WARSAW: Environment ministers started arriving in Warsaw yesterday, hoping to add momentum to troubled UN talks targeting a global pact on climate change in 2015.
With just four days left in the notoriously fractious annual negotiations, delegates and observers said scant progress had been made, particularly on the question of money.
“The finance issue is creating a lot of anger here,” Alden Meyer of US environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists said.
“Hopefully the ministers can come in now and start working on some of the political elements... and finally come up with compromises and defuse some of the tensions.”
The ministers will discuss funding issues on Wednesday, the start of a three-day high-level segment rounding off the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) parley. Developing countries are challenging rich nations to honour a 2009 promise to muster up to $100bn a year in climate aid by 2020.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) yesterday said Africa alone will need at least $200bn a year by 2070 to shore up its defences, provided that the UN warming target of two degrees Celsius is met. The bill rises to $350bn annually on warming of 3.5-4.0 C.
Still struggling with an economic crisis, wealthy economies are hesitant to put any figures on the table for the 2020 target or for shorter-term funding.
They are also leery about a proposed “loss and damage” mechanism they fear will make them liable for limitless compensation for climate change.
“Developing countries need to feel confident that the commitment to that 100bn is still on the table despite current financial circumstances,” UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres told journalists on Monday. “There needs to be more clarity on how that funding is going to be mobilised.”
Humanitarian group Oxfam warned against putting things on hold for another year.
“Kicking this issue down the road again could spell disaster for poor communities who need help to adapt to a changing climate and lead to a breakdown in trust that will bury hopes for agreement,” it said.
Figueres pleaded with countries to set down a roadmap to the 2015 UN conference in Paris and a deal that must bind the world’s nations to curbs on greenhouse gas emissions to meet the warming target.
“It would be our expectation that governments would be able to adopt a decision that very clearly puts forward the steps, the structure and the logic of the agreement, here by the end of Warsaw,” said Figueres.
AFP
