of the 194 UNFCCC parties have signed the Accord, consequently countries like the US are pushing for the Accord to progress under the Convention. The official position of the Secretariat coming into the Bonn meeting was the fact the Accord can be used as part of the negotiation process. This has come under fire from India and China, countries pivotal to the negotiations, citing that the talks should be based on the existing UN tracks namely the Kyoto Protocol and Long Term Cooperative Action (LCA). The task at Bonn is to try and find a medium between these and come up with a new draft that adequately integrates the Accord as well as the existing tracks.

Financing mechanism will also be high on the agenda, with the 26 developed countries that drew up the Copenhagen Accord pushing for the establishment of a Green Climate Change Fund. The Fund, proposed as one financial entity of the Convention supports projects and policies relating to mitigation for example REDD plus as well as adaptation projects through support, capacity building and technology transfer. A priority for the Bonn talks will be to shape how the US$30 billion pledged by industrialised countries at Copenhagen can be utilised in the near term (up until 2010) to kick-start climate action in developing countries. Issues of contention include the governance and leadership of the Fund, currently suggested to be under a board nominated by the Conference of the Parties, however many developing countries are hesitant with this notion. It is essential this promise of funding is met, and a clear road ahead until 2012 is made to regain some trust between the developed and developing nation negotiation blocks. It is essential a transparent and agreed upon methodology is employed to prioritise the most vulnerable countries and appropriately apportion financing through the Fund in this manner.

The UN climate change body has come up with a new draft which has elements of the Copenhagen Accord as alternative options for the nations to agree.  The Chair of the LCA group will be hoping to bridge these contrasting views, especially mediating talks between the small island states, China and India and the developed nation block. An indicative roadmap has already been proposed to guide the road to Cancun in December, however major speed bumps include issues related to mitigation, finance, measurement, reporting and verification. The greatest block is the global temperature targets and according emission limits, and negotiators at Bonn will have to grapple between either committing to deep cuts in the near term or setting up a longer term more ambitious global reduction plan.

Top priority on the agenda is the preparation of an outcome from the Bonn talks which can be to be presented to the Conference of the Parties in Cancun for adoption to enable the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention. In addition developing countries will be focusing on the need for cooperative action now, up to and beyond 2012, especially with regards to clarity on the future of the Kyoto Protocol. The crux is again likely to occur with the US wanting a legally binding agreement for all relevant parties, especially China, the greatest emitter of CO₂ with the developing countries likely to reiterate their stance on historical responsibility.

The two week Bonn session represents a significant portion of the remaining negotiating time before Cancun and therefore priority needs to be on finalising the architecture around the fast-track funding and ensuring funds can be efficiently and equitably distributed as laid on in the Accord. In addition do Boer needs to try and align political leadership and iron out political instabilities to try and ensure Figueres can captain and floating ship to Cancun. Almost all the Parties agree there is an urgent need to conclude a legally binding agreement, therefore the Bonn talks need to ensure a comprehensive implementation package is making its way to the table.

Climatico analysts will be following the progression of the meeting through daily updates as well as a concluding analysis.

Fever is rising for Copenhagen, as delegates and key global players in the climate field descend on the Danish capital in readiness for the official opening of the 15th Conference of the Parties on Monday. Expectations have rollercoastered in the last few weeks, with negative sentiment peaking when it was plausible Obama would not attend and the key emitters, namely the USA, China and India were yet to stipulate plans regarding emissions reductions.

The recent email scandal from the Climate Research Unit based at the University of East Anglia and James Hansen, NASA’s head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, vehemently stressing the talks ‘must fail’ will add further dent to expectations.  However pledges for emissions cuts, announced by the USA and China and the anticipation that India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh will today announce cuts in carbon intensity by 24 percent in 2020, bring hope. The cumulative result of these pledges is a positive signal that the COP could deliver a tangible structure for an agreement by the closing on December 19th.

One of the most contentious issues likely to dominate the discussions is the standoff between developing and developed countries, referred to as Annex 1 under the existing Kyoto Agreement. The key emerging emitters from the developing world, China, India, Brazil and South Africa have remained firm that developed countries must provide finance and technology to help developing nations fight global warming. This was further reaffirmed this week in Copenhagen, when the key negotiators from these four countries indicated after a preparatory meeting that they would represent a “different position” compared to a separate outline for the global climate talks by Denmark.

