UNFCCC Bonn conference – June 2011. (Image by: Adopt a Negotiator)

The UN Climate Change Conference kicks off this week in Bonn, Germany as governments continue framework discussions in preparation for the Seventeenth Conference of Parties (COP17) to be held in Durban, South Africa, at the end of the year. Over three thousand participants representing 183 countries are attending the conference in Bonn from June 6-17, including government delegates, business and industry representatives, environmental organizations, and research bodies.

Speaking on the first day of the conference, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres reminded governments that they hold an unavoidable responsibility to make clear progress towards the 2011 climate objectives agreed to at COP16 in Cancun.

“Governments lit a beacon in Cancun towards a low-emission world which is resilient to climate change. They committed themselves to a maximum global average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius, with further consideration of a 1.5 degree maximum. Now, more than ever, it is critical that all efforts are mobilized towards living up to this commitment.”

Ms. Figueres expects that the meeting in Bonn should provide clarity on the architecture of the future international climate change regime to reduce global emissions. In addition, negotiators will focus on the design of the finance, technology and adaptation institutions agreed to in Cancun which will allow developing countries to successfully adapt to climate change while still building their own sustainable futures.

The conference comes amid a backdrop of new warnings from the International Energy Agency (IEA) of a sharp rise in the volume and concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. The IEA announced last week that 2010 emissions from global energy generation have returned to record highs, marking an unexpectedly sharp rebound from the reduced emission levels caused by the financial crisis. Reports now show that carbon dioxide concentrations have once again peaked at just under 395 parts per million (ppm).

The two week conference includes the thirty-fourth sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 34) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 34), the sixteenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP 16), and the fourteenth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA 14).

New items under discussion include: SBI’s consideration of proposed items on work programmes relating to reporting by Annex I and non-Annex I countries, adaptation, and response measures, as well as SBSTA’s consideration of the work programme on agriculture, the impacts of climate change on water and water resource management, and the initiation of a new work programme on issues regarding reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) identified within the Cancun Agreements.

This month, the European Commission published development roadmaps for seven key low carbon technologies. Thy relate to wind, solar, bioenergy, CCS, nuclear technologies, as well as smart grids and energy efficiency, for the period 2010 and 2020. 

There is a long-standing policy debate over how best to spur innovation in low-carbon technologies. One option is to let markets ‘pull’ technology development along. According to this reasoning, if governments ensure there is a credible price for CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, then companies will start to develop new technologies with lower emissions in response to this market signal. The other possibility is for governments to use a policy ‘push’ and pay directly for early-stage R&D into new and promising technologies.

The roadmaps follow the publication of a EU Strategic Energy Technology Plan in 2007. It outlined a vision where the EU enjoyed global leadership in a range of low-carbon technologies. Each roadmap has been developed by the Commission in consultation with the relevant industries, and attempts to describe, step by step, how each technology should develop over the next decade in order to fulfil the vision of the SET Plan. Development in each of the technology areas is backed by an European Industrial Initiative, which is a public-private partnership working in each of the low-carbon technology areas.

In practice, governments usually opt for a combination of the two. The SET Plan was the EU’s policy push for low technologies, accompanying the market pull of the carbon and renewable energy targets included in the Climate and Energy Package it unveiled in the same year.

While the Climate and Energy Package and its 20/20/20 targets have successfully made it into EU law, the SET Plan has arguably been somewhat neglected by comparison. The Commission’s new communication implicitly acknowledges this by speaking of the need for the SET Plan now to be ‘taken forward to implementation’.

But implementation costs money and, critically, the Commission’s new roadmaps don’t come with any new funding plans attached. The Commission calls on Member States to dig deeper into their own pockets to fund energy R&D – a recommendation that is unlikely to receive a warm welcome from treasuries across Europe as they seek to recover their battered public finances – and proposes to use the European Investment Bank’s lending power to fund research in promising areas.

The communication also refers to the role of other countries in developing low-carbon technologies. As with other areas of international climate negotiations, there are large inequalities in the distribution of low-carbon innovation. While the EU can justifiably point to its global climate leadership committing early to substantial emission reductions (at least, compared to other developed countries), the US is leading the pack in terms of its expenditure on developing low-carbon technologies, from biofuels to smart grids. A number of international negotiations are in progress to improve coordination between developed countries and sure that they all pull their weight when it comes to energy R&D; another set of negotiations again are discussing how developing countries can access these new technologies.

As reported by EurActiv, it is not only global cooperation that lies behind the SET Plan: there is something of a technology race occurring between different developed countries, with potentially large future gains available to countries who lead the development of new low-carbon technologies. The IEA this week released its technology road map for CCS that envisages an investment of US$6 trillion by 2050. Companies who are successful in developing CCS technologies now will be able to profit from this economic activity in future. Similar arguments apply to other low-carbon technologies like renewable generation and low-emissions vehicles.

There is no question that low-carbon technologies will be vital during the twnty-first century: without them mitigating climate change will be intolerably expensive. How many of those technologies will be European in origin depends in no small part on whether the Commission succeeds in finding R&D funding at a scale that matches its R&D vision.

The International Standardization Organisation (ISO) announced energy efficiency standards for buildings.

It has been a while since ISO expressed its commitment to contribute to the global fight against climate change. ISO 14001, for instance, was established as an Environmental Management System (EMS) certification in enterprises and various businesses.  At the World Energy Congress organized in Rome in November 2007, there was a session on the role of International Standards in the supporting and development of energy efficiency measures and renewable energy sources. The participants concluded that “a strategic partnership between the [World Energy Council (WEC), the International Energy Agency (IEA), ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)] had been initiated and would be pursued in order to identify priorities for industry and governments and boost the production of globally relevant International Standards.” (Source).

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About only a year later, ISO took this initiative rather seriously and now aims one of the single most GHG-intensive end-usages: energy consumption of buildings (read press release). “ISO 23045:2008, Building environment design – Guidelines to assess energy efficiency of new buildings, provides energy-related requirements for the design process, or to achieve targeted values of energy efficiency for new buildings” is the complete name of the standard.  

This new standard is powerful because of its cold logic: energy efficiency (in buildings) is a way of saving money, saving the planet and fighting energy dependency. Creating these standards enable a durable “green” market to be created.

Cleaner, cooler, fitter.

The way in which standards create new markets for environmental goods and services is rather straightforward. In a sentence, when you have an ISO certification, you have something that others do not demonstrably have, hence the added value on your investment. Without standards, one has to rely on ad hoc appraisals of a building’s global energy efficiency, for instance, whereas standards reduce transaction costs, insure a certain degree of quality and oust-out wannabe greens from the building market.

As with any other standard, such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, the devil is in the details. It is not clear how exactly the energy efficiency of the building is appraised. Does it rely on best practice or on similar buildings? What are the thresholds? Is there a need for third-party monitoring, validation and measuring? Regarding GHGs, is there a qualitative analysis of the energy sources?