Poorest nations call for faster action to reduce emissions and finance to help them deal with losses from climate change
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Two weeks of U.N.-led climate talks in Bonn ended on Friday in an atmosphere of frustration, with participants bemoaning insufficient progress on everything from securing financial support for vulnerable poor countries to protecting forests.
The meeting was the last before the year’s major climate negotiations in Warsaw in November. Action there could be held back by the weak outcomes from Bonn, negotiators and observers said – a worry as extreme weather appears to be on the rise, causing widespread flooding in Europe and serious wildfires in the United States in recent days.
Russia, Belarus and Ukraine blocked one strand of the two-week session in Bonn by insisting on clearer rules for decision-making, after they were overruled in a consensus decision at U.N. talks in Qatar late last year.
“We need to act now, and we need to act together,” said Prakash Mathema of Nepal, chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating group. Poor countries in particular “have already witnessed many catastrophic climate disasters, and these events are going to be more frequent, intense and unpredictable,” he warned in a statement.
He called for “bold decisions very soon to protect humanity,” noting that “delayed climate action and lack of ambition to close the mitigation gap will cost more tomorrow than today.”
The Climate Action Tracker initiative, which monitors combined government pledges to curb climate change, said current efforts mean the world is headed for 4 degrees Celsius of warming by the turn of the century. Scientists have suggested such a temperature rise would cause fundamental changes to food production systems, as well as worsening extreme weather and sea-level rise that would threaten many of the world’s low-lying areas.
‘NEW NORMAL’ OF LOSS & DAMAGE
The talks in Bonn aimed to push ahead on a new international climate deal due to be agreed in 2015 and come into force in 2020. That deal is widely expected to include pledges by both rich and poor countries around the world to limit climate-changing emissions on an “equity” basis, with richer and more able countries – those responsible for most of the emissions – doing more.
But action may not come fast enough for some vulnerable countries, their representatives warned.
“Unfortunately, unavoidable losses and damage resulting from sea-level rise, ocean acidification and storm surges, to name only a few of the worsening climate impacts, represent a new normal for island communities around the world,” the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) said in a statement.
They called for “an international mechanism to address the permanent injury our islands are experiencing” – which would address so-called “loss and damage” caused by climate change - to be settled on at the Warsaw negotiations in November.
There was also pressure on richer nations to give details of the financial help they are providing this year, and will offer in coming years, to help poorer countries adapt to climate change and limit their own emissions.
And the Climate Action Network, a coalition of non-governmental organisations, urged negotiators at the Warsaw conference to set a 2014 deadline for announcing their carbon reduction pledges under a 2015 agreement, with the aim of ensuring those pledges add up to sufficiently ambitious action.
“This deadline is needed partly to give enough time to assess the pledges against the latest climate science, and partly so that countries can compare their efforts,” Ruth Davis, a Greenpeace UK political adviser, said in a statement.
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