After a recent meeting in Beijing it also emerged that this group at Copenhagen will formally ask “developed countries to assume responsibility for emissions reduction targets in the second commitment period (from 2013)”. As Kim Carstensen, head of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative, further advocated “the developed world needs to have deeper emissions cuts, more new money on the table and much more willingness to share the technologies for low carbon development”. Developed nations are however adamant that this group of big emerging economies must also commit to mandatory emissions cuts.

Arguing aside, the fact remains that the world must cut its emissions, by around 80% of 1990 levels by 2050 if any form of climate stabilization is to be achieved.  Nonetheless discussions are likely to stumble and potentially get deadlocked over the issue of historical responsibility. This issue of ‘burden sharing’ is hugely sensitive as it ultimately involves responsibility to give money, billions of dollars of it, needed for low carbon investment and in adaptation funding, especially in key areas vulnerable to the onslaught of climate change.

Developing countries will not vacillate over the need for comprehensive adaptation funding, and will not compromise on the need for this to be in addition to official development assistance (ODA). The EU’s negotiators recent written blunder, referring that they “cannot accept reference to ‘additional to’, and ‘separate from’ ODA targets” could gravely undermine discussions on this issue.

In addition to the issue of funding, developing countries will be pressing for a firm agreement on Reduced Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD), where large swathes of land covered by forests of high biodiversity have the potential to earn countries money by keeping forests standing. However, as with many negotiations at Copenhagen, issues need to be ironed out with regards to the details.  A major hurdle for REDD is corruption and mismanagement in the forestry industry in developing countries. For example this costs Indonesia, which has one of the highest deforestation rates, two billion US dollars a year, equivalent to its entire health budget as a Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday indicated. Many feel the negotiations surrounding REDD are fundamental if Copenhagen is to achieve anything, and will be hoping there is not a ‘no deal’ on this.

I will be traveling to Copenhagen for the second week of deliberations to cover issues related to developing countries.

 EU leaders failed to agree on a financing proposal for developing countries after their two-day summit this week, leaving the EU’s negotiating position on the issue open-ended.

A Kenyan riverbed: developing countries are expected to bear the brunt of climate change because of their geography and their lack of capacity to adapt to change (Image: Matt & Kim Rudge @Flickr)

In a set of conclusions that were long on rhetorical concern about accelerating climate change but short on any new commitments for the EU, the European Council effectively endorsed the views set forth in the Commission communication on funding that I discussed a few weeks ago. This means that the 27 Member states have agreed a common view of the amount of funding required for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries – €100bn annually by 2020 – but not over how much of this should come from the EU and its members.

One of the reported reasons for the failure to reach an agreement is reported to be, as usual, down to differences between the richer and poorer members of the EU. A coalition of East European countries allegedly resisted specific commitments due to concern over their ability to afford the proposals. But the BBC also reported differences over negotiating strategy as a cause for the ambiguity of the Council’s position. Germany, it is suggested, believed that providing an explicit figure would provide less of an incentive for other developed countries to make similar commitments.

How much the EU is really willing to pay for climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, then, remains to be seen. But the failure of EU leaders to establish a common position underlines the political difficulty associated with large transfers of wealth to countries whose citizens don’t vote in European elections.

Climatico’s entire European Union team (me) has been away on holiday recently, and on my return I find that I’ve missed an eventful couple of weeks. The credibility of both the EU’s domestic climate policy and its international commitments has been dealt a couple of blows, one by a Commission publication on climate financing for developing countries and another by a European court ruling.

EU flag (Source: openDemocracy: Flickr)

Developing country financing first. As Ian Ross wrote in a – dare I say it – grumpy post in March 2009 there are longstanding disagreements within the EU over how much money it should give developing countries to help them mitigate and adapt to climate change. Back then, the EU’s environment ministers were beginning the process of trying to reach agreement over the funding they would commit to adaptation.

