BANGKOK (AlertNet) – Negotiators from 176 nations managed to hammer out an agenda meant to shape climate change talks for the rest of the year in Bangkok on Friday evening but concerns remain over the long-term future of the Kyoto Protocol.
“This agenda is the fruit of many hours of intensive discussions and engagements and it is an achievement we must keep,” Jorge Arguello, Argentina’s ambassador to the U.N. said on behalf of the G-77 countries and China at the closing plenary session.
U.N. climate change chief Christiana Figueres also said in a statement, “I believe we now have a solid basis to move forward collectively and that governments can deliver further good results this year, provided every effort is made to compromise and show the necessary flexibility to achieve that goal.”
The talks had been largely deadlocked for three days as countries wrangled over the fate of the Kyoto Protocol and on the decisions reached in Cancun last December.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, close to 40 industrialised countries have made a legally binding commitment to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
The first commitment period of the treaty expires in 2012. No extension has yet been agreed.
DIFFERING VIEWS ON KYOTO
While the agreed agenda in Bangkok reflects largely what was settled in Cancun, divisions remain between countries on the Kyoto Protocol.
Developing countries are pushing for the continuation of the Protocol, something that key developed countries such as Japan and Russia have rejected. The United States, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, never signed the treaty.
“It’s not particularly encouraging” to see countries saying there won’t be a second commitment period, Dessima Williams, head of Grenada’s delegation and of the highly climate-vulnerable Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) told journalists.
But she was hopeful developing nations can work with other Kyoto Protocol signatories that have said they will agree to its extension under certain conditions.
“We understand this is a very incremental process and we’re willing to engage with it… we are willing to do everything we can to keep (Kyoto) alive. None of us wants South Africa to be the burial ground of the Kyoto Protocol,” she said.
A representative of Bolivia, the only country to have rejected and consistently criticised the agreement made in Cancun, said any development on Kyoto Protocol before the year’s largest climate negotiations, set for December in South Africa, “should strengthen it and not weaken it.”
Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. and head of the country’s delegation at Bangkok, said of Cancun, said that moving toward an agreement based on voluntary emissions reduction pledges instead of continuing the Kyoto Protocol, “is not a step forward. It’s a step backward.”
TWO FRAMEWORKS
Developed countries, meanwhile, reject continuing the Kyoto Protocol because it does not require emissions reductions by emerging large greenhouse gas producers, such as China, and because some technical issues – including a surplus of emission reduction credits issued under the first commitment period – make achieving actual emissions reductions difficult.
“We are not prepared to go forward with a binding obligation for ourselves which would not apply to the other major economies,” said Jonathan Hershing, head of the delegation for the United States. He said emissions reduction obligations would not need to be the same for developed countries and emerging emitters but would need to be “symmetrical.”
During the Bangkok negotiations, activists and civil society groups urged the European Union, which says it is open to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol if conditions are right, to go alone and break the impasse.
Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the E.U. delegation, however, said this is unlikely to happen.
“If there are industrialised country parties who do not want to sign up to a second commitment period, then there needs to be something else because without them I think it will not be possible to address the issue of climate change,” he said.
“It would be impossible to stay below 2 degrees (a level of warming considered relatively safe)… We alone are not going to be able to fight climate change.”
