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. [...]

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 [...]

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) credits have been receiving plenty of bad press, with the latest being reports of human rights abuses committed in Honduras over the ownership of credit-producing land. This is particularly serious as the CDM has been set up to feed into the EU ETS, which means that CDM credits find their way [...]

Emissions trading continues to court controversy following recent events which have seen Romania, an EU ETS country, suspended from trading its Kyoto Protocol emissions units by the UN. The knock-on effect has been to exclude Romania from the spot market in EU ETS allowances (EUAs) for a predicted period of six months. This incident highlights [...]

Guest Editorial by: Matt Williams, UK Youth Climate Coalition The UNFCCC process has been mired in something of a quandary since the high hopes around Copenhagen in 2009 were quickly dashed when countries failed to come up with a second global, legally binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol (due to expire in 2012). But [...]

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, [...]

The United Nation’s flexible mechanisms were introduced as a cost-effective and efficient method to help poorer countries develop sustainably, whilst providing developed countries another option to meet commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Joint Implementation (JI) have progressed at different rates, with different levels of engagement and varying degrees [...]

The Bonn UN Climate Change Talks in Bonn, Germany is taking place between 31 May – 11 June 2010. Representatives from 182 governments are in attendance, picking up on unresolved issues left over from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15) this past December and putting forward a path for the implementation of [...]

As the 32nd 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 [...]

South Africa’s Minister of Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, and former Minister of Environmental Affairs has emerged as one of the frontrunners to replace Yvo de Boer as chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC. In the follow up to de Boer’s resignation, candidates from Indonesia, India, Costa Rica and van Schalkwyk [...]