Now the Commission has set out its view of how developing country financing could work under an international agreement, and provided an indication of what it sees as an appropriate scale for the EU’s contribution. In its communication, the Commission adhered to its long-standing view of the amount of money that needs to be spent in developing countries by 2020 – €100bn every year. But its proposal for how much of this should come from EU funds disappointed NGOs including Oxfam, WWF, and Greenpeace. The amounts it proposed fall short of their expectations and – more revealingly – are short of the figures seen in a draft of the same document leaked the previous week.

Financing for developing countries is one of the four key areas identified by Yvo de Boer recently as crucial to a successful climate agreement. The Commission’s publication may help to provide a framework for negotiations over this topic. But its lack of ambition underlines the difficulty of resourcing climate mitigation and adaptation abroad at a time of severe public finance constraints – even for countries that are willing to commit substantial resources to reducing emissions at home.

Meanwhile, the EU’s flagship policy for reducing European GHG emissions found itself at the wrong end of a critical judgment from the European Court of First Instance last week. The court sided with Poland and Estonia in a dispute over the Commission’s role in evaluating their National Allocation Plans (NAPs) for carbon emissions for the period 2008-2012.

The background to the case is that the Commission rejected the NAPs originally proposed by these two countries for this period, and revised them downwards. The Commission’s power to review NAPs exists so that countries aren’t too generous in their allocations – this should avoid a price crash of the sort seen during the experimental first phase of the EU ETS. The Court’s judgment found that the Commission’s grounds for rejecting the NAPs weren’t legally valid and has annulled the Commission’s decision.

Although the prospect of a possible loosening of the cap sounds alarming, there are a few reasons to think that this won’t crash the carbon price. One is that the Commission will appeal the decision, dragging out the legal process and delaying any reversal until 2010 or even beyond. Even if the appeal is unsuccessful, Member States won’t have free rein to determine their own NAPs – they will still be subject to the Commission’s scrutiny. And the fact that certificates can be banked and used in the third Phase of the EU ETS, which runs from 2012 to 2020, should allow some of the excess certificates (if there are any) to be absorbed in those later years. But this is an unwelcome distraction all the same, especially at a time when weak demand for energy has already depressed the value of carbon allowances.

191 countries. Wildly differing priorities. Scientific uncertainty. Limited budgets. Short timescales. It’s no wonder that reaching agreements at international climate negotiations is difficult.

But depressingly, making agreements is actually the easy bit: keeping to them can be much, much harder.

Take this week’s report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), a research organisation based in London and Brussels. It strongly criticises the EU and its member states for failing to keep promises they made back in 2001.

The report centres on the Bonn Agreement, a joint declaration made by the then-members of the EU and a handful of other countries. The Agreement was an undertaking by those countries to provide USD410million per year of climate change funding for developing countries. According to the IEEP, the understanding was that this would be proportional to the CO₂ emissions of the each of the parties, leaving the EU countries with a USD361million annual commitment between them.

It was agreed that money could flow through a number of different channels, including a number of funds administered through the UN’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF). Trying to describe the funds quickly turns into something resembling the results of a food-fight with alphabetti spaghetti – before you know it you’re wallowing in SCCFs or KPAFs and LDCFs. Anyone keen to learn more is encouraged to read the IEEP’s report.*

While the details are complicated, the IEEP’s conclusions are simple. The EU’s USD361million annual contribution was supposed to be in place by 2005. But the report’s authors found that

• There is little transparency on behalf of the signatories on how much they have actually contributed;
• The limited information that is available suggests that the EU is delivering less than the annual amount it pledged each year under the Agreement.

The IEEP concludes that the lack of transparency over its compliance with the Bonn Agreement is ‘clearly inconsistent with the EU’s claim to global leadership in the climate change process’.

Coming as it does along with criticism from the WWF the previous week, this report may hint that EU’s (perceived) obligations to the developing world will be an area of political pressure as it approaches the Copenhagen negotiations in December.  And despite all the complexities of funding mechanisms and development aid mechanisms, the EU will also need to find a convincing way to demonstrate that it really is putting money where its mouth is.

*For those who love acronyms but don’t want to read the report – the SCCF, KPAF and LDCFs are just funds for LDC actions agreed at the UNFCCC COP6bis and COP7 which are administered by the GEF. KPAF is funded by a CER levy. See? Simple.

Already a whole quarter has passed since the frenzy of negotiations that led up to the 20/20/20 Package agreement at the European Council meeting last December. The series of ministerial meetings that occurred back then are being repeated this month. Environment Ministers met last Monday; Economic Ministers will meet on Tuesday 10 March; and European heads of state (the European Council) will meet on 19-20 March.

NGOs are flagging up the importance of developing countries in a global deal

A number of NGOs, including WWF, Greenpeace and Oxfam are using the opportunity to pile on the pressure for the EU to agree on solid financing commitments for an in international climate deal. With the bloc having already committed substantial sums of money towards mitigation action domestically (see the EU section in Climatico’s new quarterly report), much of the NGOs’ focus has been on financing for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.

Although the coming global climate negotiations in Copenhagen will feature on the agendas of the Finance Ministers and the European Council, it is very possible that both meetings will pass without substantial new commitments. The state of Europe’s economy will undoubtedly be the main priority for the Finance Ministers and the Council. Copenhagen is still relatively far away, and EU leaders may want to wait for other countries – particularly the US – to give some clearer indications of their intentions before making further climate funding decisions.

Usually, the EU’s policy on global warming tends to focus on mitigation: the 20/20/20 Climate and Energy Package is the obvious recent example. But this week the European Commission approved two reports on natural and man-made disasters that give some thought to the flip side of climate policy: adaptation.

Turbulence ahead: natural disasters are on the rise. (Image: cnystrom @ Flickr)

One of the documents focuses on reducing the risks from disasters in the developing world, and is tied to the EU’s development aid strategy. The other focuses on preventing disasters within Europe’s borders.

According to the Commission’s communications, there was a marked increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters in Europe and the wider world over the last two or three decades. It’s impossible to attribute the cause of individual extreme events to global warming. But climate change is likely to mean that this trend for more high-impact weather events will continue during the rest of the twenty-first century.

The documents highlight key areas where the EU could develop its strategy for preventing and managing disasters. The report on disaster prevention in Europe recommends better-developed information-gathering and knowledge sharing, better institutional links between key institutions, and improving the use of the current funding and resources dedicated to climate change. In its work with developing countries, the recommendations are for stronger dialogue between the EU and those countries that it assists, integration of disaster risk reduction into development plans, and developing regional risk-management plans.

Neither document contains a fully-fledged policy: they are at this stage discussion papers that will pave the way for further negotiation before the EU adopts strategies for managing natural disasters in Europe and elsewhere.

But it reflects the fact that, while adaptation doesn’t feature highly on Europe’s climate change agenda, neither is it entirely absent.

An interesting study from CERNA came out recently. Researchers from the team working on Technology Transfer and Climate Change (linked to the OECD) were looking at climate-related technology innovations over 25 years.

They found that Kyoto has accelerated their development, but that there is little evidence of the transfer of these clean technologies from the developed to the developing world. Based on patents taken out between the late 70s and 2003, they look at renewable energy technologies, as well as various other “cleantech” innovations, such as energy conservation in buildings, energy-efficient lighting and CCS.

The Kyoto link is that whilst innovation in all technologies (climate-related and otherwise) was growing at the same pace until the mid-nineties, climate change technologies are now apparently developing much faster. Furthermore, in Annex 1 nations, innovation in climate mitigation technologies has been growing at 9% per year on average between 1998 and 2003. However, no growth rate was observed in the US and Australia.

They measured tech transfer by looking at the share of inventions that are patented in other countries beyond the country of origin. Only 18% of clean-tech patents were extended beyond developed countries to developing countries. Indeed, three-quarters of the innovation transfers from one country to another were among developed countries.

Clearly this is not good news for adaptation. For developing countries, mitigation and adaptation will go hand in hand in the long term. If tech transfer is not happening fast enough, they will not be able to benefit from the technologies that will help them achieve low-carbon growth. There needs to be more effort from developed countries to ensure that advances in technology are shared globally, on a greater scale, and faster.